The First 100 Days of a Seth Bodnar Presidency: What the Record Suggests

Hero image: Missoula, Montana at sunset from the M trail — Prizrak 2084, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

01 The record and the scenario

This is a scenario analysis, not a prediction that the person will become president and not an endorsement or criticism of the person. This article does not predict that Seth Bodnar will become president. It examines how the positions and the record he has already put on paper might translate into action if he held the office, and it labels the difference between what he has said, what he has done, and what can only be inferred.

Seth Andrew Bodnar was born in Franklin, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and raised by two public school teachers. He graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy in 2001, was selected as both a Rhodes Scholar and a Truman Scholar, and took two master's degrees at Hertford College, Oxford — one in economics and social history, one in comparative social policy.

His campaign's veterans agenda describes the service record in specific terms: he deployed to Iraq in late 2003 with the 101st Airborne Division, commanding a 40-man rifle platoon in Mosul, then completed Special Forces selection and served in the 1st Special Forces Group commanding an A-team, and deployed again to Baghdad in 2008 as Special Assistant to the Commanding General. He is a graduate of Ranger School, the Special Forces Qualification Course, Airborne and Air Assault school, SERE Level-C and the Combat Diver Qualification Course, was awarded the Bronze Star, and was promoted early to major. He left active duty in 2011 and continues to serve in the reserve component; his published biography lists his rank as lieutenant colonel.

After the Army he joined General Electric, where he led businesses serving the global rail industry, and from January 2018 to January 2026 he was the 19th president of the University of Montana. He resigned that post in January 2026 and launched an independent campaign for the U.S. Senate on March 4, 2026.

The race he entered is the first open Senate election in Montana since 1976. Republican incumbent Steve Daines withdrew minutes before the March 5 filing deadline and endorsed Kurt Alme, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana, who filed three minutes before Daines withdrew. Alme was nominated with 76.2 percent of the primary vote. Democrat Alani Bankhead, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, won her primary with 43.7 percent of a five-way field. Libertarian Kyle Austin, a Billings pharmacist and farmer, is also on the ballot, along with write-in candidate Jami Woodman.

A Montana Free Press-Rutgers Eagleton poll of 845 registered voters, conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 7, 2026, put Alme at 38 percent, Bodnar at 30, Bankhead at 16 and Austin at 5, with a margin of error of 4.2 percent. Among the independent voters who make up Montana's largest bloc at 44 percent of the electorate, the poll found Bodnar leading with 38 percent to Alme's 25 and Bankhead's 18.

The central question here is narrow: Bodnar has a documented eight-year executive record running a public university, a 19-year military record, and a three-pillar Senate platform with unusually specific numbers attached. He has no legislative record and has never held elected office. So what would his first 100 days in the White House actually look like — which parts of the platform sit on levers a president holds alone, and which parts need a Congress that his own no-caucus pledge makes harder to assemble?

Two things about the record are worth stating before the analysis. The first is that his campaign is organized around three pillars — making the Montana way of life affordable again, investing in national competitiveness and security, and a reform agenda aimed at the machinery of Washington. The second is his explicit Independent Pledge: he says he will not caucus with either party, and will instead work with independent-minded senators to pull the Senate toward votes on legislation that already has bipartisan support.

02 Day one: what a president could do alone

Bodnar's platform is, by its own construction, mostly legislative. The marquee items he names — restoring the expired ACA tax credits, defending Medicaid expansion, capping insulin at $35 a month for every Montanan, overturning Citizens United, imposing term and age limits, mandating nonpartisan redistricting — are all statutes or constitutional amendments. A president cannot deliver any of them alone, and a scenario analysis that pretended otherwise would be describing something other than the American system.

What a president does hold alone is narrower and mostly administrative. On health care, the two clearest day-one levers are executive-branch rules and enforcement posture. The Medicaid reporting requirements Bodnar says he would fight are administrative rules, which means a president can set about rewriting or rescinding them through notice-and-comment rulemaking without a single new vote on Capitol Hill. The same is true of insurer oversight and pharmacy benefit manager transparency, which run through HHS and CMS rulemaking rather than statute.

