By Jen Clancey DIGITAL PRODUCER
On July 10, 2023, Democrat Monica Tranel announced that she would run for Montana’s first congressional district, which represents Big Sky, Bozeman and western Montana to the northern border. Tranel will be facing Republican and current Rep. Ryan Zinke again after a close 2022 election that was determined by a 3% margin. Tranel grew up in eastern Montana and currently lives in Missoula with her family. She graduated from Gonzaga University and studied law at Rutgers University and after completing law school, she returned to Montana where she still practices law today.
Outside of her legal career, Tranel competed in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics in rowing. She also won Gold at the World Rowing Championships with the U.S. National Women’s Rowing Team in 1994.
Explore Big Sky spoke with Tranel over the phone and learned more about what Montana means to her and what issues press the state today.
Explore Big Sky: We’ll start with what inspired you to run for a House of Representatives seat.
Monica Tranel: Last cycle, we came to 3%, which was a very close margin, and we had no national party support and contracts or anything. [Ryan Zinke] was funded by the Republican National Party and a lot of corporate interests. My money came from Montana—80% of my funding cycle came from Montana compared to, I think, less than 10% of [Zinke’s funding] was from Montana.
So we came out of a competitive primary, went into the general [election] and came very, very close to climbing a tall mountain. The work wasn’t finished. And we’re coming back to finish the job and have a real person from Montana, representing Montana, instead of having someone from Santa Barbara representing the corporate interests that are funding his campaign. I’ll be that voice.
EBS: Great. What do you think is special about Montana, since we’re on that topic?
MT: Everything. I mean, it’s my home. I don’t have another one. I have one home here in Montana, I spent my entire professional career here, I’ve raised my kids here…I work, play and live here. So for me, the community’s special, the geography is quite special—the outdoor, natural world is special.
Anybody who has been spending time here understands, seeing the northern lights in the sky is incredible, and all of the things that you can do and just get so deeply connected to nature and then to each other as well. I mean, our communities are really an incredible place to raise kids [and] grow up. And I got that growing up here. I have given that to my kids. And I think there’s really no better gift that you could give someone than to raise them in Montana.
EBS: I watched your concession speech from 2022. And I will say, it was really moving to watch. I was wondering if you could tell me more about how you felt at that moment. And then later on, what you learned from that race.
MT: I think I learned that Montanans really are eager for someone to be a champion for us, the people of Montana. And I felt energized by the people who were supporting me who were donating to my campaign, who wanted someone who looks like us—lives here and works here and understands that—to be our voice and our advocate.
I felt like we were closing in, we were gaining momentum, and we simply ran out of time. I think we would have won that race if we had another two weeks. And so I never called it a concession speech, I wanted to thank the people who had been with me along the journey, and call out the corporate donations that have funded Ryan Zinke. He has lined his pockets from being a politician. And that is wrong. That’s against everything that I believe in… that’s really against the fundamental values of representative democracy.
I think there is a place for regular people to represent us and I think people are hungry for that. And I spent last cycle investing in introducing myself to the voters and now I want to build on that, build on the trust that I’ve worked to establish and go one step further and cross the finish line in first place.
EBS: What would you say surprised you the most about when you were running for that race and gaining more support? Was there any element of surprise or moment where you saw a shift in what you were expecting?
MT: People are really tired of division and the fighting, the othering. I think people want to come together and have some common ground and to find solutions and to build the middle class, to support our public schools, to make sure that, you know, our football teams have enough people on them and we don’t have to combine teams from a 50-mile radius.
It was interesting to me that there is a real yearning for connection for community and for fairness. And I don’t know that I was surprised by that. I think I sensed that it would be there… But I think the level of that desire for connection and to be proud of our communities…That sense of yearning for connection, the depth of it, I would say it was revealing, maybe not surprising, but it was certainly part of the reason that I wanted to run again, because I think that’s real. I can be a bridge in this moment.
EBS: So moving on to more current things. What are some of the major issues facing Montana today, in your view?
MT: I’ve been meeting with commissioners and holding roundtables and listening sessions, I’m doing my listening tour and what I’m hearing from the people of Montana [the issues are] housing, high prices and… a desire to have government work for us.
