One year ago, Becky Beard, then a state representative, had just been tapped by county commissioners to fill the unexpectedly vacated seat for Senate District 40 in the upcoming legislature. Jeremy Mygland, meanwhile, had recently launched a long-shot campaign to challenge Jon Tester for the U.S. Senate.
And a year ago, Montana’s Senate District 38 was an odd kludge of Jefferson County and half of Butte, represented since 2017 by Democrat Edie McClafferty, a school teacher from the “Mining City.”
When the 2024 election cycle begins on Jan. 11 with the opening of the window for candidate filings, all of that will change.
SD 38 will be transformed into a comparatively immense territory encompassing Jefferson, Powell and Granite counties, the result of a decennial shuffling produced, after much partisan wrangling, by the Districting and Apportioning Commission with input from the 2023 Legislature.
Based on historical voting data, the new district will be reliably Republican — a stark change from the 2020 election, when McClafferty defeated her GOP opponent Jim Buterbaugh by just 57 votes.
That’s one reason, perhaps, that even before the race officially opens, it already has attracted two Republican candidates in Beard and Mygland. No Democrats have yet signaled their intention to contest the seat.
Both Beard and Mygland are native Montanans, and both claim roots in the state going back five generations, Beard in the Missouri Breaks area and Mygland in Hill County. Both say their families instilled in them an appreciation for self-reliance and the value of hard work.
“What shaped my childhood was my grandmother,” says Beard, 63. “She was a proud woman who would never knowingly take help monetarily. It was a pride thing. Then when we moved to Helena, I got my first job as a waitress. So I’ve worked one, two or three jobs since 1973.” Beard currently owns Beard Environmental and Technical Assistance LLC, a consulting firm in Elliston, with her husband Alden Beard, a civil engineer.
Mygland, 45, grew up on a farm outside Hingham. “You go to the farm,” he says, “and you work until the work gets done. You don’t quit halfway through.” He and his wife Alicia own Myg, Inc., a residential home builder in East Helena, as well as a lumber yard in Deer Lodge. He says they started the construction company after trying to buy a home for their own family. “What we saw was horrid. It was really poor quality.” The couple started building expensive custom homes, then decided they could “put that same thinking into affordable housing.”
Mygland hasn’t held political office and says, “I have zero interest in politics.” He says his runs for U.S. Senate, which he abandoned in October, and now for the State Senate were seeded by what he sees as government overreach during the COVID pandemic. “I really felt it a personal attack on small businesses,” he says. “They got crushed, and a lot of people are still recovering.”
He joined two of his company’s trucks on the “Freedom Convoy” in January, 2022, traveling to Washington, D.C., to protest mask and vaccine mandates. “And when I got back, they said, we want to do this at the state capital. I wanted to be the first to set the example. Within two weeks, I held the state capital rally.” About 200 people joined in, according to a report at the time from the Helena Independent Record. The paper’s account quotes Mygland speaking:
“For two years now I have watched as businesses have failed, federal spending has went off the rails causing massive inflation, families not have the ability to be with their loved ones in their greatest times of need, travel restrictions barring people from free travel, front-line workers (losing their) way of living and our military being dismantled for their religious beliefs.”
Beard was first elected a representative for House District 80 in 2017. She says she is driven by belief in the free market system and the need for accountability, but also by the imperative of standing up for working class people — a priority, she says, for her conservative Catholic forebears.
As a senator in the 2023 Legislature, she sponsored Senate Bill (SB) 159 — her “nearest and dearest” bill, she says — in response to a request from a constituent who found his property was being targeted for use as a connectivity trail. The bill, which was signed into law, prohibits the state from exercising eminent domain for certain recreational purposes, including connecting trails or paths.
Beard also sponsored SB 296, which was vetoed by Governor Greg Gianforte. The bill, she says, addressed a failure in the Medicaid system that prevented rate increases for assisted living providers from keeping up with costs — something she discovered when investigating care options for her mother. As a result, she said, several hundred vulnerable citizens were “falling through the cracks,” being shut out of care.
Mygland says he has four priorities that would shape his State Senate bid. He wants to reduce property taxes – ideally, he says, with legislation like California’s Proposition 13, passed in 1978, that limited real estate assessment increases. He supports a Convention of States, favoring an amendment to the 17th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to allow state senates to recall their U.S. senators, to “bring accountability to our representatives.” He supports an expansion of school choice; and he would work, he says, to improve election integrity, barring most mail-in balloting and ballot harvesting.
Beard said she expects to pursue more tax reform as a member of the Senate tax committee – notably, aiming to clarify the language around the state’s 95 mill school equalization tax that has become the target of protest and multiple lawsuits. She said she will “continue voting against spending increases” and work to reduce the volume of Montana statutes.
“I’m not done,” Beard says. “I’m just getting up to speed, just learning at every turn.”