On energy and data centers, the federal levers are siting and cost allocation. Bodnar supports the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require state public utility commissions to consider a strategy to make data centers pay their own way instead of passing costs to consumers. That bill is a statute — but the president appoints the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and large-load interconnection and cost-allocation questions sit in live FERC proceedings. A president can push that terrain hard without legislation.

On artificial intelligence, his AI pledge asks for mandatory, independent safety review and certification for major new models before release. There is no statute requiring that today. A president could condition federal procurement and set standards through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and could direct agency use policies, but a pre-release certification mandate on private developers would require legislation and would immediately face a First Amendment and Administrative Procedure Act challenge. That is an inference from how such mandates have fared, not a claim about his intent.

Two items he would find already sitting on his desk are reversals rather than new action. The VA staffing reductions that hit the Montana VA Healthcare System were produced by executive hiring policy, and a president can reverse hiring policy by executive action. And the president's own budget request — including his stated interest in funding the Montana National Guard's cyber capabilities — is unilateral by definition, though Congress appropriates it.

03 Days 2–30: reorienting the executive branch

The strongest executive-branch case in this scenario is health care administration, and it is strongest precisely where it is least dramatic. Bodnar's health agenda names the Medicaid reporting rules and twice-a-year eligibility checks as things that knock eligible people off coverage, and cites Montana's own numbers — 72 percent of enrollees already working and another 4 percent in school — to argue the paperwork is doing harm rather than verification. Rules made by an administration can be unmade by an administration through rulemaking. That is the single cleanest path in the whole platform.

Rural hospital payments are the second. Bodnar's stated position is that Medicare and Medicaid reimburse rural providers below the cost of delivering obstetrics and emergency care, and that the gap is what closes service lines. The instruments here are real but slow: CMS rate-setting, waivers such as the rural emergency hospital designation, and state directed-payment arrangements. A president can move all of them, and none of them shows results inside 100 days.

On immigration, the debate record is more specific than the platform. At a Sept. 20, 2026 forum at the Missoula Public Library he said the country needs strong borders and enforcement of its immigration laws, paired with accountability, and said the enforcement should not come from what he called a masked, untrained, unaccountable paramilitary force. The border-enforcement posture, detention discretion and the composition of enforcement operations are all executive questions. Comprehensive immigration reform is not.

On veteran services, his stated focus is the hiring crisis at the VA. Independent evidence of the problem exists: reports in 2025 described the Montana VA Healthcare System losing probationary staff amid the broader federal reduction, and the VA said publicly it intended to reduce staff by nearly 30,000 by the end of FY2025 through attrition, early retirements and a hiring freeze rather than a large-scale reduction in force. Reversing an executive hiring posture is one of the few items on this list that a president can actually complete quickly.

On antitrust and drug pricing, the levers are enforcement posture and negotiation priorities. Medicare's negotiation authority is statutory, but which drugs get selected and how aggressively the authority is extended to physician-administered drugs is an administration choice. Insurer claim-denial practices and PBM pricing run through CMS oversight and FTC and DOJ enforcement. These produce visible action but not, in 100 days, the structural changes his platform describes.

04 Days 30–60: the first legislative package

High evidence — he names the item, the population and the dollar, and a bill is already moving. Restoring and extending the health insurance affordability tax credits is the clearest example. Bodnar's health agenda says Congress let the ACA tax credits expire at the end of 2025, that many Montanans' premiums rose almost 30 percent in a single year as a result, and that roughly 70,000 to 77,000 Montanans buy coverage on the individual marketplace. This is a defined cliff, a defined population and a defined fix, and it is the item most likely to appear as real text in a first legislative package.

The Ratepayer Protection Act is nearly as concrete. H.R. 9340 passed the House 417 to 3 on Sept. 16, 2026 — a margin that tells you the politics are not the obstacle. It would require state public utility commissions to consider a strategy to make data centers pay their own way rather than shifting costs to households. Bodnar has pledged to fight for it, and a Senate companion is the obvious first ask. It is also the rare item in his platform that already has a bipartisan House vote behind it.

