It was a hot and dry late-August night in Missoula, and Ryan Busse, Democratic candidate for governor, was on his feet for the Pearl Jam show at the University of Montana’s Grizzly Football Stadium. Dressed in a plaid western shirt and a mesh-back trucker hat, the 6-foot-3-inch Busse blended in with the sold-out crowd of 24,000 in this beer-soaked college town as he swayed to the hits of the iconic 1990s grunge band.
For most of his life, Busse was a Republican. After growing up on a ranch in western Kansas, he moved to Montana in the mid-’90s to work as a vice president of sales for Kimber Manufacturing, an upmarket firearms company in Kalispell. But in the early aughts, when oil and gas companies lobbied for drilling leases within the protected Badger-Two Medicine area — a region sacred to the Blackfeet Nation, bordering Glacier National Park — Busse was astonished. He had hunted on that public land, felt a connection to it and respected its importance to the Blackfeet Nation and its origin stories.
In 2004, Busse spoke at a Trout Unlimited press conference in Washington, D.C., in favor of protecting Badger-Two Medicine and was swiftly pilloried by gun industry insiders for breaking from conservative orthodoxy. He refused to back down and, four years later, in honor of the disputed territory, he named his younger son Badge. His next and final break with the party was precipitated by his own industry, when, following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the GOP blocked basic reform of gun laws. Busse watched in horror as gun manufacturers moved steadily toward the most destructive (and least sporting) high-powered weapons and away from the core values that he grew up with. With his wife Sara asking what he was doing to find a solution, Busse left Kimber in 2020 and embarked on a truth-telling mission.
In 2021, he published “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America,” a widely praised memoir that recounts how the NRA transformed gun culture and conservative politics. He testified before Congress in 2022 about the firearm industry’s moral decline. Still, as a candidate for governor, Busse is making rifles and shotguns the cultural centerpieces of his television ads and political persona. He is proud of the 3 million guns he sold as a sales executive and the life of hunting and shooting that he is raising his sons to respect. In terms of policy, he supports enhanced background checks and red-flag laws that restrict gun sales to domestic abusers, but also sees gun violence as largely a matter of personal responsibility rather than a problem for the government to solve. As a gun-toting Montana Democrat, Busse is hammering his opponents with a nuanced message — guns and gun owners are normal; it’s Republicans and the NRA who made them weird.
At Grizzly Stadium, the Pearl Jam show was also a get-out-the-vote rally for Sen. Jon Tester, one of the most electorally vulnerable rural-state Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress. The wheat farmer with a high-plains, flat-top haircut is running for his fourth term while doing everything he can to distance himself from his own party. Like Busse, Tester skipped the Democratic National Convention in August to see Pearl Jam and held campaign events in western Montana instead. Tester won’t endorse Kamala Harris for president, and he spends as much time as the campaign allows in his hometown of Big Sandy (population 600), where he still runs a small family farm.
One of Tester’s hometown friends is Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, the man who brought the band to Montana four times since Tester’s first senate run in 2006. “If you could trust any politician in this world right now, you would trust that guy,” Ament told the crowd about Tester. “Because he’s the fucking real deal. He’s not some fucking transplant from New Jersey … or Minnesota, like Twin Cities Timmy.” (Tim Sheehy, Tester’s Republican challenger, who grew up in Minneapolis-St. Paul, is leading in the polls and making theirs the fourth most expensive Senate race in the country.)
The New Jersey dig was directed at Busse’s opponent, Greg Gianforte, the governor of Montana and a socially conservative Republican who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, founded a software company on the Jersey Shore, moved to Bozeman in the late ’90s, sold another company for a billion dollars, and whose most noteworthy political feat was body slamming a reporter from The Guardian in front of a Fox News crew in 2017 and going on to bankroll wins in two statewide elections.
As an incoming U.S. representative, Gianforte pled guilty to misdemeanor assault, formally apologized, was sentenced to community service and anger management counseling and, in a settlement, donated $50,000 to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Embarrassing as it might have been, Gianforte’s fit of rage came at a politically fortuitous moment and became a MAGA-era folktale of vigilantism against a “fake news” enemy. Seven years later, the governor’s assault charge has largely faded from memory and Busse doesn’t mention it in his own campaign ads. When I brought it up in an interview, he told me that his problem wasn’t with Gianforte’s temper but with the governor’s initial instinct to deny wrongdoing and avoid accountability. “Assaulting another man for asking a fair question was bad enough,” Busse said, “but what really ticked people off was when he lied to police about it.”
