Since last September, Montana voters have heard various accusations lobbed against Tim Sheehy, a Trump-endorsed GOP Senate hopeful running to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT): he’s “shady,” a “so-called businessman,” and “cashing in on Communist China,” according to a flurry of political ads running in the Treasure State.
The GOP primary ad buys were snagged by Last Best Place, a recently-formed super political action committee that, under federal law, is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates, Federal Election Commission records show. But the ads are technically thanks to Majority Forward, a nonprofit organization tied to Senate Majority PAC, the main outside group working to elect Democrats to the upper chamber and affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Majority Forward, which is organized under a section of the IRS called 501(c)(4) that allows it to shield its donors from the agency, is the sole funder of Last Best Place PAC, according to campaign finance filings. And these cash transfers from the Majority Forward dark money group to Last Best Place PAC between September 2023 and March 2024 have been to the tune of at least $6.1 million — all despite Schumer and other Senate Democrats frequently criticizing anonymous donations in the political system.
Majority Forward’s role in subsidizing Last Best Place PAC is a window into the dark money group’s vast influence across the United States. The dynamic also underscores how Democrats open themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy by decrying the influence of dark money, which Schumer has called “one of the gravest dangers undermining our democracy” that is corrupting politics. Majority Forward, which raked in $75 million and spent $56 million from July 2021 to June 2022, took large checks in recent years from CVS Health and PACs tied to other major corporations, according to campaign finance records and corporate disclosures.
“Majority Forward, with its nine-figure revenues, is proof positive that the Left’s scaremongering over ‘dark money’ is nothing more than a convenient way to villainize people who say things they disagree with,” said Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher for the conservative Capital Research Center group.
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Last Best Place PAC.
In February, the group faced a pair of FEC complaints from watchdog groups for not disclosing its anti-Sheehy spending, which was reported by HuffPost one month earlier as reaching almost $5.8 million. Between April 9 and April 16, the super PAC disclosed in filings that it spent $1.7 million on media buys opposing Sheehy in the Republican primary — with the cash being sprinkled to the Democratic-allied media buying firms Waterfront Strategies in Washington, D.C., and MVAR Media in Alexandria, Virginia.
But at the center of an FEC complaint from the left-wing Campaign Legal Center was the fact that Last Best Place PAC “treated its media disbursements as operating expenditures” in its report covering 2023. Doing so “deprived voters of vital real-time information about electoral communications trying to influence their vote,” Campaign Legal Center argued in the complaint.
Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, the main law regulating political spending and fundraising, an expenditure is “any purchase, payment, distribution, loan, advance, deposit, or gift of money or anything of value, made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office,” the complaint pointed out.
Spokeswoman Sarah Guggenheimer for the group previously said Last Best Place PAC is “confident no action will be taken on this complaint” and that Last Best Place PAC follows all federal rules. She declined a request for comment Tuesday from the Washington Examiner.
“The unfortunate reality is that there are millions upon millions of dollars flowing into states like Montana from out-of-state, progressive billionaires, at the behest of party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer,” said CEO Jeff Clements of American Promise, a group that supports limiting certain spending in elections.
Meanwhile, the Majority Forward dark money group is also keeping the lights on for a PAC called Duty and Country, which since last September has spent at least $4 million on ads in Ohio boosting Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and opposing Bernie Moreno, now the GOP nominee in the Buckeye State.
Every penny of those funds came from Majority Forward, according to campaign finance disclosures.
Despite the Majority Forward-backed ads in Montana, Sheehy is all but sure to be the Republican nominee. The former Navy Seal led Tester in an April survey of likely voters by a 3-point margin, and the race is widely viewed as a toss-up.
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“Tim Sheehy is keeping this race in a dead heat and the endless attacks against a decorated combat veteran are falling flat with Montanans who are ready for true conservative leadership in Washington,” said Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Sheehy campaign.
Schumer’s office did not return a request for comment.