Medicaid expansion protection follows, and here Montana's own history does the work. Bodnar notes the expansion was passed in Helena on a bipartisan basis, renewed permanently with votes from both parties and signed by Governor Gianforte, and covers roughly 76,000 working Montanans. Defending a program with that provenance is a materially easier legislative lift than expanding coverage from scratch.

A $35 monthly insulin cap for every Montanan, not only those on Medicare, is a named number with a named scope. The Medicare-only version already exists; the ask is expansion, which is a statutory amendment rather than a new architecture.

Moderate evidence — the direction is clear, the mechanism is not written. Expanding Medicare's drug-negotiation authority beyond its early rounds and into physician-administered drugs sits here: the authority exists, the expansion is a statutory amendment, and the administration sets how hard it is pushed. Rural hospital reimbursement reform also sits here — he identifies the underpayment precisely, but the fix is a combination of rate-setting, waivers and appropriations rather than one bill. So does the housing package: a $200 million a year federal program that rewards communities for faster permitting and better zoning, opposing tariffs on lumber and steel that raise the price of building materials, and pursuing USDA Rural Development down-payment assistance. The tariff piece is partly unilateral; the rest is not.

Low evidence on mechanism. Three items on his reform list are constitutional amendments: overturning Citizens United, and imposing term and age limits. Amendments require two-thirds of both chambers and three-fourths of the states, which is a different order of task than anything else in the platform. Mandatory nonpartisan redistricting is contested as a federal statute, and it sits in visible tension with his own stated commitment to protect local control of elections.

One further note on the reform list. The platform's primary-system item does carry a mechanism in the Reform Agenda document — nonpartisan open primaries and ranked-choice voting for federal elections — so it is a stated position rather than a slogan. It is still the hardest item on the list to enact federally, because election administration is constitutionally delegated to the states, and the same document's ninth item opposes federalizing it. The tension is inside his own text: he wants federal primary reform and state-run elections at the same time.

Two items on the reform list are less familiar than the headlines and worth naming. The first is a ban on members of Congress and their staffs and senior executive branch appointees using prediction markets, paired with a requirement that members divest individual stocks or move them into blind trusts, real-time public disclosure within 48 hours of any transaction instead of the current 30-day window, and a strengthened Office of Congressional Ethics with full independence and subpoena power. The second is a No Budget No Pay provision that would suspend congressional pay and force the Senate to remain in session during a government shutdown, on the argument that Congress has fully funded the government on time only four times in the last 50 years.

The term-limits item is also more specific than the phrase suggests: three Senate terms and a maximum age of 75 at swearing-in for future senators, representatives and presidents, plus a constitutional amendment establishing 18-year Supreme Court terms with mandatory senior status — reduced caseload and no new majority opinions — for federal judges over 75. And on the revolving door, he proposes a lifetime ban on members and senior executive officials lobbying the agencies or committees they served on, and a lifetime ban on members registering as lobbyists for foreign governments.

05 Days 60–100: where governing meets reality

The arithmetic of the Senate, whatever its composition in January 2027, is the wall this platform runs into. Almost every high-evidence item above is ordinary legislation, which means 60 votes in practice for most of it. The House vote on the Ratepayer Protection Act is evidence that one item can clear that bar; it is not evidence that the rest can.

The courts are the second constraint, and they have gotten harder rather than easier. Rules on AI certification, insurer oversight and PBM transparency would all be litigated, and the end of Chevron deference in 2024 means agencies no longer get the benefit of the doubt on ambiguous statutory authority. A pre-release certification mandate with no statutory hook is the most exposed item in the platform on those grounds.

The third constraint is the one Bodnar built into his own candidacy. He has pledged not to caucus with either party. In the Senate, caucuses are not social clubs — they are how committee seats, floor time and legislative staff are allocated. As of September 2026 the only independent in the U.S. House, Kevin Kiley of California, had spent six months sitting in the Republican conference while saying he would stop, and Senate independents were publicly arguing for breaking the caucus system entirely. That reporting is the best available evidence for how much friction a non-caucusing posture creates. Translated into this scenario, the pledge is not about his own desk; it is about whether a president with no party apparatus can assemble coalitions at all. There is no recent precedent for that, and the honest label is limited evidence.