So, housing is certainly the big issue right now, and the high cost of everything. Property taxes have gone up, utility rates are going up, everything costs more. It’s crazy now thinking about how much you pay for milk and eggs. I mean, my gosh, it’s really hard to try to carve out a living. Teachers want to live close to where they work and that’s becoming harder and harder. The difference between the rich and people who are just trying to get through the day—it has gotten so extreme, and I think we want to grow the middle class and have pride in our communities. That’s what I’m hearing.
EBS: And when it comes to housing affordability, with Explore Big Sky, we’re based in Big Sky and that is a common thread in the news in the community about housing affordability. How do you plan to support affordable housing in Montana?
MT: Well really explicitly Madison and Gallatin County [are] straddling that line and [with Big Sky] being unincorporated. So in some ways, what you’re facing is a kind of distillation and amplification of the issues facing western Montana and Montana on a broader basis…The answers will come from communities like yours, where you have to figure out how do we keep our labor pool in the town where they’re working so that they don’t have to drive this dangerous road every day. Whatever the short term band-aids are, they aren’t working.
So I think that tax reform definitely has to happen. Corporations are effectively paying a tax rate of zero. We need to make sure that everyone’s paying their fair share.
And looking at things like removing mortgage deduction for second homes is a possible solution. Releasing federal funds for immediate use in low-income housing is another option. Some of that money is sitting there and bottlenecked at the state. So making sure that funding is being pushed out the door, and then the infrastructure pieces of it as well like sewer, water, all of those pieces contribute to housing…So looking at all of the…pieces and addressing what you can for each community—which might look different in Whitefish or Big Sky than it does in Kalispell or Philipsburg. It’s maybe not a one-size-fits-all solution, but I think it’s finding the appropriate tools and making them available to the community so they’re able to address it in a way that is gonna be right for that community.
EBS: Yeah, thank you for answering that question and talking a little bit more specifically about Gallatin Valley and Gallatin County. Because that’s definitely something that means a lot to our readers.
MT: Well, I will contrast that with Ryan Zinke. [Zinke] has proposed 50-year mortgages which obviously [is in the interest of] corporate donors and banks, and out-of-state financial interests, but that just extends the time that you’re paying interest.
It harms renters, it makes it so you’ll never own your home. You won’t build equity, you won’t be able to move. There’s no upside to that. I mean, we buy our homes with the hope of someday owning them. And now people aren’t even talking about being able to buy a house, they’re talking about just being able to find a place that they can rent that isn’t thousands of dollars a month. So we need to move in the opposite direction [and make] sure that people have houses that they can get into.
Other things that are interesting to me that I’d like to explore are [supporting] teachers… ideas have been kicked around like a cost of living stipend, so if you graduate as a teacher, and then you teach in your community there will be some sort of housing stipend or some way to ease that expense. I think that’s really a back-end solution and not addressing the core problem of the high cost. But to the extent that that would be a short-term way to alleviate some of the immediate need—I’d certainly be willing to have those conversations and entertain community solutions that will work for our communities.
EBS: I was wondering if you wanted to add anything to the questions that I’ve asked.
MT: Well, I think the [Gallatin] Valley and… the canyon… That corridor is really a special place. I’ve spent a lot of time going through there. We used to vacation in Yellowstone National Park when I was growing up because we didn’t have very much money and we had a big family and it was really accessible for us. So… [these are] the places that we have in our backyard that form us in really powerful ways.
Big Sky is an incredible area and there’s so much there that I want to work with the people who are really invested in Big Sky to make it the kind of community where we can have a strong middle class, where we can have working people who can afford to live there, where it isn’t off-limits to people like me who grew up in eastern Montana with… a lot of love for home.
EBS: Those are all the questions that I have. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the current news in the House these days.
MT: I would happily tell you about that. I’m a lawyer, again practicing here I had a client who was a rodeo clown. And that work as a clown, as a rodeo clown is strategic and dangerous. And they are smart and… very talented in what they do. So do not call what’s happening right now in the House of Representatives, don’t call them clowns. They’re not worthy of that name. And what they’re doing is anarchy. They are destroying the country.
This is what the large corporate interests like the Koch brothers wanted. They want anarchy. They don’t want the government to function. And that is absolutely wrong…So Ryan Zinke just voted for increasing our debt… every vote he’s taking is against Montana right now. Watch it, follow it, and then vote for Montana and vote for me.
EBS: I guess there’s one more question just [based] off of that. If or when you get the seat, what would be your leadership style? What would be your style in talking [things] over with other representatives?
MT: I will govern the same way that I’m campaigning, which is to start out by listening.
