“Wannabe Cowboy”: This GOP Senate Candidate’s Rancher Bona Fides Are Coming Under Scrutiny

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. In Pennsylvania, hedge fund millionaire David McCormick has received the blessing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell despite currently residing in Connecticut and having spent scant time in Pennsylvania since childhood. In Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde, a wealthy banker, is running for Senate despite having extensive ties to Orange County, California, where he owns a $7 million estate.

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.”

Without a generational throughline, the most Sheehy can do is claim that he thought about moving to Montana as far back as 2011. If true, that would at least make him more of a sooner than the throngs of Americans who first imagined moving to Montana in 2018 or 2019, following the release of the hit show Yellowstone.

“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. (Montana’s other congressional district, formed in 2022, is represented by Ryan Zinke, the former Trump interior secretary who famously sported a backwards cowboy hat during a Western-themed photo op with Mike Pence.)

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. (When asked by ABC News, Sheehy’s campaign said the website changes were standard updates.) 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.”

To help remedy his MAGA deficiency, Sheehy visited Iowa this month to celebrate Trump’s victory there and make what might be considered a pledge of fealty in front of a wall of Trump 2024 posters. He also posed alongside a pair of Trump congressional disciples—while sporting a wool-lined sheepskin jacket, naturally. “MAGA!” Sheehy declared in an X post of his photos with Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ronny Jackson.

Whatever the outcome of the June primary, either candidate will pose a grave threat to Democratic hopes of retaining a Senate majority next year. While Tester won reelection against Rosendale by about 18,000 votes in 2018, the state has since become more favorable to Republicans, who already control every other statewide office in Montana. And although Democrats held the governor’s mansion as recently as the end of 2020, Republicans wrested control of it the following year in devastating fashion: Greg Gianforte, a former Republican congressman and software entrepreneur originally from San Diego, trounced his Democratic opponent by nearly 13 points, or more than 75,000 votes. “The assumption used to be that out-of-staters moving here were typically more liberal,” said Rains, the rancher. “But around the COVID phase, the more radicalized conservatives wanted to leave the cities and suburbs, and they picked Montana as the new place to get away.”