Alani Bankhead is the Democratic candidate for Montana’s Senate seat up for election in 2026. Growing up in a military family, Bankhead has lived in many cities across the globe. She participated in U.S. Air Force ROTC at Penn State University, and, like her father, served in the Air Force. After retiring from the military, Bankhead became a certified professional coach and founded Mighty Sparrow Coaching, a leadership development business.
Currently, polls have Republican Kurt Alme leading the Senate race, with independent Seth Bodnar polling in second and Alani Bankhead trailing in third. The HPR sat down with Bankhead this October to discuss the problems facing Montanans and how she hopes to solve them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Can you please explain the basics of your economic policy as a whole?
Alani Bankhead: I have a master’s degree in international relations with a national security concentration. When you look at the history of how nation-states came to be, first they exist to continue existing, but they also exist to provide their constituents with the best possible quality of life. Currently, this relationship between the people and the government is completely broken. On the economic side of things, diesel today is $6.42 a gallon, fertilizer prices went up 30%, and because of the war in Iran, gas prices and diesel prices going up means that everything is going up. Groceries are very expensive, and healthcare is out of control. On average, we hear that people’s health insurance premiums are $700 a month with a $10,000 deductible, which is insane. In terms of housing, Montana is the most unaffordable place when you compare housing costs with wages.
So, we can see that this social contract between the government and the people is broken. People are working two or three jobs, and Montanans are working their butts off. People don’t complain or ask for much. One of the reasons I’m running is because I’m frustrated with this broken social contract.
My economic policy overall is to get more dollars in the pocketbooks of Montanans. All the studies show that if you infuse Main Street with money, then every sector of society will do well. If you inject finances into the marginalized, every sector of society does well. That’s why programs like the New Deal were created — those social security safety nets — as they gave a leg up to everyday people. This created the middle class, which was the best invention in American history, and maybe world history. So, my basic economic policy is to get dollars into Montanans’ pockets and to fight to make sure that Montans are protected from big business, but we’re still supporting capitalism. We’re a capitalistic society; we’re not anti-business. We just think there can be more overlap between businesses making money and people having what they need to survive.
HPR: One of the things you’ve talked about is raising the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour by 2030. This is an increase of about $6 from Montana’s current minimum wage of $10.85, and nearly a $10 increase in the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. There’s some concern about how this will affect small businesses. How do you hope to increase the minimum wage while still protecting small businesses?
AB: The answer to that is we listen to the people. The government has been a zero-sum game for too long. The mindset of most government officials is “I win, you lose” or “I lose, you win.” What I’ve done historically is create win-wins for everybody, and that means creating the space for all the relevant parties to come and talk through what a win looks like so that we can find that sweet spot. When I say I’m proposing increasing the federal minimum wage, what that means is we’re not going to blatantly say, “it’s going to be $17 an hour, suck it up.” It’s bringing small business owners to the table, as small businesses are over 80% of the economy in Montana; they’re the backbone of our economy. It’s looking at how we can step up that minimum wage in a way that doesn’t cause small businesses to go bankrupt.
This is a multi-layered question. One of the things that causes businesses to fail is that they can’t afford to pay their employees because they’re paying for other things like their health insurance. I’m the only candidate in this race who’s for universal health care, and we can do that without people paying more in taxes because we’re the richest country in the world. We have plenty of pork barrel spending in the government, and there’s a lot of overhead in the health insurance industry. So ultimately, when we get affordable healthcare, that not only puts, on average, $700 a month back in the pockets of people paying for insurance, but it also puts money back in the pockets of small business owners so they can pay people more wages.
There are a lot of things that we’ve proposed at the federal level that will be a layered response and will create a more gentle transition for these programs so that we can raise wages, support local businesses so that they can continue existing, and hopefully grow. Again, Main Street money means that everybody does better.
HPR: What are your plans to make Montana more affordable when it comes to housing?
AB: Again, it’s a multi-layered answer. First, we have to get private equity out of housing. Housing is a right that people need access to, and it shouldn’t be something that’s primarily to make big corporations more money. We’ve talked about raising the capital gains limit from $250,000 to $500,000. It’s a great law, and people love it, but the law hasn’t been updated since the ‘90s. Housing prices have gone up, so that means a lot of people are holding on to houses because they don’t want to sell and pay taxes on those houses. If we raise that limit, people will sell those houses. I’ve only heard positive feedback on this policy proposal. We know that, simply, supply and demand says that the more supply you have, the price will come down.
The other thing that we can do on the supply side is remove barriers for construction companies. One of their biggest barriers is taxes. I understand exactly what that’s like because I have a small business myself. So, providing tax incentives is one of the best ways to create the behavior we want. Let’s say if more than 30% of the houses they’re building are affordable housing, which I define as $350,000 or less, then they get tax breaks at the federal level.
One of the other big issues we have in housing is the permitting process, which isn’t a federal issue but a state and local issue. That’s where I would work down-ballot with the state and local legislators to ensure that I, at the federal level, am supporting whatever they need to ensure that the permitting process is smoothed out in a way that we can get more houses built more quickly.
I’ve found that in the federal government, you have your big goals that take a while to get done. Housing is one of those because there are a lot of elements that go into it to bring those costs down. But when you start working on these little changes, when you have these bipartisan efforts like the capital gains increase, they start to snowball. Then, people see movement in the right direction, and other people want to follow suit.
HPR: Montana relies heavily on federal funding, which accounts for roughly 43% of our state’s funding. Do you have any plans to make Montana more self-sufficient?
