American Prospect | Can States Stop the Corporate Domination of our Politics?

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Excerpt:

THE MONTANA PLAN BEGAN WITH A CONVERSATION

between Moore and Jeff Mangan on a Friday evening in the fall of 2024. “Tom reached out and said he had this white paper that he’d been working on that might be able to address some of the issues that we have with Citizens United,” Mangan said in an interview. “We both are always looking for a way to combat dark money in elections, and fix what we believe is a broken system.”

He reached out to Moore immediately after reading the white paper.

“I just called him up that night and said, ‘We’re doing this in Montana; I’m starting tomorrow,’” Mangan told the Prospect. “I started laying the groundwork that next day.”

When they first met, Mangan was early into his six-year term as Montana’s 12th commissioner of political practices. It was 2017. At the time, Moore served as counsel and chief of staff for FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. “I met Ellen at a conference, and then subsequently met Tom,” said Mangan. The three of them have “remained friends” ever since.

In April 2025, Mangan formally established the Transparent Election Initiative (TEI), a 501(c)(4) organization focused on passing the Montana Plan and supporting similar state-based reform efforts around the country. TEI has spent the past two years engaging people around the state to support the Montana Plan.

“I started traveling across the state of Montana … asking people to come talk to me about campaign finance,” he said. “I did a little presentation on Montana’s history with corruption and campaign finance, and why this state would be a perfect state to launch a nationwide effort to get this done.”

As the plan gained traction, interest in it expanded beyond the state’s own borders.

Can the States Stop the Corporate Domination of Our Politics?

States giveth corporations the right to exist, so the states can taketh away their political spending power—or at least, Hawaii and Montana are trying.