Montana Voters Back Plan to Strip Corporations of Election Spending Power

Montana did it. Roughly 65% of voters approved Initiative 194 on Tuesday — the so-called Montana Plan — a first-in-the-nation statewide push to cut corporate cash out of elections, in a state President Donald Trump won by nearly 20 points in 2024. The measure becomes state law on Jan. 1. It arrives after a record $11.87 billion in political advertising flooded the country this cycle, split about evenly between the two parties, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.

The plan doesn't try to ban political speech, which the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling protects. Instead it strips corporations, trade associations, labor unions and nonprofits — including those headquartered outside Montana — of the legal power to spend money influencing elections in the state. Violators risk losing state-granted corporate privileges such as limited liability until the improperly spent funds are surrendered and other conditions are met. 'Keep your campaign cash out of Montana, or you run the risk of putting your shareholders' personal balance sheets on the line,' said Kal Munis, a Montana State University politics professor.

Tom Moore, a former Federal Election Commission official who helped develop the plan, frames it as a states'-rights play: because corporations get their legal existence from states, states should be able to limit what those corporations do. 'If a single state can successfully deny corporate power over elections, it proves that Citizens United wasn't the final word on democracy, and we will continue battling,' said Moore, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

There's an irony baked into the win. State campaign finance records show Samantha Walton, wife of Walmart heir Lukas Walton, gave $722,300 to groups backing the plan, while LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman contributed $150,000. The campaign's organizing nonprofit, Transparent Election Initiative, is itself a type of dark-money group that generally isn't required to disclose its donors. And the law exempts individuals, political committees, government entities and bona fide news and commentary — meaning Elon Musk, the 2026 cycle's largest known individual donor with at least $474 million in political giving, according to a CNBC analysis, could still spend his own fortune in Montana. His companies could not.

Opponents call the whole thing an unconstitutional end run around Citizens United. 'Why allow a media corporation to speak out, while denying a non-profit association of citizens the right to organize around clean water or lower taxes?' said Brad Smith, who leads the Institute for Free Speech and is a former FEC chairman. 'Billionaires will find loopholes. All this really does is silence Montana's small- and medium-sized businesses.' Michael Kang, a Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor who studies campaign finance, put it bluntly: 'Shifting the prohibition into the corporate code is a distinction without a difference... It seems like a legal sleight of hand.'

The first courtroom test is already underway in Hawaii, where lawmakers enacted a similar law in May; Montana is the first state to embrace the strategy by statewide vote. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sued to block Hawaii's law, Smith's Institute for Free Speech is representing the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii in a separate challenge, and the ACLU has argued in a brief that it violates the First Amendment. Legal and campaign finance experts told CNBC the dispute could climb to a Supreme Court whose 6-3 conservative majority has repeatedly loosened campaign finance rules, most recently in June when the justices struck down limits on political parties' spending in coordination with candidates. Montana has lost this fight before: voters banned corporate campaign spending in 1912 after copper barons bribed lawmakers, and the law stood for a century until the Supreme Court struck it down in 2012 under Citizens United. This time the threat could come from within, since the state's Republican-controlled legislature can amend or repeal the new law — though backers have pledged to take it back to voters in 2028. Similar measures are being explored in more than 30 states.