MTN News hosted a debate on Saturday between Democratic challenger Governor Steve Bullock and Republican incumbent Senator Steve Daines in Montana's 2020 race for the U.S. Senate.
The debate was moderated by a panel featuring MTN Chief Political Reporter Mike Dennison, Jay Kohn (KTVQ Billings Anchor Emeritus), and Jill Valley (KPAX Missoula/Kalispell Anchor and Reporter).
You can watch the debate in the video player above, or on-demand on all MTN streaming apps.
Daines, 58 years old, is running for re-election to a second term. He won election to the U.S. House in 2012 and then ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014, after then-Sen. Max Baucus decided to retire. Prior to his career in the Senate, Daines was a former executive for RightNow Technologies, a software-development firm founded in Bozeman that sold to Oracle Corp. in 2012 for $1.8 billion.
Bullock, 54, a lawyer and former state attorney general, narrowly won the governorship in 2012 and then won re-election in 2016, defeating current U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, who is running as the Republican candidate against Lt. Gov. Mike Cooney in Montana's governor race. As governor, Bullock helped guide the legislative passage of Medicaid expansion, which has brought government-funded health coverage to 90,000 low-income Montanans, and a major campaign-finance bill that brought disclosure to undisclosed “dark money” in elections in Montana.
