Seth’s playing dirty.

Alani Bankhead is a feed-the-poor Christian, not a storm-the-Capitol Christian. She believes Congress should codify Roe v. Wade, and she said so on camera in June. Seth Bodnar's campaign can't beat her on the issues, so for two weeks it has gone after her faith, calling her old church a "pro-MAGA megachurch" and claiming she's "STILL getting paid by a far-right publisher."

Alani first went to McLean Bible Church in 1999, when she was a teenager and her family attended. She was gone for most of the next decade. When the Air Force sent her back to Washington, D.C., in 2011 and again in 2014, she went back to the church she knew a few times a year, when she needed a place to pray. She never joined a ministry or took part in church activities, and she left D.C. in 2017. The Trump visit Bodnar's campaign points to was in 2019. Roe was overturned in 2022.

The sermons in their video are from Lon Solomon, who led the church from 1980 to 2017. Alani wasn't there for the ones they picked, and she doesn't share those views. Her positions on LGBTQ+ rights are specific and public: enforce civil-rights protections against discrimination and hate, protect access to gender-affirming care, ban so-called conversion therapy, and fund crisis and suicide-prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth. Seth Bodnar's platform doesn't mention LGBTQ+ Montanans at all.

She has talked about her faith publicly before. In a June interview with NonStop Local, she called herself "a Christian at my core" and "non-denominational," and said she hadn't "gone to a church in a number of years." Years of investigating crimes against children changed how she relates to organized religion.

Her answer on Roe in that interview was just as clear. Asked whether Congress should codify it, she said, "I absolutely think we should," and added, "I view religion and government as two very different things." That record is a big part of why NOW PAC endorsed her.

About the book. In 2023, Alani wrote The Least of Us: How Your Imposter Syndrome Points to Your Greatest Power for the Christian women she coached. She paid Genesis Publishing House, a small Christian publisher, a one-time fee to produce it. The publisher doesn't take a share of her sales; its own site says authors keep all of their royalties. Her Senate financial disclosure lists $201 to $1,000 in royalties from her own book. None of the publisher's other books pay her anything.

Attacking someone's faith is reprehensible, and it's worse when the target has spent much of her career protecting kids and survivors of abuse and trafficking. If every Democrat were judged by what a former pastor preached, or by the most conservative positions of their church or denomination, very few people of faith would make it onto the ballot. Seth Bodnar is asking Montanans to judge Alani by a pastor she rarely heard. Judge her by her record instead. It's all public.

Sources: NonStop Local interview, June 23, 2026; Bodnar campaign release, Sept. 18, 2026. Montana Freedom PAC’s TV ad repeats the “anti-LGBTQ church” line.

On CNN on Sept. 30 he said it again: “The person on the Democratic ticket has some long-standing ties to pretty far-right organizations, still being paid by a publishing company that’s profiting from books…” She has no ties to far-right organizations, and they don’t get a dime from her book. Her Senate financial disclosure lists $201 to $1,000 in royalties from her own book.

Sources: Genesis Publishing House; Alani Bankhead Senate financial disclosure, May 27, 2026; CNN, The Arena, Sept. 30, 2026. His super PAC’s mailers repeat it.

“There’s a difference between having the money and not spending it well… and a system that chooses to oppress its individuals and exploit and extract from the Montanans that we serve.”

There's a clip going around, and it's real, but missing important context. It's from a holiday episode of Alani's coaching podcast, a show made for a specific audience: people who already have financial means and can't understand why it never feels like enough.

The example she was working through was a client whose household earned $300,000 a year and was still broke. The episode is about abundance versus scarcity mindset, about people with means who don't manage them well. It was never addressed to, or about, Montanans struggling to afford groceries.

In her own words: "That is very different than what we're combating in terms of affordability. There's a difference between having the money and not spending it well, or wanting more, and a system that chooses to oppress its individuals and exploit and extract from the Montanans that we serve."

Her coaching work helped people who already had abundance change how they thought about it. Her campaign is about dismantling the systems that extract from Montanans who don't. Two different jobs.

