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May 30, 2024
A political action committee with a mix of national and state money has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mailers intended to sway voters in a series of bitterly contested Republican legislative primary elections that reveal the fissures in Montana’s dominant political party.
As of this week, the PAC, Conservatives4MT, has spent roughly $240,000 in more than two dozen contested GOP primary races for state House and Senate. The primary election is next Tuesday, June 4.
The group is at least tangentially affiliated with the group of state lawmakers called the Solutions Caucus, a loose coalition of Republicans known for working with Democrats — and against hardliners in their own party — on big-ticket legislation, especially in the areas of health care and fiscal policy. Several of the candidates that the PAC is supporting are guiding forces within the caucus, and the PAC’s treasurer is avowed Solutions Caucus member Rep. Ross Fitzgerald, R-Fairfield.
In 2019, at the peak of its power, the Solutions Caucus worked with then-Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, to renew Montana’s expanded Medicaid program, despite the opposition of Republican legislative leadership.
But in the years since, Republicans have seized the governor’s office and expanded their legislative margins, reducing some of the negotiating leverage enjoyed by the Solutions Caucus. Meanwhile, several Solutions Caucus-style Republicans have lost primary elections to hardliners or opted not to run for re-election. And in 2023, a group of ultra-right lawmakers launched the Montana Freedom Caucus, a sort-of foil to the Solutions group and its alleged lack of true conservative bona fides.
In an interview this week, Fitzgerald framed the PAC’s work as “counter-insurgency,” an organized effort to shore up the primary election chances “of some of our more logical folks.”
“You got a bell curve in there, you’ve got the far rights and the far lefts and neither one makes any sense,” Fitzgerald said.
The PAC is an independent expenditure group, meaning that while it legally cannot give directly to or coordinate with candidates, it can spend unlimited amounts on materials supporting or opposing a candidate.
Its list of expenditures offers a handy roadmap to a major factional divide in the infamously fractious Montana GOP. Candidates supported by the PAC include Conrad Rep. Llew Jones, often considered the leader of the Solutions Caucus, and Great Falls Rep. Ed Buttrey, who sponsored Medicaid expansion renewal legislation in 2019. Its targets, on the other hand, include outgoing House Speaker Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, and Freedom Caucus chair Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, who faces a primary challenge from state House Rep. Wayne Rusk, R-Corvallis. Indeed, many of the primaries the PAC is spending money in are in Ravalli County, the venue for some of the fiercest intra-party conflicts in the Montana GOP.
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