No one wants to admit how this election will really be won. I saw it firsthand.

The pain in my forehead was sharp, as if I had just slammed it against the nightstand. My eyes felt weighted by sandbags and burned when the light hit them. If I leaned forward—say, to put my head in my hands, the posture that felt correctly despondent—the strain from the back of my neck shot to the top of my skull. If I coughed, or made any sudden movement, my whole body buzzed.

I was not recovering from a car accident or an ultramarathon. Instead, over the past two days, I had watched a total of 26 hours of television from a hotel room in Livingston, Montana, during the last lengths of the 2024 election. And I wasn’t done yet. The morning shows and newsreels and college football games were swimming before my eyes. And the ads—I had seen so many ads. For skin-care products and fast-food restaurants and car manufacturers and car dealers, but especially for the Senate election between Montana Democrat Jon Tester, who has held the seat 18 years, and his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy.

The race is perhaps the most consequential statewide showdown in the country because it could decide which party has majority control of the Senate. And with that, the ability to control so much of what the next president can do, whoever it is, from passing legislation to appointing judges to the most basic task of confirming the Cabinet members who will help shape the government.

Everyone knows those stakes—and the money pouring in from across the country to this gorgeous state reflects that. The battle for Montana has become one of the most expensive statewide races ever, expected to stand at at least $315 million when the dust settles.

But there’s a peculiar quirk to campaigning here: Montana may be the country’s fourth-largest state by area, but it’s only the 44^th largest by population. There are a mere 650,000 active registered voters spread out across 147,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of California with one-fortieth the number of people. So, sure, volunteers knock doors and phone-bank and do rallies. But in a rural state with a libertarian ethos where homes are often spread far apart, in a country with unlimited campaign spending, that isn’t really how campaigning works. Instead, the final prairie Democrat’s last stand is being waged not on the high plains or the snowy ridges of the eastern Rockies but on the peaks and troughs of the airwaves. It is being fought on television.

According to AdImpact, from Super Tuesday in early March to mid-October, Montana has played host to an astronomical 387,000 political ads, second only to Pennsylvania’s 399,000. But Montana, unlike Pennsylvania, is not a swing state. It is not in play for the presidency: Trump won it by 20 points in 2020, and few things are more certain than the fact that he will win it again. It has a Republican governor (not competitive); both House representatives here are Republican; a two-thirds-Republican supermajority holds the state Legislature. There are a couple of ballot props to fight over, and, as of very recently, one of those House races has gone from “impossible” to “a reach” for Democrats. But almost all the money and attention is focused on Tester vs. Sheehy. It is a besieging of the commercial breaks of historic proportions.

“Unavoidable,” said one Montanan I talked to, of the Senate-race ads. “Everywhere,” said another. “Nonstop,” said a third. “Absolutely obscene!” declared former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot. Some people just shook their heads at me, pupils wide, haunted by the things they’d witnessed. “What you’re seeing,” one political media buyer told me, “is the result of there just being more money than there is ad inventory to spend it on.”

I had traveled to Montana to observe and participate in the American democratic process, the way most Americans engage with American democracy—not in union halls or public forums, but on the receiving end of a one-way fire hose of paid propaganda and professional manipulation, rendered in 30-second bursts of flickering blue light, largely in isolation, via television. I rode into town for 72 hours to watch unlimited campaign ads.

Most Americans watch an average of three to five hours of TV a day, depending on whom you ask. I set out to watch a whole lot more than that in Montana to see the true nature of a race for nothing less than control of the upper chamber of Congress, the life and death of the American West, and the dark present and darker frontier of American democracy. If that sounds dramatic, well, you should see what was going on in my head by the end of it all.

“Your room has a view of the beautiful mountains,” said the clerk at the Fairfield Inn in Livingston when I checked in. I didn’t want to risk distraction from the world on the wrong side of the glass, so I kept the curtains drawn. It was time to begin.

You might reasonably ask: Couldn’t I have just searched for these ads online from the comfort of my own apartment? No: One cannot experience the true effect of advertising as the hunter, only as the hunted. I wanted to feel the full force of the advertising onslaught; I wanted to be targeted as a Montana resident, with local broadcast and a Montana IP address. Most Americans spend the fall of even-numbered years doing their best to dodge the incessant prate of political ads that seems to stalk them everywhere. I would willingly succumb to them.