Imposter syndrome, what her coaching was about: a persistent feeling that you haven’t really earned where you are. “The thing that you think is your greatest weakness is actually the key to unlocking your greatest power.”

Where she stands on costs: Bringing Down Everyday Costs.

More Jobs, Less Government spent $901,179 on ads supporting Alani in the last two weeks of the primary, casting her as “a Trump-friendly Democrat who’s bullish on immigration enforcement,” and $1,005,876 against Reilly Neill, attacking her as “too liberal,” for universal health care, soft on the border and wanting to impeach Trump. Elections analyst Jacob Rubashkin described one as an ad “intended to boost Reilly Neill in a Democratic primary.” The same PAC also spent $962,124 against Seth Bodnar. Progressive Vet PAC spent $2.3 million for Alani; its money came from Contours, the same dark-money source behind Seth Bodnar’s own super PAC, and its treasurer, Moffie Funk, co-hosted a fundraiser for Bodnar.

Sources: FEC Schedule E filings (More Jobs, Less Government, C00693838; Progressive Vet PAC, C00948521); Montana Free Press, May 26, 2026; Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections; Inside Elections, Aug. 7, 2026; MTPR, Sept. 24, 2026. Follow the money.

Source: The Washington Post, Early Brief, July 30, 2026. Their TV ad runs the same splice.

Source: the July 14, 2026 blog post the mailer cites. The July 14 date is when the blog posted it. She said it earlier.

Planned Parenthood Action Fund had already decided to back Seth before it ever talked to us. Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a member of the Action Fund’s board, called three times in the week before the August 10 withdrawal deadline. She wasn’t calling about a questionnaire. She was calling to get Alani out of the race. No survey was ever sent.

When one of Seth’s supporters asked Alani at a forum about the paperwork behind an endorsement process her staff would have handled, she said she’d answered the questionnaire. We apologize for the mix-up. Had the Action Fund ever sent her one, she would have.

Sources: NonStop Local interview, June 23, 2026; NonStop Local, Oct. 2, 2026; Acker-Lyons’s own bio lists her Action Fund board seat.

Keenan endorsed Bodnar in a Bozeman Daily Chronicle guest column and wrote in an open letter that she had asked Alani to drop out (Montana Free Press, July 31). NBC News later called the 2008 NARAL endorsement a “snub”, and some of NARAL’s own state affiliates distanced themselves from it.

Source: NonStop Local, Sept. 25, 2026.

Asked whether an independent who refuses to caucus can be effective, Seth Bodnar said he plans to negotiate for committee assignments the same way every other senator does.

That isn't how the Senate works, and the difference matters enormously for Montana.

Senators don't negotiate for committee seats individually. Each party conference allocates its own slots, Democrats through their Steering Committee, Republicans through their Committee on Committees. At the start of each Congress, the two leaders negotiate an organizing resolution setting the ratios, and the Senate ratifies the conference lists. A senator's committee assignment comes through his conference. There is no third door.

This is precisely why Bernie Sanders and Angus King caucus with Democrats. Both won as independents. Both caucus anyway, because that is the price of a committee seat. The same was true of Joe Lieberman and of Harry Byrd Jr. before him. No senator in modern history has served on committees without caucusing with a party.

So Mr. Bodnar has two options. He can caucus, abandoning the central promise of his campaign. Or he can ask one party to surrender a seat from its own allocation as a favor, which is dependence dressed up as independence.

For Montana, this isn't abstract. Montana has never had influence proportional to its population; it has had influence proportional to its committee seats. Max Baucus chaired Senate Finance. Jon Tester chaired Veterans' Affairs and sat on Appropriations. Agriculture and Interior Appropriations are where farm policy, rural hospital funding, and public lands decisions are actually made. A senator outside both conferences is a senator outside those rooms.

Mr. Bodnar deserves a fair hearing on this. He may believe a party would seat him voluntarily. He may be right that in a narrowly divided chamber, a swing vote carries leverage.

But Montanans are entitled to hear the answer, not simply the assurance. Which committees does he expect to serve on, and through which conference's allocation? Every senator who has faced that question has answered it the same way, by joining a caucus.

Source: Newsweek, July 12, 2026.