Busse is pitching himself as a common man with a conscience, but he’s struggling to attract attention. If anyone sitting near him at the Pearl Jam show had any idea who Busse was, they didn’t show it. And while anonymity at a rock concert isn’t always a bad thing, Busse now has less than a month to pull off a huge upset in a quirky state where his campaign’s biggest problem is that most Montanans still can’t identify him.
Montana is not a typical swing state. In the last 75 years, it voted for just two Democratic presidential candidates — Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Bill Clinton in 1992. But statewide and congressional races are more mixed. Since World War II, when the mining industry was roaring in Butte, a labor union stronghold, the state has sent eight Democrats and three Republicans to the U.S. Senate. In 2020, Gianforte was the first Republican to win the governor’s seat in 20 years. Both of his predecessors, Brian Schweizer and Steve Bullock, were popular two-term Democrats. In 2019, Bullock mounted a brief run for president.
As the unions have declined — and since eastern Montana’s second congressional district was reapportioned in 2020 — state elections have favored the GOP. But compared to its deep-red neighbors, the state remains idiosyncratic and unpredictable. A conservative choir book that soars in Boise, Idaho and Cheyenne, Wyoming can come off flat in Helena, Montana. Montana voters tend to reward politicians who reflect their own character: small-c conservatives and open-range libertarians comfortable with bipartisan problem-solving and protective of the state’s vast public lands. Most are proud of Montana’s unique constitution, a populist overhaul that was drafted and ratified by 100 nonpolitician delegates in 1972.
“Montana is the last of the egalitarian purple places in the West,” Busse told me. He described statehouses in neighboring Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas as “shit shows” beholden to special interests. In Montana, it was the mining industry, the “copper king” barons who ran it and a network of auxiliary industries like timber, railroads and power utilities that all exerted heavy political influence for more than a hundred years — but with an important caveat.
“Why is Montana different? Because people rose up against these big corporate abuses and spent decades fighting for rights established in that constitution,” Busse said of the 1972 text. The revisions made government business more transparent, empowered local jurisdictions, established a range of environmental protections, fortified the walls between church and state and guaranteed individual access to education and an absolute right to privacy.
With his rusty Chevy pickup (280,000 miles and counting), his garage full of taxidermy and his vast gun collection, Busse is trying to redefine what it means to be a Democrat in the West. He speaks directly to what he sees as Gianforte’s character and temperament issues that dogged his first term and cast doubt on his reelection. The most recent polling had Gianforte’s approval rating at neutral — 37% approve, 37% disapprove — the equivalent of a collective shrug. A plurality of residents think the state is on the wrong track, an ominous sign for a governor who oversaw a historic surge in property taxes last year while staking his legacy on a raft of legally shaky anti-abortion bills, several of which were blocked by state courts and have been tied up in lawsuits that the legislature has set aside $2 million to defend.
Consequently, women’s health care has become one of Gianforte’s main liabilities. Last month, abortion rights advocates easily surpassed the number of signatures needed to get an abortion-access referendum on the ballot as Montana joined five other GOP-controlled states that are putting the issue directly to voters. By staking their legacy on new abortion laws, Gianforte and his anti-abortion allies are making a risky bet that constituents won’t mind the obvious contradictions. On the one hand, Republicans celebrate limited government and the protection of individual rights; on the other, Gianforte signed nine laws to intervene in women’s health care and vowed to sign more. “Respect for freedom is a Montana mantra,” Busse told me. “We never wanted a governor telling people what to do. Gianforte is a religious zealot.”
Before Gianforte was elected to Congress, he donated half a million dollars to Focus on the Family, a public charity that promotes “gay conversion therapy,” the discredited practice of “healing” homosexuality through Scripture. Last year, he gave a quarter of his governor’s salary to a crisis pregnancy center in Kalispell which, depending on your outlook, either encourages or coerces women into carrying pregnancies to term. Between 2017 and 2022, the Gianforte Family Foundation, among the state’s largest philanthropic organizations, gave $1.7 million to more than a dozen crisis pregnancy centers statewide.