I started off my Saturday morning at 9:59 with the closing credits of a show about wild animals. Then I got my first Senate spot. “Don’t believe the lies about Jon Tester,” said two men, one of whom was identified as a Republican. Tester had worked with Republicans to shut down the border, they explained. He did not vote to tax Social Security or give benefits to “illegal immigrants,” and he definitely, definitely did not block support for white farmers. Thirty seconds later came an attack ad on Tester’s opponent. “Tim Sheehy says he grew up rural. That’s a lie,” the ad intoned. He had grown up in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Sheehy isn’t rural, and he isn’t right for Montana.”

I switched the channel and watched football players for the University of Miami and University of Louisville teams warm up. Miami took the lead and held it. I saw ads for Jersey Mike’s and Domino’s and various pharmaceutical products. I moved over to the University of Michigan versus Illinois and quickly saw a menacing ad that showed Tester getting a trim. For 20 years, the ad said, Jon Tester had been running on this flattop haircut because he couldn’t run on his record. This included voting to allow “$500 million to illegals.” He had backed legislation that could raise Medicare drug premiums more than 50 percent, the ad warned, with bold text over video of Tester flashing a smile in the barber’s chair, clippers chewing through flat and villainous hair, while immigrants amassed at the border in a split screen. It flowed immediately into another anti-Tester spot, a refutation of a previous ad that must have asserted that Tester was tough on China. Instead, I was informed, Tester had met with a top lobbyist of a Chinese agricultural company that’s buying up American farmland. He sold us out to China.

Illinois scored, or maybe the team punted, or maybe the quarter ended, any of which was great news because it meant we were back to ads, where I saw that Tim Sheehy is against the abortion rights initiative in Montana and could help pass a national abortion ban.

At 2 p.m., Montana State was about to go up against Portland State, and my TV wasn’t carrying it. This seemed certain to be an unmissable advertising opportunity, so I made the tough choice to decamp to a sports bar in a town a mile up the road, if that. There were multiple advantages to this move, beyond the simple need for me to consume food to sustain my TV consumption. There were at least 10 separate screens at the sports bar, a 270-degree panorama that in theory could also amp up my ad exposure tenfold, our American answer to the Roman forum.

At the bar, Montana State scored. I saw that Tester had amassed “large wealth” and delighted in “campaign-funded fine dining” that could have fed starving Montanans. Montana State scored again. Two separate TVs carrying different games simultaneously showed the same ad with a Republican woman saying Tim Sheehy wants to privatize health care and that Jon Tester had her vote. Then I saw an ad that said Jon Tester was F-rated by the National Rifle Association, unlike Tim Sheehy (A), and that the Second Amendment is fundamental to our Montana way of life. Then I saw an ad that said Tim Sheehy wanted “more land sold to rich out-of-staters” and that he was “not one of us.” And on it went. I looked like an owl, my head swiveling on my neck, trying to take it all in.

Two guys were sitting at the table next to me. One of them, Heath, worked in HVAC; the other, Shaw, worked in mining. I asked them what they thought of the deluge of Senate ads, and whether it was having any effect on them. “Just annoyance,” said Heath. “Effect? No.” Shaw agreed: “It’s more annoying than anything.”

Who were they supporting, I asked, and why? “Sheehy,” said Heath. “Tester has been in office for 20 years already, and everybody knows he’s gotten rich,” he said. “I’m the opposite, for Tester,” said Shaw. “I’m so sick of these rich out-of-staters raising costs.”

They had repeated back to me almost verbatim lines from the ads.

Advertising works. Everyone likes to think that advertising works only on others, not on them. Wrong. Advertising works on you.

There are plenty of studies that prove it. A review of research on attitudes toward advertising by University College of London professor Jeremy Dean found that people who thought they were unaffected by advertising were just as influenced by it as any other group. Psychology and mass media professor Richard M. Perloff found that advertising is actually even more effective on us when we don’t agree with the message or if we consider its source to be bad or its subject irrelevant. It seeps right on in.

As digital marketing executive Scott Fenstermaker, who runs a blog on the topic, put it, “We tend to overestimate our own free will and resistance to influence.”

This is well understood by corporations. Coca-Cola, for example, one of the best-known brands in the world, spent $5 billion on advertising in 2023, much of that on TV. That was not charitable giving. It is also well understood by campaigns. According to a report by the research firm Insider Intelligence, political advertising in the 2024 election cycle is expected to increase by 30 percent over 2020’s record-high explosion, to $12.32 billion. (More than $10 billion has been spent so far.) Traditional media, most of which is TV, will account for over 70 percent of that.

