FORCE
MULTIPLIER

Bodnar's résumé reads like a catalog of American meritocratic institutions: West Point, Rhodes Scholar, Green Beret, senior leader at General Electric, university president. Yet his political identity, as he frames it, has been stubbornly nonpartisan.

"I raised my right hand at the age of 18 and swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States, not to a political party."

At the University of Montana, where he served eight years as president, he distilled the school's mission down to two words: inclusive prosperity. An institution that did not boast about turning away 95 percent of its applicants, but instead took pride in admitting students from working-class backgrounds and helping them succeed.

"We said we're going to accept 95 percent of the people that come, we're going to charge them one-tenth of what an Ivy League school charges, and we're going to still produce Rhodes Scholars and Truman Scholars."

A third of the student body was Pell-eligible; a third were first-generation college students. For Bodnar, this was not just a campus mission but a microcosm of the American promise. And he believes that promise is faltering.

The world outside Montana is intruding on his race in ways that are hard to ignore. As the war in Iran escalated and President Trump signaled a willingness to expand U.S. involvement — even floating ground operations — Bodnar leaned on his combat experience.

"We should make no mistake. There are real threats to our security." Iran, he notes, has been "the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism," and its regime and proxies have been responsible for the deaths of people he knew personally.

"Our generation of veterans found out the hard way that wars are a lot easier to start than they are to finish."

He describes filling his truck up with gas at $2.89 a gallon a month ago; when he returned, it was a dollar more. Diesel is nearing $5 a gallon — punishing farmers whose export markets have already been whipsawed by shifting tariffs. Farm bankruptcies were up 46 percent last year over 2024.

He recounts a conversation with a woman who told him 75 percent of her next year's Social Security check will go to rent. The war, in his telling, is being paid for not only in the lives of 13 service members killed in action and more than 300 wounded, but also at Montana pumps and grocery stores.

Independents are a mood, critics like to say, not a movement. Bodnar wants to prove that wrong — in part by leaning into political math. Nationally, around 45 percent of Americans identify as independents.

His opening line to voters is blunt: "If you think things are working really well right now... then maybe I'm not your guy. But if you think there's a better way, let's have a conversation."

In Montana, those conversations cross party lines. One of his most vocal backers is Mark Racicot, the former Republican governor and ex-chair of the Republican National Committee who also ran George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

"I hope he does it. I want to vote for him. I hate my own party just slightly less than I hate the other."

That last line — resentful, weary, darkly comic — captures the electorate Bodnar is chasing: citizens who have learned to hate both parties and are now open, grudgingly, to an alternative.

Toward the end of the conversation, Bodnar reaches for a different kind of metaphor: the space race. He invokes the shock of Sputnik in 1957 — the "beep heard around the world" — and the fear it sent through the American public.

The response was not fatalism but a surge of investment. Less than a year later, President Dwight Eisenhower — a Republican and a West Point graduate — signed the National Defense Education Act, passed by a Democratic Congress.

That act funded the research and STEM education that allowed the U.S. to win not just the space race but the Cold War, and to enjoy 75 years of economic and technological superiority.

"We can still do these things. We just have to get past the toxic, divisive, partisan rhetoric that's holding us back, that's turning our guns inward. And we need to pull together and go fight and win."