And then there’s the Glendive Dinosaur Museum. Opened in 2009 in a fossil-rich area of eastern Montana with the help of $290,000 from Gianforte’s charity, the 20,000-square-foot museum is run by an Oklahoma-based religious foundation and “presents the truth of God’s Word using the latest in dinosaur and fossil exhibits.” A diorama of Noah’s Ark includes small, seaworthy stegosauruses about to climb onboard. A nearby plaque explains that Noah “would have brought baby dinosaurs, as they eat and drink less, produce less waste material, take less space, and would have had a full reproductive life span for when they exited the ark.”
Jack Horner, the curator of paleontology at Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies, which has one of the largest collections of dinosaur fossils in the world, found little humor in the exhibits that Gianforte funded in Glendive. “It’s not a science museum at all. There’s nothing scientific about it,” Horner told a local reporter at the time. When journalists asked about his six-figure donations to the dinosaur museum during his run for Congress, Gianforte deflected the questions as attacks on his faith. When I asked his campaign whether he still supports creationist education, along with a list of other questions for this article, Gianforte’s team did not respond.
Compared to Montana’s Senate race, the contest for governor has garnered little national attention. The only two public polls, taken in February and early October, both showed Gianforte with a 22-point lead. For Busse, starting from such a deficit does offer at least one advantage: He can campaign like a man with nothing to lose. He’s been having fun on social media (in one recent post, Busse introduced a backyard chicken he named Egg Gianforte) and is leaning into issues that most rural Democrats avoid — taxes, abortion and guns. Busse is also betting that he knows his state better than its current governor does.
Political contradictions are something of a tradition in Montana. In Billings, city residents recently voted to both tax and ban cannabis sales in the city. Both propositions were on the same ballot and both passed. “Montana is a little weird,” said Paul Pope, a political science professor at Montana State University. “This race should be a lot closer than it is.” The main reason Gianforte is expected to win, Pope added, is that he is an incumbent, while most Montanans still don’t know who Busse is.
“I’m a populist Democrat fighting for basic things,” Busse told me in late August as he returned from his 140th campaign event, an open-door fundraiser that drew more than 120 people to the Dram Shop, a growler-filling station in downtown Missoula. At the event, Busse was approached by several gun owners who told him that they dropped their NRA memberships for the same reasons that he wrote his industry tell-all: “Because the NRA went crazy.”
“The NRA lost its way when it prioritized hardline partisan politics above all else. In so doing, they abandoned millions of gun owners and discarded the social contract of responsibility upon which all rights depend,” Busse told me. “All of this played a huge role in breaking our political system.”
This is the message that led the Montana Republican Party to label Busse a “gun grabber” and the reason why most red-state Democrats avoid the topic altogether. But Busse has spent his personal and professional lives surrounded by firearms. For gun-owning sportsmen, his candidacy poses a riddle: If a man who spent his life shooting, collecting and selling guns can’t be trusted on the issue, who can?
“Every Democrat gets called a gun grabber,” he told me. “I own more guns than all of them. I shoot more than them. I own about 40 guns. I’m a hunter. I have three bird dogs, and I love to bird hunt. It’s recreational, but it’s also food gathering for our family. We eat wild game: elk, deer, antelope, grouse, partridge.”
Gianforte’s hunting record reads more like a rap sheet. In 2000, he was fined by the state’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency for illegally killing an elk. In 2021, as governor, Gianforte shot a collared black wolf caught in a foothold trap, which, as some local hunters observed, was not exactly a fair chase. The trap had been set on a private ranch outside Yellowstone National Park belonging to one of his political donors, Robert E. Smith, whose family runs the GOP-aligned Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest local television operators in the country. After initially reporting the illegal kill to state authorities as the law prescribes, Gianforte reversed course and pressured the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to scrub his name from the record. When one game warden refused, Gianforte’s allies forced him out of a job he’d had for 22 years.
In 2018, two of the state’s most prominent GOP officials were caught in a different sort of gaffe when Representative Matt Rosendale tweeted a photo of himself and Sen. Steve Daines out for a crisp fall hunt. “Beautiful day enjoying our public lands and hunting with @SteveDaines,” Rosendale wrote, tipping off the local journalists who figured out that the photo had been taken not on public land, but on Smith’s private ranch. In the Rockies, where abundant public land is an elemental part of life, this is not a minor discrepancy. It’s the difference between hunting in Montana (which is about 33% public) and Missouri (about 3% public), or, for that matter, the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom, where the feudal model that granted nobles and the aristocracy the vast majority of land and river use still rules today.
