When political analysts look at Montana, they see a reliable stronghold of the modern Republican Party. This is a state that President Donald Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points in 2024, a place where conservative populism runs deep in the soil. Yet, grassroots advocates are looking to the state’s unique political heritage to advance proposals that could radically alter the political landscape. Under Initiative 194, also known as “The Montana Plan,” voters will decide whether to completely bar corporations, labor unions, and other artificial legal entities from spending money on state elections, testing whether local frameworks can withstand national scrutiny.
The concept taps into a brewing, cross-partisan fury over the pervasiveness of so-called “dark money” — the untraceable millions flowing into political campaigns through opaque corporate structures. To outsiders, a red state leading the charge against corporate political speech might seem paradoxical. But to anyone familiar with Montana’s history, it makes perfect sense. This is a state where corporate “robber barons” once ran wild, buying judges and legislatures during the Copper King era of the early 20th century. Montanans have a long, proud history of fierce institutional skepticism toward money in politics. Now, they are using that history to pioneer a novel legal strategy that could trigger a national domino effect.
What makes this emerging framework revolutionary is its procedural maneuver around federal jurisprudence. For over a decade, traditional campaign finance reform has slammed into a legal brick wall: the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision. That ruling established that independent political spending is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment, effectively granting corporations the same political speech rights as living, breathing citizens.
Rather than challenging Citizens United head-on, a strategy doomed to fail before the current conservative supermajority, this new approach attacks the problem from the flank. It shifts the legal battlefield from corporate rights to corporate powers. Under the 10th Amendment, state governments possess the absolute authority to charter corporations and define the legal scope of what those “artificial persons” are allowed to do. Proponents argue that while a person has an inherent right to free speech, a corporation only has the powers granted to it by the state. By stripping political spending from the approved list of corporate powers, advocates are testing whether states can regulate the entity itself, rather than the speech.
Predictably, the establishment is terrified. A high-stakes Supreme Court challenge is virtually guaranteed if such measures are successfully enacted. Business groups and opponents have already denounced these strategies as flatly unconstitutional. Legal scholars are fiercely divided on how the nation’s highest court will react. Skeptics view the strategy as a transparent “end run” around Citizens United that a conservative court will eagerly strike down.
However, constitutional optimists note that the strategy forces the conservative block into an uncomfortable ideological corner. The justices will be forced to choose between two core conservative tenets: protecting corporate political expression or upholding federalism and a state’s 10th Amendment right to govern its own corporate charters. If the court rules against such state regulations, it will have to explicitly declare that federal corporate speech rights override a state’s fundamental sovereignty over its own creation.
Montana is far from alone in this fight. The Big Sky strategy is the flagship of a coordinated, multistate assault on dark money. Movement organizers at the Transparent Election Initiative note that variations of this corporate charter-power strategy are active or under consideration in more than 30 states, creating a bipartisan populist front across the country.
Citizens looking to follow these developments can consult official state portals to verify the status of legislative proposals and charter-power frameworks across the country. On the opposite coast, the reform group Honest Elections Oregon filed a near-identical constitutional amendment for its state’s November 2028 ballot. Meanwhile, states such as Michigan, California, and Alaska are independently advancing their own variations of campaign finance restrictions, targeting everything from utility company political contributions to foreign-influenced corporate spending.
This is no longer a localized grievance — it is a structural rebellion. The unusual coalitions forming around these measures prove that the fatigue over campaign finance has transcended traditional partisan boundaries. This broad, cross-partisan alliance features high-profile state leaders like former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, standing alongside populist progressive figures. To track active campaign finance measures, petition filings, and upcoming ballot schedules in Montana, citizens can verify current initiatives and leadership details directly through the Montana secretary of state’s office and official state voter portals. These movements are united by a simple, universal truth: When anonymous corporate entities can dump unlimited sums into an election, the voices of actual voters are completely drowned out.
Critics of such measures argue that barring corporations from political spending is an unfair restriction that prevents local businesses from defending themselves against harmful regulations. They contend that in a modern economy, policy decisions directly impact a company’s survival, and businesses must have a seat at the electoral table.
But this argument fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the crisis. This reform model does not prevent small business owners, corporate executives, or union members from spending their own hard-earned money to support candidates or causes. It simply demands that they do so transparently, under their own names, as citizens. What it stops is the practice of hiding behind a shell corporation or a generic LLC to drop half a million dollars into a local race without accountability. It restores a level playing field where human beings, not paper entities, decide elections.
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When voters evaluate these innovative proposals, they are participating in a broader conversation that extends far beyond any single jurisdiction. If these measures gain traction, they will provide an immediate road map for dozens of other states waiting on the sidelines. It will force a definitive, historic reckoning at the Supreme Court over the limits of corporate power.
For decades, people have resigned themselves to the idea that nothing can be done about the corrupting influence of dark money in our democracy. By looking backward to populist roots, states such as Montana may have just found the legal key to unlocking a fairer political future for the entire nation.
Eric Wargotz is a practicing physician, clinical professor emeritus at the George Washington University, a judge, and a regular contributor to national policy debates. Views expressed are his own.