The MontanaSenate race is increasingly being dominated by talk of scandal as the election enters its final week and Democrats make their last push to defend a crucial incumbency.
Jon Tester and Tim Sheehy are separated by single digits in the only race where a Republican challenger has been consistently leading a Democratic Senate incumbent. Tester, who has represented the state since 2007, has trailed his opponent by a significant margin for several months, though a The Hill/Emerson poll released earlier this month showed that gap possibly narrowing in his favor.
It’s a race that could decide which party controls the Senate in the upcoming year.
Now, Democrats are hoping that growing scrutiny of Sheehy’s service record will upend the race. After questions previously emerged about whether Sheehy was wounded during his service in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL, new reporting from NBC News emerged this week revealed another apparent contradiction. The Republican Senate candidate has claimed that he was “medically discharged” from the Navy after being diagnosed with a “tiny hole” in his heart, but “heavily redacted” records obtained by NBC pertaining to Sheehy’s discharge do not state that as a reason and list his discharge as voluntary.
“Tim Sheehy was honorably discharged from the Navy after being declared medically unfit to continue to serve as a Navy SEAL in 2014,” a Sheehy campaign spokesperson told NBC News. “After Tim left active duty in 2014, he was then in the Navy Individual Ready Reserve (IRR)” — a section of the Navy Reserve — “until his honorable discharge in 2019.”
It’s hard to say whether the NBC claims will have an effect on the race. Sheehy was leading by a considerable margin, as high as 8 percentage points in some surveys, ahead of the final weeks of the election. The majority of his war record also remains unquestioned, including his commendations: a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, received for actions in some of the most brutal theaters of the war.
But the bullet wound accusations has followed the Republican for months, especially given the lack of firm documentation to validate his claims. Sheehy, 37, would be one of the youngest members of the Senate if elected. A Washington Post story, citing a former US park ranger who would later come forward and reveal his identity, claimed that he was certain that Sheehy had sustained his bullet wound while on an excursion in Montana’s iconic Glacier National Park, not in Afghanistan as he has said.
Sheehy’s own version of the story is difficult to prove: the former SEAL says that he sustained the bullet wound in Afghanistan during combat, but lied about it and concealed the wound from superiors to avoid implicating another US service member in what he suspected was a friendly-fire incident.
Then, Sheehy says, he went to Glacier National Park. Nine years later. At the park, he was fined several hundred dollars after he confessed to discharging a .45-caliber handgun in a parking lot, on accident, after dropping it. The bullet, according to both his own statement at the time and the Park Ranger’s statements to the media in 2024, struck Sheehy at that time.
Sheehy’s campaign says that was a concocted story to conceal the supposed friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan. Others aren’t so sure, pointing out that the campaign has not explained why he and a former Park Ranger would both have said he was injured at the time of the parking lot incident if it was supposedly a concocted story. Another park visitor reported the gunshot, meaning that a shooting occurred at the park that day.
Katie Martin, a spokesperson for his campaign, said this week: “The bullet in Tim’s arm was a result of his service in Afghanistan. Tim never reported it because he didn’t want to trigger an investigation of his team, be pulled from the battlefield, and see a fellow teammate be punished.”
“To witness the media in cahoots with Jon Tester and his allies attempting to tear down a combat veteran’s record is appalling, and they should be ashamed of themselves. It shows just how desperate they are to win this U.S. Senate race. Jon Tester doesn’t care about veterans and their sacrifices; he only cares about another term in office.”
The latest questions about Sheehy’s medical discharge are likely to add fuel to the arguments around his bullet-wound scandal. But Montana’s increasingly deep-red bent has made Tester’s reelection battle a very tough race for Democrats.
One former editor of a Montana newspaper told The Hill that conversations about the race in the state itself have largely shifted to Sheehy’s military record.
Tester is the only Democratic incumbent running for reelection this cycle in a firmly red state, with the sort-of exception of Sherrod Brown, whose home state of Ohio is a very reddish purple. Brown, however, has lead his challenger Bernie Moreno in most polls of the race since the summer.
The loss of Montana’s Senate seat would force Democrats to beat a GOP incumbent elsewhere to maintain their majority. The party has opportunities to do that in Texas and Florida, where two Democrats are running competitive Senate campaigns, as well as Nebraska, where an independent candidate who has vowed to caucus with neither party is now leading incumbent GOP Senator Deb Fischer in one survey.