In GOP governor primary, a dispute over who's 'conservative' (2024)

Back in 2020 in his second attempt to become the governor of Montana, with the state coming off 16 consecutive years of a Democrat at the helm, some of Greg Gianforte’s opponents threw everything at the wall to paint him as a far-right-wing threat.

There were his ties to a creationist museum in Glendive and his assaulting of a reporter on the eve of his election to the U.S. House. Before the three-way Republican primary that cycle, the state's largest union, a Democrat-supporting group, unanimously adopted a statement condemning his candidacy, under the rationale "Greg Gianforte is NOT one of us and too extreme for Montana." Still the tech billionaire from Bozeman won both the primary and general elections by decidedly comfortable margins.

Fast-forward four years, and the now-incumbent Gianforte is facing a primary challenger from the right flank of the party trying to flip the attack script.

The pitch Tanner Smith, a Flathead Valley excavation contractor and state lawmaker, is making to Republican primary voters is that the governor is a “Chamber of Commerce” Republican who sold out the more conservative wing of the party and squandered an historic GOP majority in the last legislative session.

Gianforte is running a campaign with the confidence of an incumbent in a state that favors familiarity and has brightened its hue of red dramatically since his first unsuccessful bid for public office in 2016. He's stayed mostly quiet about the primary and is focusing on his own record more than criticizing his expected Democratic opponent, Ryan Busse.

Meanwhile, Smith, who has put more than $167,500 of his own cash into the race, is traveling Montana telling voters the governor is a moderate sheep in conservative clothing.

On June 4, the primary election, Smith will see if there’s enough frustrated ultra-conservatives like him in the Republican Party to pull off an upset. Busse, who has labeled the governor a “fascist,” will also be watching the margins of the GOP primary closely to gauge any chinks in the incumbent armor.

Who’s the real conservative?

At a Republican fundraising event in Missoula recently where Donald Trump, Jr., and top-of-the-ticket GOP candidates espoused the virtues of Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy, Gianforte addressed a room of party loyalists. He started his remarks after a standing ovation.

“The report card is pretty simple,” Gianforte told the crowd of his time in office. “I just did what I told you I was gonna do. … There were a lot of things that had to change in Helena and it was sort of like ‘cleanup on aisle four.’”

But to Smith, Gianforte’s tenure is a catalog of missed opportunities. One of the bills the governor signed in 2021, a GOP-carried policy to create the regulatory framework for the voter-approved recreational marijuana industry, was the last straw for Smith.

“Greg Gianforte is not a conservative,” Smith said in a recent interview. “He works with the Solutions Caucus, the Republicans in the middle of working with the Democrats, to get all their more liberal-leaning agenda items passed … Greg Gianforte’s your tech billionaire, and it's really easy for me to ask people, ‘Do you want Montana to become the next Silicon Valley? Or do you want to get back to who we brought to the dance?’ That's farming, ranching, logging and mining. We’re going to bring those industries back into our state and that will alleviate the tax burden that the residential taxpayers are feeling.”

While Gianforte was prominent at the Missoula event in a key speaker spot and a popular photo-op when he mingled with the crowd beforehand, Smith wasn’t allowed in the room. He posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, that the ticket he’d purchased for the event had been revoked.

“Montana Association of ‘Conservatives’ uninvited a true Montana conservative with a proven voting record,” Smith wrote. "This was after purchasing a ticket and was offered a candidate table… the UNI Party swamp is at it again."

Gianforte’s argument to primary voters is that he’s executed his promises — the “Montana Comeback Plan” he campaigned on four years ago— and should get a second term to finish the job. Back in 2020, COVID-19 ravaged the state both from a health and economic perspective, and in that election Gianforte presented himself as the cure to the state’s financial woes.

To the 300-or-so people at the Missoula event, Gianforte said Montana has seen record employment growth since he took office with the creation of 50,000 jobs. The state has also experienced sustained low rates of unemployment.

