Can Montana’s most popular Republican microtarget her way to Congress?

Only one politician can claim to have shared a Montana ballot with Donald Trump and received more votes — twice — and that’s the state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen.

How the Helena native generated such dominant support is a topic of some curiosity in political circles.

Jacobsen isn’t known for traditional campaign strategies or public appearances. Her two most serious contenders in the Republican primary for Montana’s Western U.S. House District — Aaron Flint and Al Olszewski — told Montana Free Press they don’t see much of Jacobsen as they traverse the 18 counties that comprise the district, which runs from Bozeman to the Canadian border along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. Jacobsen lives in Helena, which belongs to the Eastern Congressional District. Candidates are not required to reside in the district they seek to represent.

Jacobsen, whose interactions with the press are few, first scheduled and then canceled an interview for this article, and didn’t respond to additional invitations to participate in MTFP coverage of the Western District primary, including a questionnaire offering each candidate the opportunity to respond to a common set of questions in their own words, unedited. As secretary of state, she also continues to draw scrutiny from lawmakers for declining to appear before legislative committees tasked with overseeing her office.

“We would have appreciated that your boss, the Secretary, would have come and visited us. You can pass that on,” Legislative Audit Committee Chair Jerry Schillinger told a Jacobsen employee on April 10 after an afternoon of tough questions about voter rolls and publicly funded mailers prominently featuring Jacobsen.

But despite her inaccessibility, the advice of those who have worked with or run against Jacobsen is to not count her out.

“Part of the issue with the party right now is that when the kingmakers of the Republican Party are all men, we have a problem,” said former Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton. Stapleton doesn’t think Jacobsen, his former chief deputy, would have received much consideration from party leadership that looks to men first, and whose preferences set the tone for party-sponsored events.

“If the kingmakers have already decided, then in that group of a few hundred people who go to these things, it may not be in her best interest to do that. She knows who her people are — the soccer moms and the country club men and the conservatives, they support her. We’ve got great candidates, no doubt about it. Dr. Al, he’s a thinker. Aaron Flint, he’s a talker. But Christy Jacobson is a doer, and we need more doers.”

“I wouldn’t bet against her,” said Scott Sales, one of five men Jacobsen defeated when she first ran for secretary of state in 2020. Sales said he wasn’t especially impressed with Jacobsen at the start of that 2020 Republican primary. At candidate events, he said, Jacobsen’s responses weren’t particularly effective. But then the pandemic hit and the Lincoln-Reagan Dinners that are the backbone of the Republican primary circuit were canceled.

“When COVID hit in the first part, or middle of March, and all the Lincoln-Reagan Dinners, and all the community stuff that I had set up, it all went away, which was perfect for her, because she didn’t have to go out and meet the public,” Sales said.

“Everybody was at home watching Fox News, the Republican primary voters were wondering what the hell’s going on, and here’s this woman, Christi Jacobsen. She has a nice smile, and she’s jogging, and she’s saying that she’s in love with Trump. And you know, it just worked out. The fact that she had bought television ads on cable TV on Fox News just worked out to be the perfect storm, and she beat me by 3 percentage points.”

Jacobsen captured 29% of the primary vote in the 6-candidate race and went on to win easily in the 2020 general election, taking over as secretary of state from Stapleton, who served a single four-year term. Her 352,939 vote count in the 2020 general election was higher than any other candidate on the ballot that year — a record she repeated in 2024 when she was reelected with 364,319 votes.

She achieved those wins with fairly nontraditional campaigning. Her biggest expenses in the 2024 election were to hire the services of McShane LLC, a data-driven advertising and consulting firm known for microtargeting voter outreach based on information gathered from purchasing habits, web browsing and other data gathered through social media records, public voter files and machine learning. Campaign finance reports show that more than 98% of the roughly $250,000 Jacobsen spent in the 2024 general election went to McShane, primarily for “voice mails, text messages, robocalls and mailers.”

McShane LLC drew national scrutiny after its then vice president tried to recruit members of the Proud Boys to contest Nevada election results in the days immediately following Nov. 4, 2020, the night Trump lost the state to Joe Biden. Firm owner Rory McShane has said that the vice president, Woodrow Johnston, was acting on his own.

In her current campaign’s plus column, Jacobsen is the only candidate (of the four Republicans, four Democrats, one Libertarian and one independent) in the Western District House race ever to have won a statewide election. She also has some ability to self-fund her campaign.