What that posture does buy is unusual coalition room. Bodnar's endorsement list is the most cross-cutting in the race: former Democratic senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus, former Republican governor Marc Racicot, former Montana Republican Party chair Susan Geise, former Democratic legislator Dorothy Bradley, and a set of labor and veterans organizations. In a legislative fight, that is a genuine asset. It is also not a whip operation.

06 The policy record in detail

Affordability and housing

Bodnar's affordability argument is built on a specific comparison: the average cost of a home in Montana has nearly doubled since 2018 while incomes have risen by a fraction of that. His proposed responses are a federal permitting-reward program he says Congress just created at $200 million a year and funded for only seven years, tax incentives targeted at affordable and workforce housing in rural and small-town communities where he says builders cannot make the math work, opposition to tariffs on lumber, steel and other building materials, and exploring down-payment assistance through USDA Rural Development loans. He also ties the national debt to housing directly, arguing that rising public debt crowds out private borrowing and drives up interest rates.

Health care and reproductive care

The health agenda is the most developed document the campaign has published, and it leads with costs. It cites Gallup for the finding that more Americans named health care as a serious worry than any other issue, and that for the first time since Gallup began tracking, fewer than half of Americans can reliably afford the care and prescriptions they need. For Montana specifically it cites a figure of 43 percent who have skipped or put off medical care because of what it costs — one of the highest rates of any state — and roughly 20 million American adults carrying unpaid medical bills.

On rural care, the numbers he uses are stark: roughly 50 rural hospitals in Montana, nearly two-thirds of which have already cut services, about a third at risk of closing, a quarter of Montanans saying the drive itself has delayed or stopped them from getting care, and close to half saying they have waited too long for an appointment. His proposed fixes are ending what he calls chronic underpayment of rural providers, protecting ambulance and air ambulance access, and recruiting the next generation of rural clinicians through student loan repayment, rural residency slots and recruitment support.

Two premium figures appear in his material and they do not match. The health agenda says premiums rose almost 30 percent in a single year after the ACA tax credits lapsed at the end of 2025; at the Sept. 20 debate he described premiums rising 26 percent year over year. Both are attributed to him, neither is independently reconciled in the published material, and a reader should treat the range as the campaign's own characterization rather than a single verified figure.

On reproductive care his position is stated plainly: he says he will protect the right of Montana women and their doctors to make their own reproductive health care decisions, and on the Dobbs anniversary his campaign issued a statement reaffirming a commitment to freedom and privacy. Planned Parenthood Action Fund has endorsed him.

Education

The education section rests on the eight years he spent running the University of Montana, and it is the one place where he has an executive record rather than a position. He claims a turnaround from a decade of enrollment decline to health, record-high retention and graduation rates, the university's first R1 research classification, nearly doubled research funding, the largest fundraising campaign in its history, a ranking as the top military-friendly university in the nation, and a 20 percent surge in trade-school and certificate enrollments through a program called Accelerate Montana. His campaign also published a detailed accounting of women's advancement into leadership at UM, noting that on his arrival no woman held a non-interim vice president title and one held a deanship, and that by the end three women held vice presidencies, eight sat on his senior executive team and seven of thirteen deans were women.

The K-12 numbers he cites come from state sources, and the state's own data broadly corroborates the shape of the problem: more than 850 licensed teaching positions were open heading into the last school year, and Montana's starting teacher salary of $34,476 ranks last in the nation by his campaign's count. State labor-market publications have put average Montana teacher salaries in the high $50,000s and ranked the state in the mid-30s nationally, which is consistent with a low starting scale. His fixes are federal rural education funding directed at instruction and teacher pay rather than administration, expanded loan forgiveness for teachers committing to high-need rural schools, parity for trade credentials, and rural broadband investment.