In each of the legislative sessions he’s been at the helm, Republicans voted to cut the state's top margin tax rate, lowering it from 6.75% to 5.9%. Additionally, Montana raised the cap on its rainy day fund and filled it to the maximum allowed by law, as well as paid off all state debt, in part using revenues fueled by rapid income tax growth and a wash of federal pandemic aid.

The economic growth has not come without significant downsides, however. And Gianforte’s handling of them is where Smith aims to draw distinction between the two men.

COVID-19 was also a catalyst in dramatically changing Montana with an influx of new residents who often imported their higher incomes, leading to skyrocketing housing costs and the spike in property taxes. Those two issues have become focal points this campaign season, and the next occupant of the governor’s office will be the person in the state perhaps most influential over what policies Montana pursues to address the dual problems.

Gianforte has repeatedly placed the blame for skyrocketing property taxes on local governments. In a recent interview, he said he was disappointed a bill last session to restrict growth in local spending didn't pass.

As for solutions, he ran through a checklist that included expanding the property tax relief program through the Department of Commerce for people on fixed incomes, but admitted “it's not a solved problem yet.”

Earlier this year he appointed a task force to examine property taxes and craft recommendations before the Legislature meets again at the start of next year.

“It’s essentially crowdsourcing solutions,” Gianforte said. “I'll be the first one to say (the property tax rebate) was a one-time deal. We need a permanent fix. And that's what the task force is focused on.”

Perhaps most visible, his administration issued property tax rebates of up to $1,350 over two cycles, in addition to a one-time income tax rebate of up to $1,250 for an individual and $2,500 for a married couple in the previous tax year.

The money for that came from the surplus Montana and many other states found themselves with in 2023. Gianforte and a majority of Republican lawmakers settled on the rebates after long debate in last year’s legislative session, and directed the rest of the extra cash to things like the permanent income tax cuts, debt payoff, road and bridge projects, infrastructure at state-owned facilities and more.

“That’s your money, that’s why we gave a billion of it back to the people of Montana in permanent rate reductions and rebates,” Gianforte told the Missoula crowd. “ … It was your money, we needed to give it back.”

But to Smith, the way a majority of legislative Republicans and Gianforte handled the surplus is a frustration— “the cake was already baked, the money was already spent,”he said— adding that he would have sent all of the nearly $3 billion back to Montanans.

To Smith, the property tax rebates are “just more of Greg buying votes,” and he said that the approach left out renters and the middle class, and that they were hard to access for some who struggled with the application process. When it comes to taxes, he said he’d pitch a policy of not taxing any income over 40 hours a week.

“There's a lot of conservative values and principles we can implement that help the middle class, that help the renters and help the folks that are struggling the most get that relief,” Smith said.

In the Legislature, Smith said he observed “lots of good conservative bills to get Montana back on track,” but even though he was in a super-majority “I couldn't get anything done.” So he announced his candidacy for governor early in the session, an unconventional move for a freshman lawmaker.

Smith aims to tap into what he’s betting is a large enough faction of the Montana GOP that sits farther to the right, embodied by the Freedom Caucus wing of the Legislature, that also believes their ideal version of Montana is slipping away. His campaign platform is an appeal to the right wing of the party, a group Gianforte decidedly overlooked in legislative primary endorsem*nts he issued this spring.

Tapping into a national issue that’s become a main talking point for Republicans up and down the ballot, Smith said if elected he would in the first week issue an executive order declaring a state of emergency because of “the illegal alien issue.”

“I will use our National Guard dressed in plainclothes to start rounding these people up because if the federal government isn't going to do our job, I will do that job here in Montana,” Smith said. "And that dovetails into the homeless crisis."

He called for "sideboards on these homeless shelters," such as drug-testing residents or else they’d lose any tax-exempt status.

“We need to start curtailing these bad actors and making sure that the bad actors are out of our state,” Smith said, adding he wanted to see fentanyl dealers subject to the death penalty. "If you're a Montana resident, we're going to take care, if you’re an alcoholic single mother, that's a battered wife, we're gonna take care of you. But we have a lot of bad actors that aren't even from here that are abusing these resources."

