This Week’s Top MT-SEN Story: Tim Sheehy Exaggerates “Cowboy” Credentials on the Campaign Trail
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Monday, February 5, 2024
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Tim Sheehy calls himself a “cowboy,” but doesn’t run the day-to-day operation on the ranch and uses it for brand collaborations and magazine photoshoots
Helena, MT – Transplant Tim Sheehy clearly likes calling himself a “cowboy,” but as it turns out, his only real connection to the rancher lifestyle is that he has enough money to try and buy it. Last week Vanity Fair uncovered that Sheehy greatly inflated his “cowboy” bona fides to score political points, but that he doesn’t run the day-to-day operations of the ranch land he bought in 2020.
Sheehy bought the ranch land after selling his tech company for $350 million, then used the ranch for brand collaborations and magazine photoshoots. Montanans will see right through Sheehy’s charade – they’re known for having a nose for bull.
Read more from Vanity Fair here.
Vanity Fair: “Wannabe Cowboy”: This GOP Senate Candidate’s Rancher Bona Fides Are Coming Under Scrutiny
By Caleb Ecarma
January 31, 2024
For Senate Republicans this cycle, recruiting candidates with deep pockets appears to be a bigger priority than finding ones with substantive ties to the states they are hoping to represent.
This same controversy has emerged out of the Senate race in Montana. There, however, interloping happens to be a near-cardinal sin; residents commonly demarcate their allegiance to the land by pronouncing what generation Montanan they are. And yet McConnell’s best hope of unseating Jon Tester, the state’s three-term Democratic incumbent, is Tim Sheehy, a millionaire aerospace and drone technology entrepreneur who grew up in Minnesota and moved to Montana barely a decade ago.
“We call it a wannabe cowboy,” Matt Rains, a fifth-generation Montanan rancher, says of Sheehy, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment. “He bought his way in—and we’ve lost a lot of great ranchers to rich out-of-staters buying up land to add to their little collections, just like Sheehy has.”
“People watch that show and come in with these highfalutin ideas that you’re a cowboy, you ride horses, by God you fight for the land,” said Nancy Keenan, a storied Montana Democrat with a husky voice no doubt suited for a role on Yellowstone. “Well, those of us born and raised in Montana, we’ve seen it all, and Sheehy is just another multimillionaire who bought a ranch two years ago and uses it more for self-promotion than a livelihood.”
Keenan was referring to the land Sheehy purchased back in 2020, weeks after selling his drone company, Ascent Vision Technology, for $350 million. Since then, the Little Belt Cattle Company, Sheehy’s combination ranch, and, according to one magazine profile, “lifestyle brand experience,” has been used in a plethora of marketing ventures, appearing on magazine covers and in brand collaborations.
“Lots of brands give an image. But it’s a facade built by a corporation that wants to create an illusion,” Sheehy said in a 2022 interview, arguing that Little Belt, by contrast, offers authenticity.
The truth is a little more complicated. One Little Belt photoshoot notably featured Roby Burch, the chief executive of the Pennsylvania-based grill company Burch Barrel, whose Instagram bio at the time said he was “playin‘ cowboy.” Another collaboration was with Schaefer Outfitter, a clothing company founded in Wyoming that Sheehy personally modeled for to promote the brand’s Yellowstone collection. (The company’s jackets were often worn by characters in the show.)
The ranch even has its own social media influencer on staff, a micro-celebrity who goes by the username “HashtagRanchLife” and promises followers “major Yellowstone vibes.”
For Sheehy, the ranch thus bestows a semblance of regional mooring: Although incapable of reciting a Montanan bloodline, he can now legally describe himself as a “cowboy.” (He cited his employer as Little Belt Cattle Co in FEC filings last year under a donation to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.)
That being said, it appears Sheehy does not oversee the ranch’s day-to-day operations, according to statements made by Little Belt partner Greg Putnam. In multiple interviews over the past two years, Putnam has claimed responsibility for the “day-to-day” cattle and farming activities at the ranch and said he would visit Bozeman once a week to report to Sheehy. Putnam has also taken credit for the very creation of the ranch. “I was responsible for helping get all the kind of real estate deals put together,” he said during a 2022 podcast appearance, “and then putting together the cattle operation from scratch.”
Sheehy is far from the first politician to contrive a cowboy aesthetic in the Treasure State. Montana congressman Matt Rosendale, a second-term Republican originally from Maryland, has often referred to himself as a rancher, despite reportedly only owning land he rents out to actual farmers and ranchers.
A former real estate developer, he moved to Montana in 2002 when he was in his early 40s. This part of Rosendale’s biography was often cited as a mark against him by both Republicans and Democrats in 2018, during his failed Senate campaign against Tester. But Rosendale refused to yield, leaning even harder on his granger identity in 2020 when he successfully campaigned for what was then Montana’s only congressional seat.
Should he choose to run for Senate a second time, Rosendale would immediately become Sheehy’s primary rival. It’s a scenario that could prove deeply problematic for Sheehy, a relative unknown in Montana politics who also lacks the pro-Trump credentials that have become all but mandatory for Republican Senate hopefuls.
“Sheehy has an impressive resumé, but he ain’t MAGA,” said one Montana Republican operative. “I don’t really know what he believes and from what I can tell, he doesn’t know either.”
The operative was hinting at changes reportedly made last year to the website of Bridger Aerospace—an aerial firefighting company run by Sheehy—which conveniently scrubbed references to its climate change, and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) policies shortly before Sheehy’s senatorial ambitions became public.
Rosendale, meanwhile, is one of Trump’s foremost allies in Washington; he was among the handful of Republicans to vote for Kevin McCarthy’s ouster last year. “Sheehy would have trouble getting around Matt Rosendale,” explained Matt McKenna, a Montana political strategist who worked on Tester’s 2008 campaign. “He’s actual MAGA, while Tim is just trying to wear his cowboy costume and a MAGA costume at the same time. The reality is he’s neither of those things.”
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