In 2020, Jacobsen loaned her campaign roughly $100,000, a debt she forgave after winning the race, according to state campaign finance reports. There were no personal loans in 2024, when her list of contributors was more substantial. Jacobsen has so far loaned her current campaign $115,000.

Being the only U.S. House candidate ever elected to statewide office means Jacobsen is also the only candidate in the race with a statewide political record. In January, the Legislative Audit Division reported that 2023 financial records for the Office of the Secretary of State couldn’t be trusted, and that 2024’s records were only marginally better. Legislative auditors concluded that misapplied policies and weak financial controls contributed to the inaccuracy of the secretary of state’s financial records. Jacobsen concurred with most of the audit’s findings and agreed to follow the financial practices recommended by auditors.

Jacobsen also faces scrutiny from the Interim State Administration and Veterans Affairs Committee and the Legislative Audit Committee for the cost and funding source of 467,000 postcards featuring Jacobsen and President Donald Trump that Jacobsen’s office mailed to voters around the start of the year. For months, secretary of state staff wouldn’t explain when asked by a bipartisan group of legislators how the mailers had been paid for. In March, Jacobsen’s office indicated that federal grant money from the Help America Vote Act covered the roughly $197,000 expense.

The Legislative Audit Division is now investigating whether those federal funds were used appropriately.

Frustrations with Jacobsen’s communication about the issue boiled over March 10, when the Interim SAVA Committee received a report from Jacobsen’s office that didn’t address the committee’s repeated questions about the cost of the mailers.

“I think at least four times last meeting I asked for a source of the funding and the quantity of funding to pay for the postcard mailer, and that is not in this document,” Rep. Kelly Kortum, D-Bozeman, said at the committee’s meeting in March. “And since then, we have learned more about doings in the SOS office, including previously unreported knowledge that our voter data have been sent to the feds at least once. We are the oversight committee for the secretary of state, and we hadn’t heard about that despite it happening for the last year. Why is that? Omitting something that important seems very mysterious, given what our relationship is supposed to be with an executive branch office.”

Communications between Jacobsen and the U.S. Department of Justice show the secretary of state eager to work with President Trump following his March 2025 executive order calling for the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to work with secretaries of state on voter citizenship verification, mail ballot deadlines, and voter roll maintenance for the stated purpose of preventing non-citizens from voting — which state law already prohibits.

One April 2025 letter from Jacobsen to the U.S. Department of Justice reads:

Dear Attorney General Bondi,

President Trump gave me his Complete and Total ENDORSEMENT because he knew that I, like him, put America FIRST. The President’s RESTORING TRUST IN AMERICAN ELECTIONS Executive Order specifically Section 5 (a), requires me to partner with you, an esteemed officer of President Trump, to make our country stronger.

When there is voter fraud — lock them up! The Biden administration did not even acknowledge our concerns about election crimes. I’m proud to·work together to protect our country.

I look forward to working to make these agreements a reality. Montana wants to be the First to be American First. God Bless, Christi Jacobsen.

Stapleton said Jacobsen has been a good secretary of state, crediting her for positive changes to the office during his tenure as well, including a reduction in leased space used by the office before Stapleton arrived.

And Interim SAVA Chair Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, offered measured approval of Jacobsen’s performance in office, though Manzella made it clear she supports Olszewski.

“She has a very open, gregarious personality that invites discussion and communication,” Manzella said. “She’s done a really good job in the office, I think, with the business aspects, creating customer service atmosphere and reworking websites to make them more user-friendly.”

A general election win for Jacobsen would end her time as secretary of state two years early. If she remains in the position, she will be term-limited out of the office at the end of 2028. Jacobsen doesn’t have to leave her elected position as secretary of state to campaign for U.S. House.

Jacobsen’s campaign website doesn’t outline a platform. It does say that she “is running for Congress to take Montana’s values and proven leadership to Washington, D.C.”

Jacobsen’s campaign ads also suggest that as a member of Congress she would support Trump’s efforts to exert federal control over elections. Several states are currently suing the Trump administration for attempting to exert control over mail elections.

“She stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump, securing our elections and cleaning up Montana’s voter rolls. Now she’s ready to take that fight to Washington and take on the establishment Republicans again,” one Jacobsen ad says. As the narration plays, Jacobsen jogs, smiles, chops wood and expresses devotion to Donald Trump — the very things that Sales credits with delivering Jacobsen’s first political win in 2020.