TOWNSEND — This weekend, MTN broadcast a candidate forum in the race for Montana’s western U.S. House seat. Incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke and Democratic challenger Monica Tranel were the two candidates who met MTN’s criteria to be invited, but there is also a third candidate on the ballot: Libertarian Dennis Hayes.
It’s easy to recognize Hayes – and tell what issue he’s most concerned about – when you see him on the road. He drives a red pickup truck with a large sign in the rear window, reading “Forest Service is a waste of taxpayer money”. When MTN interviewed him in Townsend, one man came up to him and complimented him on the sign.
“A lot of them want to take pictures of it,” Hayes said.
Hayes says he’s been fighting with the U.S. Forest Service since 2015. He says he has a mining claim in the Confederate Gulch area, north of Townsend, and that he’s applied to the USFS to mine gold and silver there, but he doesn’t believe the agency has made any progress toward processing the application. Hayes has since concluded based on his interpretation of federal law that the USFS shouldn’t be supervising mining at all.
Hayes says his dispute with the USFS is an example of what he calls “corruption” in the federal government. He says he’s running for Congress because neither party is serious about addressing it.
“The Republicans got maybe five to ten people that are fighting for the American people, and the rest of them are in there for their back pockets and another page in their portfolio,” he said.”
Hayes is an Oklahoma native and says he’s now retired after having worked in construction. He’s lived in Montana since 2004 – originally in Bozeman before he moved to the Townsend area to be closer to his mining claim. While Broadwater County is not in the western congressional district, the U.S. Constitution requires only that House candidates live in the state they’re running in, not the district.
Hayes says he considers himself conservative. He’s concerned about illegal immigration and federal spending on migrants, he believes veterans are not receiving enough support, and he says the federal budget needs to be cut by half or three-quarters. He says he did not have any connections with the Libertarian Party before he ran.
“I wasn’t even sure what the Libertarian Party was until I looked it up and found out that they're for the Constitution and small government,” he said. “And it's like, ‘That's right up my alley.’”
Earlier this year, Hayes told Montana Public Radio that he was encouraged to run by the group “Patriots Run Project.”. He told MTN that people had reached out to him about running because of the political posts he’s put on Facebook, and that a donor agreed to pay his filing fee because he didn’t have the money himself.
Hayes is one of six candidates from across the country named in an Associated Press article who reported being recruited by Patriots Run Project. The AP’s investigation suggested the group may have ties to Democratic consulting firms, and several of the candidates interviewed said they believed it had been an effort to siphon conservative votes away from Republicans.
Hayes told MTN he had no idea about whether that was the case, but he was firmly standing against what he called an effort to push him out of the race.
“I'm dead serious about running,” he said. “If I had the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the corruption has to put out on news and ads and everything else, I'd be doing that. But when you live on Social Security, you don't have the money to do that, so you have to do everything by word of mouth.”
