BILLINGS- With a month until the November, general election, Montanans are being inundated with political advertising.
“It’s constant. It’s every ad break on television,” said Paul Pope.
Pope, a professor at MSU Billings and political analyst, said voters can’t get a break from it.
“You need to protect your mental health,” he said.
But parties are in the end stretch of the election cycle with spending topping into the billions for Montana’s U.S. Senate race.
“We are seeing $3 billion election cycles now and a lot of it is buying ad time,” he said.
Pope says sometimes it’s hard for voters to know the difference between facts and untruths.
First, it’s important to know who is sponsoring the ad.
“A PAC or a political action committee is a group specifically formed for political advocacy,” explains Pope. “A candidate’s ad is something that comes from its campaign.”
Perhaps one of the most memorable PAC ads in recent weeks is one centering around a claim that white farmers in Montana didn’t receive crucial funding based on race.
The ad doesn’t come from Tester’s Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, but instead comes from a Super PAC called the Senate Leadership Fund, whose goal is building a Republican senate majority.
Pope says PACs use the muscle of the First Amendment to toe an unethical line about their opponents.
“The PAC ads are often very exaggerating with the claims that they make, and in some cases, they are outright lies,” said Pope.
The claim made in the ad is false, according to Tester’s voting record and Walter Schweitzer with the Montana Farmer’s Union.
Schweitzer says the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, which is referenced but not named in the ad, was born out of good intentions.
Initially it never went into effect, so no farmers were turned away from funding.
“For decades, disadvantaged farmers and ranchers have been denied financial assistance,” said Schweitzer.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act, the USDA gave money to 228 Montana farmers who reported discrimination.
Schweitzer says white farmers were never denied funding and received thousands of dollars in aid from the agency through the years.
“I am sure there were some women farmers who used this funding, I am sure there were some Native American farmers who received funds from this,” he said.
In 2022, Tester voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which replaced an earlier version of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program with one that doesn’t discriminate based on race.
The program is currently in effect today with recipients reporting discrimination including age, gender, and religion.
The attack ads go both ways.
In 2023, the Last Best Place Super PAC was found to violate finance reporting requirements for ads calling Sheehy, “Shady Sheehy”. The complaint alleges the PAC failed to file required pre-election independent expenditure reports.
“The voter has to use more than these campaign ads to figure out what they want from a candidate,” said Pope.
He says voters must look beyond the salacious language and follow the money.
“They have to go to the candidate’s web page. They have to look at the candidate’s history,” he said.
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