Montana's deep-red politics faces fresh challenge — from notorious Oath Keeper's son

In the Lincoln County High School auditorium in Eureka on Wednesday, Montana State Rep. Neil Duram and Dakota Adams introduced themselves to a small audience ahead of a candidate forum led by the school’s civics class.

Duram, the Republican incumbent, talked about his career in law enforcement and his work during the last three legislative sessions.

Adams, his Democratic challenger, introduced himself as a construction worker and rural firefighter, and the oldest of six children whose family moved to Trego — a town of 500 in Lincoln County — “to survive the apocalypse. That did not happen, which is why I’m still here.”

“I think that’s all the relevant biography, unless I’ve forgotten anything,” Adams said to a few chuckles from the audience.

For a low profile Montana State House race in which the incumbent is expected to win by a wide margin, Adams has drawn outsized notoriety based on his life’s story.

The 27-year-old Democrat is the son of Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a former Montana attorney disbarred in 2015 who founded Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia group that Rhodes organized in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Rhodes is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for his role in plotting to forcibly disrupt the transfer of presidential power during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Adams, who uses his mother’s maiden name, grew up in a home ruled by Rhodes’s paranoid, anti-government ideology that kept him from public schools and peer socialization. Living for a time near Kalispell and then an isolated property near Trego, Adams spent a portion of his adolescence taking part in military drills with Oath Keepers members, attending conventions with Rhodes, and transcribing Rhodes’s rambling thoughts into coherent forms to disseminate throughout the organization.

In 2018, Adams, his mother Tasha, and his five siblings left Rhodes after Tasha filed for divorce, and Adams has been unwinding the convictions he grew up with ever since, including writing extensively about his experience with extremist ideology using the online platform Substack in a newsletter called “Deprogram.”

A big shift for Adams, who grew with the foundational worldview that the Democratic Party is part of a grand conspiracy of power involving the Illuminati and other deep-state puppet masters, came shortly after the family separated from Rhodes and the Oath Keepers.

“Everything I’d heard about a welfare state — a bloated machine handing out money to everyone — was mythical, because I couldn’t find any support when our family needed it,” he said. “There was no support for women and families leaving domestic violence. I was only able to avoid having infected wisdom teeth because I was on Medicaid. Things like that helped me become more open as I experienced what life is really like.”

Adams also said what he perceived as the willingness of national Republicans to set aside their values to stay in lock-step with former President Donald Trump helped push him toward the left side of the political spectrum. He considers himself a progressive Democrat, though one “who’s suspicious of any government authority over people’s lives.”

Filling a political void

Adams works full time as a drywall worker while also taking classes at Flathead Valley Community College on the side — slowly working towards a degree in political science.

As someone who got an early start in politics volunteering with his parents for Libertarian-turned-Republican Ron Paul’s presidential run in 2008, Adams gravitated towards campaign work as he found his own worldview. In 2022, he knocked doors in Lincoln County for Democrat Monica Tranel’s race for Montana’s newly formed U.S. House District.

It was while urging his fellow residents to get out and vote that Adams realized one of the fallacies of northwest Montana’s political scene — it was entirely one-sided.

“The ballot was almost totally blank down the Democrat side. Below Congress, we did not exist,” he recalled. “That was dismaying and demoralizing. I think it reinforces the idea that the national Democratic Party has left rural America behind. Montana Democrats and, like, local Democrats are a different story. But it’s incumbent on everybody who’s trying to fix a situation to start working where they are.”

In 2023, Adams decided that if he was going to continue advocating for citizens to be more engaged in democracy, he had to be willing to do his part.

“It would be hypocritical if I was just another guy yelling at other people to do something on Twitter. I told myself that I had to go all in,” he said. “A lot of young people feel very apathetic about the future of the country and that their vote doesn’t matter. But at the local level, the margins are narrower, and every vote really does have an effect in a way that it doesn’t in a national race.”

Adams, often sporting a leather jacket, dark eye shadow and a skull ring, said his reception as a candidate has been better than he expected.

