Early in her career, Alani Bankhead struggled to see herself as a natural fit for the rooms she kept ending up in.
“When I was younger, I struggled with imposter syndrome a lot,” she said. “I am small, female, brown, so not what you would expect in those high-powered positions. And it took me at least 10 years to figure out that those were my superpower.”
As a hand-picked bodyguard at the Pentagon, she found that her non-threatening appearance put potential threats at ease, reducing confrontations. “Nobody expected me to be the bodyguard,” she said. “So my team actually had the least number of use-of-force incidents.”
Then her boss handed her, the only female agent, the lead on a child exploitation case in Japan.
“I’m like, me? This guy’s not gonna talk to me. Give it to one of the guys.” Her boss refused, so Bankhead went into the interview room and got the confession. “When I realized that I could be a tool to protect kids, I was hooked after that.”
In January, the 43-year-old Helena resident entered the Democratic primary for Montana’s U.S. Senate seat, the fourth candidate to join a field vying to challenge Republican incumbent Sen. Steve Daines in November.
She brings more than two decades of Air Force service, a history of stopping crimes against children and a highly successful colleague, Lulu, her retired electronics detection K-9. She is confident the same qualities that made her an unlikely fit for security work are exactly what Montana needs in Washington.
A third-generation military kid, Bankhead grew up moving around: Panama to Puerto Rico, West Point to U.K. boarding school to studying criminal justice and Latin America at Penn State University and joining the Air Force. She started as a personnel officer before moving into special agent work – the Air Force does a great deal of counterintelligence, investigations and protection – and landing some unusual assignments, such as running terrorist informants in Iraq.
In 2011, she was put in charge of protecting the Air Force’s most secret technologies from foreign adversaries, overseeing investigations and operations for 220 global counterintelligence units. Her colleagues saw it as a dead end.
“People were like, who did you piss off?” she recalled. “What my parents taught me is, wherever you are, you just do the best you can. So I quit moping and I got to work.”
By the time she left in 2013, the team had grown from four analysts to ten.
Her child exploitation work, which began with that confession in Japan, shaped her career. She brought the Air Force’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) mission to Japan around 2009, when possession of child pornography remained legal there.
She spent a year as investigations director for the International Justice Mission in Latin America, a global nonprofit that investigates slavery, child sexual assault, the commercial exploitation of children and other human rights abuses. From 2018 to 2021 she served as Alternate Commander of the Hawai’i ICAC Task Force, covering Hawai’i, American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).
Her operation resulted in nearly 100 arrests, more than 35 live child victims identified and a 96% conviction rate, according to Bankhead. The work required building coalitions across agencies that didn’t always want to cooperate.
“Everywhere I go, the pattern is the same,” she said. “You have an idea, it’s a perfect concept, it’s unproven, and there’s always ego that gets involved. In Hawai’i, we had some pretty major players in state law enforcement that opposed us, tried to sabotage us. But the first arrest we got was a police officer, and after that, everybody was on board.”
These days she is rarely without Lulu, who is trained to detect a flame retardant chemical compound used to protect memory chips in electronic devices, which may hold child abuse material. Years ago, Lulu led Bankhead to a cell phone an inmate had thrown into dense forest outside a Hawai’i correctional facility six weeks prior. Together they did a TEDx talk on how dogs can help protect children from online exploitation.
She and her husband moved to Montana about four years ago, after he retired from the Air Force. The couple is raising a 17-year-old, Bankhead’s stepdaughter Olivia, whom she describes as “way smarter than her parents.”
Bankhead herself retired from the Air Force Reserves a few weeks after launching her candidacy. Asked why she jumped straight to a Senate race rather than starting locally, she pointed out that she knows Washington, not Montana’s legislative history.
“There are people that I worked with 15, 20 years ago that are now at very senior levels of government,” she said. “They’re all messaging me on the side like, ‘Hurry up and get here so we can get to work.’ These are people I would trust my life with.”
She describes herself as a moderate and an “independent Democrat,” and says she is not accepting special interest or dark money donations.