Veterans, tribal communities and public lands

Bodnar frames veterans policy around the roughly 86,000 veterans in Montana — one of the highest concentrations per capita in the country — and around VA staffing. The veterans agenda puts numbers on the problem: VA Montana had nearly 9 percent of its workforce cut between late 2024 and December 2025; the VA hired the fewest new employees since 2005; the cuts included three psychologists; and Montana veterans have reported waits of up to six months for a psychiatrist appointment. It cites Montana's veteran suicide rate at 53.9 per 100,000 against a national rate of 35.2, and a national loss of roughly 17 to 18 veterans a day. An independent 2024 letter from then-Senator Tester to the VA had already described Montana as ranking third highest for veteran suicide deaths and called the loss of critical mental health positions unjustifiable, which corroborates the shape of the campaign's claim.

His stated remedies are specific: streamlined VA hiring authority with Montana-specific recruitment incentives, restoration of cut positions, an expanded Community Care Network, mobile VA clinic funding, telehealth built for Montana geography, PACT Act implementation and oversight, treatment-resistant PTSD research, partnership with Montana hospitals such as Billings Clinic to train rural VA physicians, HUD-VASH preservation, and services for women veterans including military sexual trauma and maternity care. He has released his own DD 214 and called for full transparency from his opponents in the race. He also commits to fully funding the Indian Health Service and tribal health systems and to giving tribal nations a real say rather than a courtesy notice in how federal health dollars are spent in Indian Country.

On public lands he invokes the Montana Constitution's guarantee of a clean and healthful environment, describes public lands as common ground for hunting, fishing and recreation regardless of income, and has opposed the Sheep Creek Mine in explicit terms.

Data centers and artificial intelligence

This is the most distinctive part of Bodnar's platform, and it is where state and federal action are visibly converging. In Montana, an interim committee advanced a draft bill on Sept. 9, 2026, by unanimous voice vote, spelling out the Public Service Commission's responsibilities for regulating a utility serving a large load and stating that a cost shift onto residential customers cannot occur. Its sponsor, Senator Daniel Zolnikov, framed it as putting buildout risk on the utility and the large customer rather than on households. The committee chairman noted the draft still needs work and more input before the 2027 Legislature. NorthWestern Energy has said it is in conversation with at least 11 data center developers.

At the federal level, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417 to 3 on Sept. 16, 2026. Bodnar has pledged to fight for it and to tie federal tax policy to ratepayer-protection obligations.

His six-point AI pledge then goes further than the bill does. It commits to opposing any AI data center that raises Montana power bills, to full public disclosure of every data center's real-time water and energy consumption along with higher efficiency standards and closed-loop cooling, to wage support and retraining obligations for companies that displace workers with AI and to Montana labor on Montana projects, to safety standards and accountability for AI products used by children, to mandatory security standards for AI systems connected to critical infrastructure, and to mandatory independent safety review and certification of major new AI models before release.

Political reform and the independent pledge

The third pillar is a straight anti-corruption platform, and it is the longest list in his published material: banning members of Congress from enriching themselves on insider information, full financial transparency for Congress, the executive branch and the Supreme Court, No Budget No Pay, term and age limits, closing the revolving door between Congress and lobbying, overturning Citizens United, ending gerrymandering with mandatory nonpartisan redistricting, fixing the primary system, and protecting local control of elections.

His own campaign has also been the subject of the thing he campaigns against. In August 2026 he issued a statement after reports of additional dark money activity in the race, saying his personal cell phone number had been shared by Republican dark money groups and asking any organization supporting him to stop contacting candidates' family members. A super PAC supporting his candidacy, Montana Freedom PAC, has run television and digital advertising against Bankhead and distributed yard signs calling on her to withdraw. Bodnar said he had not coordinated with the group and had never asked Bankhead to leave the race; Bankhead said he had not asked her directly but held him responsible for the pressure. Montana voters will also consider a dark money ballot initiative in November 2026. That contrast — the reform platform and the super PAC — is part of the record, not a footnote to it.