“There’s been a little bit of door slamming, but less than expected. It’s struck me how often a conversation starts with people saying they’re a ‘down-the-ballot Trump-voting person,’ but because I’m there to talk about Montana issues, not national issues, we can actually talk,” Adams said. “I’m here to campaign for me, I’m here to apply for a job. And honestly, I’ve had more people say they’re completely politically uninvolved than tell me they’d never vote Democrat for anything.”

Red, red and red

The Lincoln County Democrats acknowledge how difficult it is to recruit candidates to run in the deep red districts — 74% of the county’s vote went to former President Trump in 2020.

“When I first moved to Montana 22 years ago, it seemed like it was a pretty balanced, bipartisan state,” said Lincoln County Democrats treasurer Lannie Fehlberg. “But Lincoln County is such a red county. Just six years ago, there just didn’t seem to be any Democratic organization in Eureka.”

Two years ago, Fehlberg started hosting dinner parties with other Democrats around Eureka and even held one event with Tranel during her 2022 campaign. Eventually the local group folded into the county Democratic organization but still acutely felt the lack of presence during the 2022 election.

“It was very discouraging; we didn’t have a Democrat for County Commission and we didn’t have anybody for state rep in either district,” she said. “But this year, we managed to recruit candidates for all three local offices. In one cycle we went from none to three.”

It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing, however. Doug Davies, the Democratic candidate for the Lincoln County Commission, dropped out of the race earlier this month citing health issues, but endorsed independent candidate Brian Phillips. Elizabeth Story, the Democratic candidate for House District 2, also dropped out but was replaced by Brad Simonis.

The H.D. 1 race was the easiest for the Lincoln County Democrats to engage in — Adams reached out to them when he decided to throw his name on the ballot.

“We didn’t need to recruit him,” Fehlberg said. “He told us he’d noticed some of his younger siblings didn’t have any interest in government or politics and felt like the best way to get them motivated was to step up and run himself. [Our organization is] mostly retired folks, and it’s hard to recruit young people, but Dakota is articulate, very intelligent and very motivated. I have utmost respect for him for not being afraid to just be himself, and that makes him more relatable to the younger generation.”

Beating the odds

Montana House District 1 covers northern Lincoln County — formerly House District 2 before last year’s redistricting process. Duram, a three-term incumbent representing the area, is running to keep his spot in the legislature.

Duram is a former Montana Highway Patrol officer who currently serves as the Eureka police chief. As a legislator, he has primarily focused on public safety legislation, including carrying a bill requiring extended stop signs on school buses in the 2021 session.

He told the Daily Montanan he encourages having an opponent in the race to give voters a choice, but primarily views his campaign as having to sell himself as the best person for the job.

“My outlook in life is that at the end of the day I’m running against myself. If we were playing basketball, I wouldn’t want to beat you down, I’d want to try to make as many points as possible. If we were running a race, I wouldn’t try to slow you down, I’d try to run as fast as I can,” Duram said. “Ultimately if a voter picks me, great. If they pick the other person, great. Both representatives would attempt to bring policy changes that affect different people differently.”

During the Oct. 16 candidate forum, high school students posed a dozen questions to both candidates covering myriad topics including abortion rights, property taxes and the local logging industry.

Duram said the separation of powers is the biggest issue facing the state, citing many decisions made by Montana judges that struck down laws passed by the legislature in the last session.

By contrast, Adams said he was most concerned about the inability of working families to afford housing in Montana, calling it a “chokepoint that is strangling the economic growth in the whole state.”

Adams readily acknowledges that running against any incumbent — much less a popular Republican in a deep-red district — is an uphill battle. Duram has run unopposed twice and won by 60 percentage points in his 2020 race against Lori Ramesz. Adams has also split his ticket and voted for Duram in previous elections.

While Fehlberg said she’d be happy seeing Dakota pull in 20% of the vote, Adams has a higher bar.

“I would like to beat the turnout record for a Democrat,” said Dakota, noting that in 2016, Democrat Steve Bullock earned 35% of Lincoln County’s vote during his successful gubernatorial reelection.

But his primary goal is to galvanize younger voters into showing up to the polls by giving them a reason to care and a person to vote for.

“You can get a very concentrated, reliable target audience that always turns out for voting out of fear of the opponent winning, but most people are exhausted by that,” he said. “It’s a mindset I grew up in, and I was exhausted by it.”

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