Her primary opponents are Reilly Neill, a former state lawmaker from Livingston; Michael Black Wolf, preservation officer and community leader from the Fort Belknap Indian Community; Michael Hummert, a 2024 U.S. Senate candidate from Helena; and Kate McLaughlin of Kalispell.
On the Republican side, Daines, who is seeking a third six-year term, faces a primary challenge from Charles Walking Child of Helena. The Cook Political Report, a national political analysis outlet, rates Daines’ seat as safe for Republicans. Bankhead is unbothered.
“How many billions of dollars have been spent on pundits making assessments on elections, and how does that usually work for them?” she said. “I have a history of people telling me that it’s impossible, and then we do it anyway.”
Bankhead’s recent campaign kickoff event, held in February at Helena’s Ten Mile Creek Brewery, drew more than 40 attendees.
“There were people from every political walk of life: Republicans, MAGA, libertarians,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘This is Montana.’ It’s just, who’s the person who we think is going to best support the life we’re trying to create, regardless of political affiliation?”
The issues she is hearing about most on the campaign trail – access to healthcare, mental health resources, education funding, affordability – are likely to resonate deeply across Jefferson County and in East Helena.
On healthcare, Bankhead says hearing about people forgoing care they cannot afford and veterans showing up at food banks has sharpened her thinking. Healthcare access, she says, is inseparable from mental health, and her perspective on the latter is shaped by years of investigating its downstream consequences.
Montana consistently ranks among the top states for excessive drinking, and suicide rates among ranchers and veterans remain above the national average. Bankhead sees both as symptoms of the rural mental health access gap. She wants to see teams of mental health professionals deployed to rural areas through federal contracts, with built-in feedback on what works.
“I think the government focuses their resources on the cities, which isn’t wrong, but rural communities get left out,” she said. “Just showing up is a big deal.”
She sees the same underfunding in schools, with potentially greater impact. When Basin’s 130-year-old school entered non-operational status last year, residents feared losing far more than a building. Similarly, East Helena voted to raise property taxes to build a high school from scratch, and the school has emerged as a source of local pride. In Boulder, Jefferson High regularly pursues state grants to push students opportunities further, recently securing funding for everything from advanced coursework to theater upgrades.
“Education is the cornerstone of a strong democracy,” Bankhead said, hoping to raise teacher pay and redirect some defense funds to schools. “These are the people that teach our children…When we invest in education, our communities become abundant. It’s a trickle-down effect.”
Housing affordability is another key concern. The median home price in Jefferson County is now higher than that of neighboring Lewis & Clark County – where home prices are rising as quickly as almost anywhere in the state.
And on former ASARCO smelter land in East Helena, Habitat for Humanity and Oakland & Co. have plans for a combined 6,000 homes, underscoring sharp demand. Echoing President Trump, Bankhead hopes to bar institutional investors from bulk-buying single-family homes.
“We’re going to ban that. It’s not that I’m anti-capitalism – this is America – but it reminds me of the monopolies from 100 years ago,” she said. “Government had to come in and bust those up because it was hurting the average American.”
Few topics animate Bankhead more visibly than what she sees as the federal government’s failure to support Montana’s agricultural producers.
“I don’t need to be a rancher to know and respect who puts food on my table,” she said. “And I’ve been really upset about what Congress and the federal government are doing. $800 million of Argentinian beef coming in and they’re blaming the ranchers for the lack of supply when ranchers are barely breaking even.”
On public lands, Daines has faced a good deal of criticism. In December, he reintroduced a bill to remove protections from more than 100,000 acres of Montana wilderness study areas, drawing condemnation from conservation groups. The nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities last year reported that Daines was negotiating to include public land sales in budget reconciliation legislation, after pledging to never support such sales.
“Our public lands are the crown jewel of America, period,” says Bankhead. “When it’s gone, it’s gone, and I’m going to fight like hell to make sure those interests aren’t sold off…I don’t know any Montanan that actually wants that to happen.”
The June 2 primary will determine whether she gets the chance to make her case throughout the summer and into the fall, leading up to the Nov. 3 general election.
“I would have your readers ask themselves: how well are things going right now? And if it’s not going well, maybe you need to pick someone different,” she said. “Nobody does risk and adventure better than Montana.”