There’s plenty of debate over just how effective political advertising really is, if that’s even something you can quantify. Some say it can’t be measured or is skewed by predetermined outcomes—lots of races are not even competitive to begin with. Sometimes, the candidate who spends more loses. But usually, the candidate who spends more or is backed by more outside spending wins. About 96 percent of House races, for instance, are won by the candidate who spends more money, according to Open Secrets. The bigger the race, the more money that’s spent, and usually, the biggest thing that money is spent on is ads.

“Zero question that the ads work, even with political stuff where people are absolutely jaded,” Keith Teske told me. Teske is the longtime station manager of Nonstop Local, KULR, the Billings NBC affiliate, and the person in charge of managing the placement and sales of all those ads I had been watching. “I know dyed-in-the-wool liberals who are doubting if they’re going to vote for Tester, and I know conservatives who are completely anti-Tester but are confused about ‘Shady Sheehy.’ It works.”

“ ‘Shady Sheehy’ is even a concern on the playground,” he said. That was actually the second time I’d heard that: One Montana State student I spoke with said the 7-year-old she babysits couldn’t stop talking about “Shady Sheehy.”

Right now, Teske said, was an unprecedented ad bonanza. “We’re selling $40,000 for a single ad on college football. Just sold $160,000 for five commercials,” he said, referring to blocks of last-second airtime recently purchased. “Every time you think it’s finally cooled off, something crazy flares up.” He added, “Never seen anything like it.”

A little history: The first video attack ads came in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression. Upton Sinclair, the famous socialist writer of The Jungle, had swept the Democratic gubernatorial primary in California, with massive grassroots backing on an anti-poverty platform. But after Sinclair suggested that the state hire idle studios and pay unemployed actors to make movies on their own, the head of Hollywood’s MGM Studios, Louis B. Mayer, a bigwig state Republican, and studio executive Irving Thalberg set to work making the first batch of attack ads, airing them in movie theaters before the features played. And that was basically the end of that. Sinclair lost to Republican Frank Merriam by 11 points.

Political attack ads came to television in the 1950s, alongside the rise of the medium, and by the 1952 presidential race between Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson, they were already a fixture. But they really exploded in the 2010s, after the Supreme Court opened the door for unlimited political spending by declaring that money is speech in the Citizens United decision. The super PACs that resulted are responsible for much of the increase. In the 2010 election cycle, the year of the decision, super PACs spent $61 million on political communication, aka ads. In this election, super PACs have spent $2.5 billion and raised $4.2 billion so far.

And super PACs tend to spend $4 of every $5 of their budget on TV ads.

By Sunday, Day 2, I had already witnessed great battles, and they had taken a physical toll on me.

I finished out Saturday back in the hotel, watching more college football and Saturday Night Live and competing local news programs and the rebroadcast of Saturday Night Live. I waited for one merciful commercial break without a Senate ad as sign I could call it a night, and finally got one just before 2 a.m.

I slept terribly. I had a throbbing headache. I had to force my eyeballs from retreating back into my skull. I watched the Sunday shows anyway, muting the interviews, keeping my eyelids half-drawn. The ads were still going: Jon Tester had been running on his haircut for 20 years and don’t fall for the attacks on Jon Tester they’re all lies and Tim Sheehy wants to ban abortion and Jon Tester sold us out to China.

On the ABC affiliate, I saw that it was unseasonably warm, and then an ad warned that Tim Sheehy wants to return health care to pure privatization, and another ad had a lifelong Republican pledge her vote to Jon Tester because she didn’t trust Tim Sheehy and Tester had helped her secure Social Security benefits. On the CBS affiliate, before the NFL games kicked off, one ad told me Tim Sheehy thinks government should be making medical decisions for the daughters of Republican fathers, and that Sheehy called abortion “murder.” Another ad dropped a clip-art magnifying glass on a logo on Sheehy’s shirt, as evidence he was lying about his affiliation with a group that advocated for public-land privatization—he himself wanted to privatize public lands, and we had to “stop Shady Sheehy before we lose Montana for good.”

I figured, for the sake of thoroughness, I had to survey at least one other Montana media market, so I powered down a gas-station-bought medicinal course for migraine-strength pain and drove across the Continental Divide. I installed myself in a sports bar in Butte, a mining town in the state’s western region, best known as the home of one of the country’s largest superfund sites, a gaping open pit full of toxic heavy metals and sulfuric acid and featuring groundwater with a pH of 2.5. The bar was down the street.

