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Candidates › Montana U.S. Senate race › 2025–2026
Alani Bankhead
D Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Montana
Has not served in Congress
- On the ballot
- Lost the general electionNov 3, 2026 · 139,021 votes (35.0%) · 2 of 4
- Where to vote
- Find your polling place (opens in a new tab) · More ways to vote
- Top priorities
- My bottom line
- Where I stand
- Getting ready pays
- Energy, done the Montana way
- Learning from the tribes
- Money
- $190.5K raised, $167.7K spent, $22.8K cash on hand (through Oct 14, 2026). Where it comes from
- Who gives
- 48% of individual money from donors at $200 or less · largest committee giver NATIONAL FARMERS UNION PAC, $500
- Outside groups
- $3.2M supporting, $119.4K opposing Bankhead
- Backed by
- Montana Democratic Party · Lewis & Clark County Democrats · Gallatin County Democrats and 45 more. As the campaign lists them
- Polling
- 21.2% in the latest poll (Quantus Insights). The polls
65 priorities from alaniformt.com, in the order they are listed there. Every heading and the text under it is copied exactly, as one passage for each page it is from, and links to that place on the page; hover a source to see which passage it opens.
✓Write the rules while we lead
✓A human stays in the loop
✓Your likeness is yours
The next century will be decided by who leads on artificial intelligence, and leading means writing the rules, not just building the tools. America is not behind in this race. The question is whether we set the standards while we're ahead, or let someone else set them for us.
We are not behind. American companies invested more than twenty-three times what China's did in AI in 2025. The question is whether we write the rules while we lead, or hand that lead away. Setting the norms is the competitive advantage.Stanford HAI, 2026 AI Index
My rules are simple. The most capable systems get tested before they ship, the way we already test aircraft and weapons systems. A human stays in the loop in every life-or-death decision. Your face, your voice, and your name belong to you, not to anyone with a laptop. And where health, safety, and freedom aren't at stake, Washington stays out of the way. Rules where the stakes demand them. Restraint everywhere else.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/ai
Heading as listed on alaniformt.com/ai ↗ (opens alaniformt.com/ai at this heading)
Climate change is real, and we’re the ones driving it. The planet is warming faster than at any time in at least 2,000 years, and Montana is already paying for it. The land is asking something different of us now. The climate has changed, the forests have changed, and our winters and rivers have changed with them. When the facts move that much, honesty means the answer has to move with them.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
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If you’re not convinced people are driving this, that’s okay. You don’t have to agree with me on why the climate is changing to agree on what we do about it. The fire bills and the insurance letters show up either way, and every dollar we spend getting ready saves several later, in fire bills, flood repairs, drought relief, and crop-insurance checks. The federal government’s own auditors list climate risk as a threat to the budget. We can pay a little now or a lot later, and right now we’re choosing later.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
Heading as listed on alaniformt.com/climate ↗ (opens alaniformt.com/climate at this heading)
I’ll push a clean-energy build-out that creates Montana jobs and lowers energy bills, done the Montana way, through our co-ops and tax credits, never mandates. You’ve heard “green jobs” promised before and watched them never show, so I’ll be specific: it only counts if it pays a real wage, close to home, year after year.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
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This land evolved with fire, and low, cool fire kept it healthy long before anyone tried to put every fire out. Montana’s tribal nations have been reading this land through fire and drought for thousands of years, and some are leading on climate right now, like the Blackfeet Nation with its climate adaptation plan and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai with their cultural burning and their care of the Bison Range. As a country, we have a lot to learn from that work. Where tribal practices are working, federal land managers should be learning from them and putting those lessons to work on public land, with tribes as partners from the start. Cultural burning is the clearest example. It’s good fire, set under close supervision, only in the right conditions of weather and ground, and never lit and left. That’s how the tribes have always done it, and it’s the rule I hold every prescribed burn on federal land to. None of that means telling any nation what to do. I’ll back tribal-led work, make sure federal climate dollars actually reach Indian Country, and respect every nation’s sovereignty, including over its own energy.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
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There’s a version of climate policy that starts by making your life more expensive and hopes you’ll understand. That’s backwards, and it’s why so much of this has failed. My order is the opposite. First, give people a real choice, because a rule that costs you money when you had no other option isn’t a climate policy, it’s a bill. Second, go after the pollution that isn’t costing any Montanan a dime: the gas that companies are venting into the air instead of selling, and the goods we import from countries that pollute their way to a lower price. Third, actually measure it, because you can’t manage what you refuse to count. Get those three things done and we’ll finally be in a position to look at whether pricing carbon would work here. That’s a question worth asking honestly, and it’s not a question anyone should be answering before Montanans have a real alternative.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
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Montanans wrote the right to a clean and healthful environment into our constitution, and our highest court has said that right includes a stable climate. I’ll stand behind that, and I’ll carry the same standard to Washington.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
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✓Restore the clean-energy tax credits Congress cut short in 2025, and protect the direct-pay option that lets Montana co-ops use them for solar and storage. Incentives, never mandates.
✓Fund the work closest to the house first, home hardening and defensible space, then fuels treatment in the buffer zones between towns and the backcountry. Include the grants that reach renters and families who can’t front the cost.
✓Make prevention a career: thinning and prescribed fire near towns, home-hardening crews, post-fire replanting and erosion work, and the watershed repair that carries a ranch through a dry year. Multi-year funding and long-term stewardship contracts, so it pays a real wage year after year.
✓Fix disaster recovery. Fund FEMA to reach renters, mobile-home residents, and the uninsured fast and fairly, because these disasters are only coming more often.
