Alani Bankhead
DemocraticQ1 As electricity demand increases due to manufacturing, electrification, and data infrastructure, what role, if any, do you believe alternative energy sources, such as nuclear energy, wind, or solar, should play in America’s future energy mix? What policies, if any, would you support related to alternative energy development, regulation, and/or research, and why?
Montana should build the energy that lowers bills and keeps the money here. I would restore the clean-energy tax credits Congress cut short in 2025 and protect the direct-pay option that lets our rural electric co-ops actually use them for solar and storage. Incentives, never mandates: a co-op or a landowner should choose what pencils out rather than be told.
The pressure on our grid is not coming from households. Roughly 1,400 megawatts of data-center load has already been signed in this state. My rule is that new large loads pay 100 percent of their own grid upgrades, through the FERC large-load rulemaking in Docket RM26-4, and buy their own power instead of islanding off a grid Montana families paid for.
I would steer federal energy and workforce dollars to our public universities, community colleges and tribal colleges, and guarantee research computing for Montana institutions and startups rather than shipping that value out of state.
On new nuclear in Montana I want the cost, water and waste questions answered in public, with the numbers on the table, before I commit to a position I would have to defend for a decade.
Keywords: co-ops, cost-shifting, research capacity
Q2 Do you see community-based institutions like K–12 schools and community colleges playing a role in strengthening science and research across MT state? If so, what policies do you support regarding these institutions?
Yes, and right now Montana is starving the institutions that would do it. Our starting teacher pay is about $36,682, dead last in the nation. You cannot ask a school to build the next generation of scientists while paying the person at the front of the room less than any other state does. Raising that floor is where science education in Montana starts.
Beyond pay, I would protect the federal programs that put working labs and current equipment in rural schools, and fund dual-enrollment and career-technical pathways so a student in a small town can take real college science before graduating.
Our community colleges and tribal colleges are the most underused assets we have. For a lot of Montanans they are where research first becomes something you can touch.
I would also make the companies that want Montana’s power and water pay into this. Every data-center project should put a set share into local education, research and nonprofits, and partner with our universities, community colleges and tribal colleges to train a homegrown technical workforce.
Keywords: teacher pay, tribal colleges, dual enrollment
Q3 The Sand Creek & Bobcat Lake Fire, is recorded to be one of ten largest fire in the state in August 2026, burning over 43,000 acres near Wisdom and Wise River. What are your policies around fire risk management for the state?
Protect the home and the town first. More than half of Montana’s properties are vulnerable to wildfire, second-highest in the nation, and families in fire country are losing insurance coverage over it.
So fund the work closest to the house first: home hardening and defensible space, including grants that reach renters and families who cannot front the cost. Then fuels treatment in the buffer zones between towns and the backcountry. Real thinning takes out the small crowded trees and the brush that let a ground fire climb into the crowns, and leaves the big ponderosa and larch that have already shrugged off fire standing.
Fund science-based fuels reduction and prescribed fire to head off high-intensity megafire, and defend the Roadless Rule rather than bulldozing roads into backcountry under a wildfire banner. Intact backcountry burns less severely, and every new road is one more place a fire starts.
Prescribed fire done right means burning under the right conditions of weather and ground, and never lit and left. That is how the tribes have always done it, and I would back tribal-led fire work.
More than eight in ten Montana fire departments are all-volunteer. Pay and protect the people who show up.
Keywords: home hardening, good fire, volunteer firefighters
Q4 Pesticides are widely used in food production to help manage pests and support crop yields, but ongoing debates over their safety have raised questions about their long-term use and led to proposals to restrict certain pesticides. What data and evidence will you use to weigh the role of these products in food security against safety concerns when shaping policy on their use in Montana’s agriculture?
I spent a career building cases, so my instinct is to ask what the evidence actually shows rather than what either side wants it to show. On pesticides I would start with the peer-reviewed record and the agencies’ own data: EPA registration reviews, USGS water monitoring, USDA and NIH research, and the residue testing already underway.
Where the science is contested I want to know who funded the study, what the exposure route was, and whether farmworkers and applicators were included, because they carry the highest exposure and are most often left out of the analysis.
Two things I will not do. I will not set policy on a chemical because the company selling it wrote the summary. And I will not dump the cost of uncertainty on a family operation that followed the label in good faith: if a product has to come off the market, transition support and research into alternatives come with it.
Montana’s water is not for dumping. Where contamination traces to a responsible party, that party pays for the cleanup, not the neighbors downstream.
Keywords: peer review, applicator exposure, polluters pay