I watched the Detroit Lions finish off the Minnesota Vikings, and a Republican father on-screen said that Tim Sheehy thinks the government should be making medical decisions for “my girls.” I watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Houston Texans, and Jon Tester sold us out to China and don’t believe the attacks on Jon Tester they’re all lies. The 49ers kicked a field goal and we went to ad break and we got a rare four-pack, four straight Senate ads, pro-Sheehy, anti-Tester, pro-Tester, anti-Tester.

It was a gorgeous afternoon, unusually warm and sunny, and there were only four other patrons, two couples, sitting on stools in the darkened cave of the bar. They all knew one another. It didn’t take all that long before they inquired as to what exactly I was doing in there. When I told them I was there for the ads, they helpfully pointed out that while I was fixated on the ads in front of us, there were even more ads firing off on the TV screen behind me, which was broadcasting Wipeout Xtra.

Here is the deal with Wipeout Xtra: It is a game show where contestants run an elevated obstacle course, competing against various hazards and the clock to finish. Mostly, they do not succeed, and I have no idea what happens if they do. Still, I wheeled around and watched a column of spirited Australians being successively and violently deposited into mud and water.

The battle of Wipeout Xtra quickly became the greatest advertising clash I’d witnessed all weekend. An Australian woman got socked by a spring-loaded punching bag and then, for 20 years, Jon Tester had been running on his haircut and Tim Sheehy could pass a national abortion ban. An Australian man fell off an elevated platform and Jon Tester took on Big Pharma and a lifelong Republican just didn’t trust Tim Sheehy. An Australian slipped in mud and Jon Tester was cracking down on price gouging and military veterans warned that Tim Sheehy wants to privatize health care and veterans’ benefits. Down went the Australians and a lifelong Republican just didn’t trust Tim Sheehy and for 20 years Jon Tester had been running on his haircut and don’t trust the attacks on Jon Tester they’re all lies.

My head pain was quelled thanks to the drugs, but now my neck and back began to flare up, the previous day’s slouching and craning setting in. I felt for the Australians.

I asked the four patrons what they thought of the Senate ads. They groaned. “Can’t avoid ’em,” said Tom, the man sitting closest to me. I asked them, too, if they thought they were working. Again, the answer was a resounding no, and a lot of shaking of heads. I asked them if they were voting, and for whom.

“Sheehy,” said Francis, another patron, because Tester had been running for so many years, and everyone knew what he was about. “Tester,” said Tom, because taking that choice out of a woman’s hands, that’s terrible. “I don’t care if he did take money from China,” he added.

On the road back to my confinement, I listened to the radio and there, too, were Tester and Sheehy. Someone sang about a new truck and someone sang about heartbreak and someone sang about loving drinking and then Jon Tester saved Medicare.

I was back in the hotel room for Sunday Night Football. My headache had returned with a vengeance. The Pittsburgh Steelers scored a late touchdown and drew to 15–13 at the half and Jon Tester helped a Republican woman get Social Security benefits and Spectrum offered internet and Arby’s has the meats.

The Tester–Sheehy showdown comes in the context of a rapidly changing Montana. The state has seen relatively huge population growth in recent years, perhaps owing to COVID migrations, perhaps owing to the popularity of the show Yellowstone, surely owing to the necessary labor that has followed the arrival of new residents. After the most recent census, the state was awarded an additional House seat. There are still way more cows than people, but there are a lot more people than before.

Costs have increased dramatically. The median home sale price in Montana rose by 90 percent from 2018 to 2023; median household income increased only 28 percent over that same period. The state holds the dubious distinction of being the least affordable housing market in the country.

Part of this is an influx of the superrich: The Yellowstone Club, a private luxury real-estate endeavor built on what was once public land in the town of Big Sky, claims to have the highest concentration of billionaires anywhere outside of New York City. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt are all members.

Another part is the rise of remote work and high-paying internet jobs, which drove up costs in a mining-and-ranching state. The state has succumbed to national inequality trends. People hate rising costs, but then they also hate the new developments that sprawl into the once-pristine or not-at-all-pristine agricultural countryside.

One might think that local popular outrage toward outsiders would tilt the balance in favor of Jon Tester, who started out as a dirt farmer from Big Sandy. Tester has served as a senator since 2007. He presents about as Old West as a person can: portly frame, flattop haircut (ahem), left hand in a permanent shaka after he lost his three middle fingers in a meat grinder.

