Busted: GOP Senate candidate running on rural roots grew up 'three miles from a Trader Joe’s'

13 April 2024

Businessman Tim Sheehy, who is running for US Senate in Montana, has been hyping his rural connections to voters on the campaign trail. But a new report suggests Sheehy is actually a product of suburbia.

Farm life is a mainstay of Montana. US Census records show that the Big Sky State has the nation's fifth largest concentration of rural residents (behind Vermont, Maine, West Virginia and Mississippi), with 46.6% of its residents living in remote areas. Incumbent Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana), who is running for a fourth term this November, is a bona fide lifelong rancher who lost several fingers in a farming accident as a child. So Sheehy has been trying to persuade voters of his rural credentials, saying in a 2023 interview that he "grew up in an old farmstead... surrounded by farmland."

But according to the Daily Beast, Sheehy's upbringing in Minnesota was actually in "a multi-million-dollar lake house in Shoreview, Minnesota, a quiet Twin Cities suburb just north of St. Paul with a population of roughly 27,000."

"According to a 1990 deed, Sheehy’s childhood home on Turtle Lake is 13 miles from the Minnesota State Capitol, 13 miles from the home of the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium, and just over 20 miles from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the Mall of America," the Beast's Riley Rogerson wrote. "The property sits just three miles from a Trader Joe’s market—much closer than the nearest Fleet Farm, a fishing, hunting, and farm supply store popular in the state."

The Beast further reported that Sheehy claimed the Shoreview home as his residence as recently as 2016, before his parents ultimately sold it for more than $2 million the following year. Rogerson described the community as "a desirable slice of middle to upper-middle class suburbia with quiet spaces and good schools." Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who authored The Great Gatsby, was educated at the nearby St. Paul Academy, the same exclusive private school where Sheehy graduated.

"Niche, a popular online source for school rankings and community reviews, called Shoreview 'one of the best places to live in Minnesota' and even bestowed the community with the distinction of '#1 Best Suburb to Buy a House in Minneapolis-St. Paul Area,'" Rogerson wrote, adding that residents described Shoreview as "the stereotypical suburb."

This isn't the first fib Sheehy has told about his upbringing. Last November, the GOP senate hopeful, who runs an aerial firefighting business, said on a podcast that when launching his company, he and his wife "bought our land, and we lived in a tent, literally, for months, and we built the barn that we lived in for four and a half years. And it was like bootstrap central." However, the Beast reported that his parents actually provided him with a $100,000 loan to get his business venture off the ground.

The Montana US Senate race is one of the most hotly contested elections this November, and could decide which party controls one half of the legislative branch for the next two years. Tester is the only remaining Democrat representing the Big Sky State in any statewide office, and he has amassed an impressive war chest in his bid for another six-year term. OpenSecrets reports that in the 2024 campaign cycle, Tester – who chairs the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee — has raised more than $24 million.

Sheehy also trails tester in polling. RealClearPolitics' polling average has Tester ahead by more than five points in a head-to-head matchup with Sheehy, and he has not trailed in any previous poll conducted thus far. Montana remains a GOP stronghold, however, and former President Donald Trump is heavily favored to carry the state in November, having easily won it with comfortable majorities in both 2016 and 2020.

Click here to read the Beast's full report (subscription required).

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