Public rivers are also sacred. The state’s stream access law is one of the broadest in the country and assures every citizen the right to fish, swim, raft or recreate in any civilized manner on any and all naturally flowing rivers and streams. The night of the Pearl Jam show, I hitched a ride with a local who showed off photos of the striped bass she caught in her favorite secret fishing spot. “I will never tell you or anyone where it is,” she turned and said in a sudden and grave tone, one of countless Montanans who find solace in their own little hideaways in a vast and public open range.
Before launching his political career, Gianforte blundered straight into violating this code when he sued the state in 2009 to close public access to property he bought along the East Gallatin River in Bozeman. The social radioactivity of such litigious behavior in much of the West cannot be overstated. During Gianforte’s first run for governor in 2016, then-Gov. Bullock slammed him on it repeatedly — “Montanans have been locked in a battle against wealthy out-of-state land owners buying up land and blocking access to places Montanans have literally enjoyed for generations,” Bullock said. It arguably sank Gianforte’s campaign that year.
“He and billionaire types like him hate this type of access that we have,” Busse told me. “He didn’t want the poors coming onto his property.”
Montana voters’ top concern this election year, and Gianforte’s weakest issue, is property taxes. After the COVID-19 pandemic brought a surge of wealthy out-of-state home buyers, Gianforte ignored warnings from the state budget office to mitigate an explosion of property tax rates statewide. From 2022 to 2023, as predicted, the average Montana homeowner got hit with a 21% tax hike. In the western counties that absorbed the biggest influx of pandemic migrants, many homeowners’ taxes doubled. “Did I anticipate a Republican governor would be stupid enough to raise everyone’s property taxes?” Busse said. “No, I didn’t.”
The historic tax hike was met with all the enthusiasm one would expect in a conservative state, and it sent county-level officials in both parties into revolt over not only Gianforte’s governance, but his subsequent strategy of lying about it in official state mailers and blaming the problem on counties spending too much on public schools. To make matters worse, as some residents’ taxes tripled, Gianforte’s own bills on properties he owns in Helena and Bozeman dropped or barely increased, and property taxes for the state’s largest corporations fell sharply. NorthWestern Energy, which made a profit of nearly $200 million in 2023, enjoyed a $36 million tax reduction. Whether intentional and ideological or simply the result of sloppy budgeting, Gianforte shifted the tax burden from big business onto homeowners. “It lit the state on fire,” Busse said.
To avoid discussing such topics, Gianforte spent most of this election year refusing to debate Busse. His campaign dismissed Busse as not “a serious, credible candidate,” and said he would only debate if the Democrat released his tax records. After Labor Day, Busse handed over 10 years of tax returns to The Associated Press, and the two are currently scheduled for their only debate tonight, Oct. 16.
Though Jeff Ament and Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder never said his name at the show in Missoula, Busse is benefitting from the Senate race that brought the band to town. The Tester-led coordinated campaign has about 120 paid staffers in almost two dozen offices scattered across the country’s fourth-largest state by area. Late this summer, Busse pulled ahead of Gianforte in fundraising, an accomplishment that may prove irrelevant considering that Gianforte spent about $15 million of his own fortune on his last two campaigns.
November’s outcome will likely be decided by quirky independents and disaffected Republicans, voters who Busse said remind him of himself 20 years ago when he decided to speak up for protected Native American lands, knowing that he would take heat from his fellow conservatives.
“I wasn’t naive. I knew what would happen,” he told me about that day in Washington, D.C. “It was a foretelling, a predictive thing about where our national politics were going.”
The fight over the Badger-Two Medicine area, which conservationists and the Blackfeet Nation ended up decisively winning last year, was instructive. It reinforced Busse’s ethics, clarified the transactional and shallow machinations of politics and galvanized his subsequent decision to stand up to the NRA. It also showed him a way forward, which, win or lose next month, could set a tone for rural Democrats and independents nationwide.
“It’s hard in this country to break away from these political identities that have become so strong,” Busse said. “But people are doing it, because it’s important.”
Become a member today to receive access to all our paywalled essays and the best of New Lines delivered to your inbox through our newsletters.