The issues tied with substance abuse and correlated crime aren’t far from Gianforte’s mind, however, and he brought it up second in a list of the top five things he’d like to address in a second term.

“We've seen an uptick in violent crime,” Gianforte said. "We've done a bunch. We increased penalties for selling fentanyl. But there's more we can do." He pointed to the southern border and said he hopes that the next president will do more to cut off the supply of fentanyl crossing into the U.S.

Within Montana, the governor said he wants to invest more in treatment and recovery. His HEART Act, Healing and Ending Addiction through Recovery and Treatment, was a start in 2021, but he said more work needs to be done to get money into communities where it will have the most impact. He also said he wanted to see robust support for law enforcement.

Smith veers far more into hot-button culture war topics, while Gianforte tended to stay above that fray during his address in Missoula. But the governor's four years in office have been punctuated by those issues, as has his campaign to some degree. He recently issued a fundraising effort with the claim President Joe Biden is "dumping illegal immigrants in Montana," capitalizing on a migrant family arriving in the Flathead recently, an occurrence other Republicans have sensationalized without proof of Biden's involvement. The Daily Interlake reported the campaign later pulled the ad.

Gianforte over his tenure also signed bills that banned businesses from being able to require COVID-19 vaccinations, blocked transgender girls and women from participating on women's sports teams, and aimed to limit abortion access in Montana. Some of those laws are on hold by the courts, and Gianforte has joined fellow Republicans in calling for the judiciary to be reigned in.

But for the most part, Gianforte is highlighting things like the work done by his Lt. Gov. Kristen Juras, who the governor said “went to work on red tape” and so far has repealed or streamlined 20% of all the regulations in state government. Smith's running-mate is Public Service Commissioner Randy Pinocci.

“We went through every line of every regulation in every agency … removing friction between the state government and small business,” Gianforte said.

As an example, he cited a change that flipped the ratio for electrician apprentices from the previous of two journeymen to one apprentice. Changes like that, Gianforte said, have quadrupled the number of apprentices in Montana.

“We have more people entering into the trades, making a good living and building the houses we need,” Gianforte said.

The governor also said he’s worked to recruit companies to Montana, pointing to pending gains like the 500-job VACOM manufacturing plant expected in Lewistown by 2029 and Brixtel Defense, an ammunition manufacturing company moving to Glendive that aims to employ 350 people in four years.

“I have a couple of business-attraction people at the Department of Commerce and we go visit with the principals and the pitch is really simple: ‘Hey, you want to move back to America?’” Gianforte said to laughs.

Smith’s main economic platform pitch is what he’s calling the ORACLE Act, or Opening Road Access Clearing Lines and Exits.

“That's gonna be our way to get back into these forests and start reducing the fuels, so we don't have these devastating forest fires that we've been having,” Smith said. He said the Legislature would pass a resolution affirming his act, and then county commissioners could adopt the act because “your county commissioners have legal standing in federal and state courts to keep their constituents safe from these forest fires.”’

“What that act will do is just allow them to go in there and cut these roads that have been closed out of and start getting these fire lines and being proactive to fight against these forest fires,” Smith said.

That will boost flagging industries, Smith said, creating jobs and boosting tax revenues, which can help alleviate property taxes.

Echoing the “New Jersey Greg” line used ad nauseam by Democrats in 2020 against Gianforte, Smith called the governor a rich carpetbagger.

“Greg has the money, but I have the message,” Smith said. “Having been born and raised in this state, third generation, I know what Montana is supposed to look like. And this Montana that we’re all growing up in is nothing like what it should look like. I'm giving a voice to all the loggers and miners, farmers and ranchers, that have been left in the shadows of Greg Gianforte.”

Gianforte said he understands the changing nature of the state, but believes he’s the best person to shepherd the state through what’s next.

“For too long, Montana has not reached its full potential. From my perspective, that's the state's role is to make sure that Montanans that want to pursue the American dream can do it here,” Gianforte said. “We can’t make a decision on who moves here and who doesn't. But we can pass laws that protect the rights of Montanans. Montanans are fiercely independent, they don't want to be told how to live their lives.”