AB: I think the goal of every person is to be self-sufficient. Montanans are very proud people, and we don’t want to have to rely on others to a certain extent. We are working across different sectors to make that a reality. Agriculture is a really good example. I was talking to folks in different associations recently, and they’re really hurting. They have this Argentinian mystery meat coming in; their mental health is struggling, struggling financially; the big four corporate agriculture entities are dominating everything. USAID was cut last year, and that meant a lot of the contracts for agriculture were lost. I asked if that’s something they want reinstated, and they said they would actually prefer to have food sovereignty in Montana. They would prefer to produce local food to feed local people. They would rather do information exchange with those foreign agricultural producers so that they become self-sustaining agricultural communities as well. That’s the consensus we see all around, but Montanans need a leg up on how to do that.
Small business is, again, the backbone of our economy, but it’s also one of the quickest ways to build wealth. We have programs and policy positions in place to support people wanting to start small businesses. This is America, this is Montana; you can create anything and make something of yourself. And when you are doing really well, you’re paying more in taxes, which means better schools and better roads. Ultimately, what it comes down to is partnering with Montanans to see what a greater community looks like for you.
HPR: You’ve talked a bit about supporting universal healthcare. One of the big concerns is what it would do to rural hospitals. Roughly 49% of rural hospitals in Montana operate at a loss, and roughly 16% are at risk of closure. How can universal healthcare be tailored to help these hospitals?
AB: First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the facts. We’re the only developed country in the world that doesn’t have universal healthcare. So, there are lots of other countries that have it and are doing it well. The biggest impediment I hear from folks is, “I don’t want my taxes to go up,” and “I don’t want my tax money to go to undeserving people.” [Universal healthcare has] already been done; we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Also, we actually have a form of universal healthcare called TriCare. It’s the military’s healthcare system. It’s a single-payer system that covers eyes, dental, primary care, and mental health, and you can go anywhere in the country. If you have an emergency, you don’t need to transfer or get different insurance; you can just walk into whatever clinic or emergency room you want, and you’ll be seen.
They have solutions for rural healthcare built in. In the military, you have those hard-to-fill locations, like rural places. What they do to incentivize people in those locations is provide an increase in pay to healthcare providers for three to five years, and then they’ll give them a choice of location after. They’ll also offer additional benefits like housing. Obviously, it’s very relevant in rural areas and in Montana to have the government build housing so that we can have healthcare providers on site. And, on top of that, when the government runs your healthcare, it runs it as a service, not as a business.
I’ve talked to people on all levels of this healthcare crisis. When we talk to training and local healthcare professionals, what they say is that it’s basically impossible to put a training site in a rural area because you need certain specialties to be represented there, so you have to attract people in those specialties to live in that area, which isn’t likely to happen. Then you have to have the infrastructure and money to build the facility and run it at a loss. The government does that right now. We have medical training facilities that we run at a loss because the military services need healthcare. So, that would be a government service that we can provide where they’re building training facilities out in Glendive or Miles City, and then they could hire and retain local Montanans, who already have deep roots in the community, to get trained in these facilities and go back to their communities to provide these healthcare services.
A lot of people don’t go and see the doctor when it’s a little problem because they can’t afford it, so they only go to the doctor when it’s an emergency. But when you walk into the emergency room, everything is 10 times more expensive. When you have universal healthcare, none of those costs exist because you can walk in and get primary care when it’s not a bad issue, rather than when it becomes an emergency.
Another thing is this issue of use-or-lose spending. For different departments, if you don’t spend all of your budget, you lose what you didn’t spend, and you get less next year. In September of 2025, the government spent $93 billion of your taxpayer dollars on things like baby grand pianos and instruments and lobster tails because of this policy. We have the money to be able to fund universal healthcare in a way that we can still meet national security requirements without raising taxes, and that’s how we get universal healthcare.
HPR: What’s your stance on data centers in Montana?
AB: Myself and Kyle Austin, the libertarian candidate, are the only two candidates against AI data centers. I’m the only candidate who came out for a moratorium, and I say that because 82% of Montanans don’t want AI data centers. They don’t want their electricity prices to go up; they don’t want to have to pay for this.
Make no mistake, this entire race is about AI data centers. The Republican [Kurt Alme] and the independent [Seth Bondar] won’t come out against AI data centers, and in fact the independent has come out against a moratorium. This is because they’re bought and paid for by the billionaire class and tech corporations that want those AI data centers, and they want them built in public spaces and public land. That’s why the federal government is doing this push to decentralize the Forest Service and put that back to the states. It’s an effort to open up our public lands for exploitation. This is the number one issue, in addition to affordability, that Montanans are the loudest about. I’m the only candidate who’s against AI data centers and for healthcare prices coming down for everybody.
HPR: Any final thoughts you’d like to add?
AB: I usually end by reminding folks that I’m the only candidate for universal healthcare, I’m one of two against AI data centers, I’m the only one who’s put handcuffs on the Epstein class for child exploitation, and I’m the only one with ties to D.C. folks who get stuff done. The power of Montana lies in the community and in the reminder of who we are as individuals. I tell people that while others have the money, we have the many. We’re experiencing the Copper Kings 2.0 when it comes to money in elections. In my career in the military, I’ve arrested hundreds of pedophiles, and we did that with a team of about five people who are no different than you and me. We just cared. It was a messy process, and we didn’t know what we were doing in the beginning. The hard part is reminding Montanans that our humility is our superpower — the idea that one person isn’t enough, but when we each offer our share, we win. My final reminder is always that we can choose our values or we can choose our fears. Montanans usually choose values because of the love we have for our community, and I think that’s going to win in the end.