But Montana has also succumbed to another national trend, which is the nationalization of American politics and party polarization. Since Tester first got the seat, the Democratic Party has been summarily wiped out in the state. There were once five prairie Dems in the Senate; now there’s one. The potency of straight-ticket Republican identification has overwhelmed even the widespread disdain for wealthy outsiders: As the American Prospect pointed out, Montana’s Republican governor and both Republican House representatives are all out-of-state millionaires. So is Sheehy, who moved in from Minnesota. I saw that in an ad.

Those trends were clear enough even before COVID, so clear that they looked certain to doom Tester when he previously stood for reelection, in 2018, two years after Trump won the state by 16 points. But Tester pulled off one of the great miracles of modern politics, winning by 3.5 points.

So the national GOP circled this race and starred it and underlined it in dark red. The party threw its weight around to ensure that Sheehy got the candidacy and raised massive money to help him. Now Tester has to pull off the ultimate ticket-splitting triumph in modern political history. He has to get a bunch of Trump-voting Republicans to vote for a Democrat on the second line of their ballot.

Sheehy basically doesn’t do press and has very few events open to the public. There is barely any local news left anyway, especially in rural areas. So the only way to get exposure to him is via his ads. And Tester is meeting him where he’s at, with ads of his own.

Tester has brought billions to the state during his time in office. He’s rarely criticized as absentee. He’s not an annoying megalomaniac like red-state Democrat–turned–independent Sen. Joe Manchin. If there’s one Democrat who could pull this off, it’s Tester. Does his record really matter? Sure, but not more than the ads.

He has certain advantages with his ad-heavy approach: There are regulations in place, in TV ad buying, that afford candidates what’s called the lowest “unit rate” for a 30-second slot.

This means that Tester, who is a prodigious fundraiser, has been able use his campaign cash to pay the very lowest rate an ad space sells for on any given broadcast—the same $1,000 that, say, Lithia Dodge of Billings pays. The Sheehy campaign also pays the lowest unit rate, but Sheehy is not the fundraiser that Tester is, and Sheehy had to win a primary too, so Tester got a head start, making huge buys almost a year in advance.

There are limits on how many ads a candidate can get on any given station per week. And that’s where the super PACs come in. Super PACs pay market rate, which means they frequently pay 20 times what the candidate pays. These groups can raise money anywhere and in unlimited quantities. And if one super PAC has hit its quota for a certain channel, another one hops in.

Here’s a nonexhaustive list of super PACs and outside groups actively spending in the race on the pro-Tester side: Last Best Place PAC, WinSenate, Montana Outdoor Values Action Fund, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Montana Rural Voters, CFFE PAC, Your Community PAC, BIG SKY 55+, America’s Credit Unions PAC of Credit Union National Association Inc.

And for Sheehy: More Jobs, Less Government, Senate Leadership Fund, American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity Action, NRA of America Political Victory Fund, Sentinel Action Fund, Jefferson Rising Fund, School Freedom Fund, 1889 PAC.

The result is this: According to analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks federal ad airings by state, Montana saw 43,774 political ads in August, the most of any state in the country. Second place: Ohio, at 25,000. In September, Montana saw 85,392, the most again. October’s numbers will be higher still, guaranteed. It’s an all-guns-drawn, Wild West–style shoot-out.

It might be the last real battle for Montana. The entire middle of the country has gone one-party red, a trend that is likely to continue apace. Improbably, Tester has managed to hang close: Recent polling shows him within the margin of error; one has him tied. And though Sheehy has consistently led, his margin has been shrinking. Critically, Tester has spent more and run more ads, which, of course, is not everything. If he holds on, it won’t not be because of his record. But it will also have a lot to do with his advertising prowess.

I awoke in the dark and stared at the wall and savored the black and quiet for one brief moment. Then I turned the TV on. Good Morning America was recapping all of the sports games I’d watched the day prior and Jon Tester was running on his haircut and then he had an F-rating from the NRA and he sold us out to China.

I flipped over to the Today show, and Tim Sheehy lied about his involvement with a land-privatization group and was against abortion and didn’t support a woman’s right to choose.

