Powerhouse Montana Democrat Carol Williams calls on Bankhead to drop out of senate race

Williams' letter calling on Bankhead to step aside characterized her as dishonest about her record and disrespectful to the working poor.

In a text response to a request for comment, Bankhead didn't directly address the concerns laid out in the letter. 

"I have the utmost respect for the legacies of Pat and Carol Williams," Bankhead said. "I have said everything on this topic that needs to be said. What is most important is honoring the democratic process and stopping the suffering of Montanans at the hands of the Epstein class. And I look forward to doing so when we win Nov 3."

Bankhead sat for an interview with NonStop Local where she addressed some questions about her career and inconsistency in remarks made on the campaign trail.

Williams served in the state house, became the first woman to serve as both majority and minority leader in the Montana Senate and founded "Carol's List" to recruit and support progressive, pro-choice women to run for office. She's also the wife of former Congressman Pat Williams, who died in 2025.

Her letter came after Democratic lawmakers expressed a similar concern and called on Bodnar and Bankhead to sit down and figure out a plan to prevent splitting the vote.

Bodnar said he responded that he was interested in having a conversation Bankhead. Bankhead claimed Bodnar never reached out to her.

Bankhead also lost support from the Progressive Vet PAC. The group that spent millions of dollars supporting Bankhead in the primary said they would not continue that support in the general election because they didn't see her as a viable candidate.

Read Williams' full letter here:

Dear Montana Democrats,

For seventy years, in the Legislature, as your nominee for Lt. Governor and beside Pat for 18 years in the U.S. Congress, we fought, and delivered for, the people of this state.

I founded Carol's List to give Montana women a fair shot at leadership.

I have never been afraid of a hard question, and I won't start now. So I will ask the one that matters most in this Senate race: who is Alani Bankhead, and why are we being asked to take her entirely on faith?

I want to be clear about what this is and is not. Supporting women in leadership does not mean waving them through without scrutiny. It means the opposite. The women I have spent my life recruiting earned their place by being tested, by being known, by having a record their neighbors could vouch for.

Alani Bankhead has none of that. In her adopted hometown of Helena, Democrats say they had never heard of her before she filed for the United States Senate.

She rode more than $3 million in outside dark money from a single unknown super PAC into the nomination. That PAC has already walked away. When the money that manufactured a win vanishes the moment it is tested, that is not a fluke. That is a warning.

There is a deeper problem.

Nearly everything we know about Bankhead comes from Bankhead. Her military service, her law-enforcement exploits, her arrest numbers, her book, her coaching business, her Senate run: she is the only source for all of it. That, of course, is not automatically disqualifying.

Plenty of good candidates run on a personal story. But when the story is the entire campaign, the story had better hold up, and hers is already cracking. She has claimed she facilitated the arrest of "hundreds" of child abusers, terrorists and spies across the globe. In a general election against a Republican machine that Swiftboated a decorated war hero, a candidate whose biography inflates under the lightest scrutiny is not a risk we can afford to discover in October. It's also just plain wrong.

And I have not even reached the part that offends me most. Less than a year ago, on her coaching podcast, Bankhead said "So if you're poor right now, it's because you decided you wanted to be poor."

I was born into a teamster family in Butte. My father owned a grocery store and was Butte's beloved Mayor. I know exactly what that sentence does to people who work themselves to the bone and still cannot afford a house in the least affordable state in the country. Poverty is not a choice. It is systemic, it is man-made, and it can be overcome by the actions of human beings, including a United States Senator. Working people, including the working poor, are the backbone of our party. Her rhetoric belongs to Donald Trump. It has no home among Montana Democrats.

People will tell us this is settled, that primaries are final, that we play the hand we're dealt. I have heard that certainty before. For nearly half a century the home run was treated as an accident, until Babe Ruth swung from his heels and outhomered every other team, combined, in the league. What changed was not his biceps, but what he let himself swing for. We are told just as confidently that nothing can be done here. I do not accept that.

Democrats have never been afraid to do hard things. In fact, these past days and months,

Democrats in California, Maine, Nebraska, and Alaska have done real soul searching, and all of us will be better for it.

This is not an ordinary seat and this is not an ordinary moment. One vote in the United State Senate seats or blocks the next Brett Kavanaugh. As this administration works to harden the country toward authoritarianism, as the people of Maine know too well, we cannot gamble on a candidate we do not know, cannot vouch for, whose record we cannot verify, and whose values are unknown.

The Montana Democratic Party has always stood for working people, vulnerable families, civil rights and reproductive freedom. A relentless commitment to these values matter more than any candidate.

So l am asking the leaders of this party, the officials, the donors, the faithful who have carried us through harder fights than this, to encourage Bankhead to drop out of this race.

We need a nominee Montanans can trust, be proud of and who can win. Time is of the essence. Bankhead should step aside.

Sincerely,

Carol Williams