✓Protect the whole ranch. Fund and speed up agricultural disaster recovery after drought as well as fire, including livestock indemnity, ELAP, and the Emergency Conservation Program, and get the money out the door in the year a producer actually needs it.
✓Fund the conservation programs Montana producers already use. Nationally, about 3 in 4 requests for help from these programs get turned down, not because the producer doesn’t qualify but because the money runs out. The soil tests say what the ground needs. The producer decides how to do it on their own place.
✓Defend the Roadless Rule. Intact backcountry burns less severely.
✓Restore the places that hold carbon: healthy forests, rangelands, and wetlands. Keeping a sink working is as valuable as cutting a new source, and in Montana that work is the same work as fire prevention and clean water.
✓Stop letting companies waste the gas and stick you with it. Methane that gets vented or flared is a product somebody could have sold, and when it’s wasted, taxpayers eat the loss. What leaks or gets vented raw costs us twice, because it traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the air. Congress created a charge on wasted methane, then killed the rule that carried it out, which the Congressional Budget Office scored at $7.2 billion in lost revenue over 10 years. The law is still on the books. Finish the job, so gas gets captured and sold instead of burned off over eastern Montana.
✓Make foreign polluters pay at the border, not Montana families at the pump. Back the bipartisan Foreign Pollution Fee Act, so a country that pollutes its way to a cheaper steel price doesn’t get to undercut an American mill that did it right.
✓Count it honestly. Congress has already directed the Department of Energy to measure how much more carbon goes into foreign goods than American ones. Finish that accounting and publish it, so trade policy runs on arithmetic instead of anybody’s talking points.
✓Count the full cost of war, including what it burns. The Pentagon is the largest institutional consumer of petroleum in the world, and the rebuilding after a war is a carbon bill nobody puts on the invoice.
✓Make polluters pay for their own cleanup, and make the biggest new power users, like data centers, cover their own costs.
✓Bring the best of tribal land stewardship into federal land management where it works, from cultural burning, done carefully and never lit and left, to grassland and bison restoration, with tribes as partners. Respect every nation’s sovereignty over its own land, water, and energy.
✓Stand behind Montana’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, including a stable climate.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/climate
Heading as listed on alaniformt.com/climate ↗ (opens alaniformt.com/climate at this heading)
I spent two decades building the cases that put predators and traffickers away, so no one needs to explain to me why crime has to be taken seriously. That work also showed me something most campaigns won’t say out loud: a lot of what we pay for in the name of public safety is quietly making us less safe. Serious crimes go unsolved and victims wait, while we spend a fortune sending people back to prison for breaking a rule of parole, like missing a check-in with their officer, when they haven’t hurt anyone. We’ve aimed the whole system at the wrong targets, and aiming it back at the things that actually keep Montana safe is the whole job. You can’t fix the prison by only looking at the prison, so I won’t reach into a Montana courtroom, but I can move the federal sentencing laws, the federal courts, and the federal money that pushes states one way or the other, and I will.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/criminal-justice
If we’re serious about crime, we start with the crimes that leave someone hurt. Congress passed a law in 2008 to fund the task forces that hunt online child predators and never came close to paying for it, so those units now get about a million tips a year tied to U.S. states, far more than they can chase. The fund that pays for domestic-violence shelters and rape-crisis centers had its grants cut by about 40% in a single year, and rural states like ours feel it first. We even passed a law to clear the backlog of untested rape kits, then left it underfunded. There’s a pattern: Washington passes the promise and never pays for it. I’d pay for it. And when we catch the people who hurt a child, I’d come down hardest of all.
✓Fully fund the units that hunt child predators: pay for the ICAC task forces and Project Safe Childhood at the level Congress promised, put the crime-victims fund back on stable ground so a shelter isn’t one budget cycle from closing, and finish testing the backlogged rape kits.
✓Come down hardest on those who hurt a child: strengthen the federal penalties for producing and distributing child sexual abuse material and for trafficking a child.
✓Close the jurisdictional seams: stand up federal, state, and tribal task forces that align penalties and let investigators work as one, tighten interstate offender tracking, and strengthen tribal criminal jurisdiction so a reservation is never a loophole, enabling tribal sovereignty rather than steamrolling it.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/criminal-justice
Then there’s the other failure. We take someone who committed a lesser, non-violent crime and run them through a system that hardens them into a repeat offender they never would have been. We overcharge, so they carry a felony for life, which cuts their shot at a good job roughly in half. We put them on probation with rules built for a life they don’t have, a car, a clinic down the street, so they miss a required check-in with their probation officer, and for that missed check-in, not a new crime, we send them back to prison, which takes the job that was the only thing keeping them steady. We build the reoffending we say we’re afraid of.
✓Roll back mandatory minimums that force a sentence to match a chart instead of a crime.
✓Tear down the record barriers that reach far past the job: the same conviction can bar someone from public housing and even food assistance for years after the sentence is served, and cutting people off from the basics that keep them steady raises reoffending, it doesn’t lower it.
✓Stop imprisoning people for technical violations like a missed meeting when they haven’t hurt anyone.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/criminal-justice
Nobody should make money off a full cell. A cell should be about protecting the public, and nothing else.
✓Get profit out of federal prisons for good and write it into law so the next administration can’t flip it back.
✓Ban lockup quotas by making federal dollars conditional on dropping them, and put real rules on out-of-state transfers so no state can ship people across the country to cut a cost or slip its own rules.
source ↗ (opens the page at this passage) · alaniformt.com/criminal-justice