The night before, this chorus had played me to sleep as my agony mounted: Jon Tester is running on a haircut because he can’t run on his record … Tim Sheehy wants to ban abortion and a woman’s right to choose … Tester sold us out to China … Sheehy is “another millionaire buying up land and driving up prices” and won’t protect my daughters’ right to choose or public lands … Tester sold us out to China … Tester’s been running on a haircut because he can’t run on his record … Don’t believe the attacks on Jon Tester … Tim Sheehy wants to ban abortion … Tim Sheehy wants to ban abortion … Sheehy caught lying about land privatization … Being a bartender in Montana, you hear a lot of things, and Sheehy lied about where he grew up, bullet in arm, about protecting public lands … Wealthy outsiders like Tim Sheehy are trying to change our state, jacking up costs … Jon Tester haircut … Don’t believe the attacks on Jon Tester … If you support the right to choose, you can’t choose Tim Sheehy …

The battle raged. Three days into this, I had seen Tester lose the skirmish of The Voice and triumph in the siege of Saturday Night Live. I had seen great losses and unlikely feats. I was sure I had seen every ad, most of them five times, some of them probably 20.

I needed some perspective. I needed to speak with an expert on American democracy who could tell me what it all meant.

I drove 110 miles away from my hotel to Billings, to the broadcast station of the local NBC affiliate I’d been so dutifully watching. There was Keith Teske, station manager, the man who handled ad sales.

Teske sat in a chair at the head of a long conference table and leaned back. He wore a black Eddie Bauer vest (not Patagonia) and blue jeans and sported a white goatee, thick white hair, and glasses. Teske had lived a long time in old Montana, and he had worked in the industry a long time too, 25 years, starting out in radio, then helming one of the smaller outposts in the more rural part of the state. Finally, as the industry consolidated, he had been pulled off the frontier and driven back into the big city of Billings, population 185,000, to serve as station manager.

What we’re seeing—what I had been watching—had been years coming, ramping up nonstop since 2012, Teske told me.

Every two years, Teske said, he’s sure that he’s seen it all, “that nothing will surprise.” And then it happens. He gets surprised again. “In 2020 we got a last-second request for a Sunday afternoon ad on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Thirty seconds. They paid $14,000 for that spot. That’s a $30 commercial,” he said. This year, he was still blown away by what had come to pass.

It probably wasn’t good for democracy, all that unlimited money pouring out of state and into manipulation. But if Tester lost, and Montana became a true one-party state for good, all that money would disappear. The age of Wild West TV spending in Montana would be over. “We haven’t gotten presidential money since ’08,” Teske said.

No more ad money would be bad for the Billings station, which, Teske noted, was one of the few sources of local news remaining. (The incredible windfall from 2024’s ad bonanza will be used to pay for new transmitters, he told me.) Montana’s lapse into one-party control would free the state from paid political manipulations, sure, but that would also be an indicator that the political options had disappeared too.

Still, Teske told me, he wasn’t too worried. Montanans were still sort of independent and “politics has always been up for sale,” he said. “It’s still gonna be cheaper to buy a seat here than California,” something people once said about Montana real estate. “It’s still cheaper to sway an election.”

But there was another reason the TV ad bonanza would likely soon end. Remember that TV advertising, for all its excesses, is regulated. There are lowest-unit-rate provisions for candidates and content reviews for factuality. “We answer to the FCC,” Teske said. “The reason I’m even telling you these [money] amounts is that they’re publicly available online.”

Digital ad sales, however, have been rapidly gaining on broadcast. And ads that run solely online remain totally unregulated. The future, Teske told me, would not be free of ads but full of manipulations on the internet even more obscure, from dark money groups, which, unlike super PACs, do not disclose donors. “I turn on YouTube now to listen to music, and every single ad is politics,” Teske said. “By 2030, it’ll all be different.”

The whole point of local broadcast, Teske noted, was never just to sell ads. There was a higher civic purpose. It was to serve as a communication network in case of natural disaster or catastrophe. “Every day we’re live is a rehearsal,” he said, for the avalanche, or the earthquake, when that communication infrastructure could save lives. The internet might be more adept at monitoring a person’s consumption habits, and targeting them with relevant ads, but it hasn’t been able to replace that.

“I love this country; it’s given me a great life,” Teske said. But, he added, “I don’t know how sustainable this is. And if that’s how we’re making our decisions, I just don’t know.”

My quest in Montana had tanked my health, opened my dreary eyes, infested my brain. But what was coming over the horizon was darker still. The Wild West might be closing, but the frontier was wide open online. “It’s a little bit scary, just to be honest,” Teske told me. “It’s scary.”