07 What could not happen alone — and what could

Requires Congress, and would face a filibuster. Restoring the ACA affordability tax credits if they have lapsed; extending the $35 insulin cap to all payers; expanding Medicare drug negotiation into physician-administered drugs; the Ratepayer Protection Act companion; comprehensive immigration reform; rural hospital reimbursement reform as a durable funding fix; a federal nonpartisan redistricting mandate; and, at a different order of difficulty, a constitutional amendment on Citizens United and another on term and age limits.

Unilateral or partly unilateral. Reversing the executive hiring posture that shrank the VA workforce (executive); rewriting the Medicaid reporting and eligibility-check rules (rulemaking); pushing large-load interconnection and cost-allocation rules at FERC (appointments and proceedings); conditioning federal AI procurement and directing agency standards through NIST (procurement and guidance); setting insurer claim-denial and PBM oversight priorities at CMS, FTC and DOJ (enforcement); protecting ambulance and rural provider payments through waivers (administrative); and the president's own budget request, including Montana National Guard cyber funding (a request, then appropriations).

Coalition partners in this scenario. An unusually broad one is on the record: Tester and Baucus from the Democratic side, Racicot and Geise from the Republican side, Bradley from the Democratic legislature, plus the Montana AFL-CIO, the Montana Federation of Public Employees, SEIU 775 Montana, Boilermakers Local 11, VoteVets, Independent Veterans of America, End Citizens United, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Montana Conservation Voters, Forward Montana, WILD Montana Action Fund and the Political Integrity Project, with former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger's Country First among the cross-party endorsements. On paper that is a governing coalition. In practice it is a set of endorsements, not a whip count.

The likeliest conflict is structural rather than ideological. Every lever above runs through institutions — committee chairs, agency career staff, and a Senate organized by caucuses he has said he will not join. There are also internal tensions inside the platform itself: opposing tariffs on building materials while seeking to protect Montana ranchers and manufacturers from trade disruption pulls in two directions, and promising both mandatory nonpartisan redistricting and local control of elections leaves the allocation of authority unresolved in his own text.

08 The 100-day scorecard and what the record tells us

What the record suggests is a presidency whose first 100 days would be sharply split: a real administrative program on health-care rules, rural payments, veterans hiring, energy cost allocation and AI procurement, and almost nothing on the items the campaign talks about most. The tax credits, the insulin cap, the reform list and the constitutional amendments all pass through the Senate, and several of them need supermajorities that no president can conjure.

That asymmetry is the finding, and it is not a criticism. Bodnar has run a campaign whose loudest promises are legislative and whose achievable ones are administrative, and the material he has published shows he understands the difference — his health agenda is organized around rule changes and reimbursement formulas, not slogans.

The distinguishing feature of his platform is not its breadth, which is broad, but its specificity in three places: the Ratepayer Protection Act, where a House vote and a state draft bill already exist; the rural hospital reimbursement gap, which he names in the language of rates and service lines rather than access; and a six-point AI pledge that goes past cost-shifting into pre-release safety certification, a position almost no candidate in either party has put in writing.

Where the record is thinnest is not the reform list, which turns out to be the most detailed document the campaign has published — open primaries and ranked-choice voting, a prediction-market ban, 48-hour trade disclosure, blind trusts, Supreme Court ethics, an 18-year judicial term amendment. The thin place is the one that matters most to a presidency: the no-caucus pledge. There is no documented plan for how a president without a party apparatus assembles 60 votes, and the closest available evidence is a single House independent describing how much friction the posture creates.

One further limit belongs in the open. This article does not know the outcome of the November 2026 election, does not know the final composition of the Senate that would sit in January 2027, and does not assume either. The polling cited here is a snapshot from late August and early September with a 4.2 percent margin of error, and a four-candidate race with an independent at 30 percent is not a result.

What the record does tell us is where the 100 days would be spent: in rulemaking on Medicaid and insurer oversight, in rate proceedings on who pays for data centers, in procurement guidance on AI, and in a Senate where the largest items would wait. For a candidate whose central argument is that he answers to no party, the irony is that the party machinery he has rejected is the machinery that moves legislation. The record shows a president who would be effective administratively and blocked legislatively — and who has said, in writing, that he knows which is which.