New district map helps Montana Democrats to legislative gains

Tuesday’s election, the first held with Montana’s newly drawn legislative district maps, saw Democrats pick up House and Senate seats in the state Legislature even as the party’s candidates were soundly rebuffed in elections for statewide and federal offices.

Regardless, Republicans will remain in firm control of the Legislature. Based on unofficial vote counts available as of Thursday, Montana Democrats appear likely to hold 41 of 100 House and 18 of 50 Senate seats when the 2025 Legislature convenes early next year.

That’s a nine-seat House and two-seat Senate gain for Democrats relative to 2023, when Republicans held a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers. That power shift will make it easier for Democrats to block legislation, advance their priorities and negotiate with Gov. Greg Gianforte on issues that split the larger Republican caucus.

When, for example, Montana’s expanded Medicaid program was last renewed in 2019, it was backed by a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans that pushed the renewal bill through the state Senate by a one-vote margin over vigorous opposition from hardline Republicans. The program, which currently provides health coverage for about 78,000 Montanans, is up for renewal next year in what is likely to be one of the most high-profile debates of the session.

“When we have more seats we have more leverage. And when we have more leverage, we have more power to influence the outcome and decisions on any issue, whether it’s property tax or expanded Medicaid,” Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, said during a Wednesday press call.

Montana’s legislative district maps are redrawn every 10 years to account for population shifts recorded by the decennial census. Because it takes years for federal statisticians to publish census data and because the state Constitution requires the state’s redistricting commission to wait for input from one of the Legislature’s every-other-year sessions, this year’s election was the first time the state used legislative maps based on data reflecting population counts for April 2020.

The new maps, adopted last year, were criticized by Republican districting commissioners who argued that Democratic commissioners and a nonpartisan chair appointed by state Supreme Court justices put too much priority on drawing districts that would likely produce a Legislature where the number of seats won by Democrats would roughly match the party’s share of the overall statewide vote. Democrats argued that the preferred Republican approach, which would have generally done more to segregate Democratic-leaning urban cores from Republican-leaning suburban and rural areas, would have produced a map where Republicans outperformed their overall vote share.

According to preliminary vote counts, Democrats won 39% of votes in partisan statewide races and about 37% of all votes cast statewide in state House races this year, including in districts that had no Democrat on the ballot. Democrats will hold 41% of House seats in the 2025 Legislature.

Republicans won an average of 58% of the vote in statewide races this year and about 62% of House votes while winning 59% of House seats.

In comparison, Republicans won 64% of House votes and 68% of House seats under the old map in 2022.

State Sen. Greg Hertz, who chairs the Montana Republican Legislative Campaign Committee, which recruits and supports Republican candidates, attributed his party’s legislative losses this year entirely to the redrawn map. He said he thought the GOP could have lost even more seats to redistricting than it did.

“I think the shift in the numbers was completely to do with the new maps,” Hertz said in an interview. 

Democrats argued in a press briefing this week that the party’s gains are largely attributable to recruiting good candidates and running effective campaigns. However, they did acknowledge that the redrawn map helped their cause.

“Running on a fair map, and not running on a map that has expired like hot milk in the sun, was definitely a factor,” said Scott McNeil, director of the Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

McNeil also said he believed Democratic legislative candidates performed well in a year when the overall political currents favored Republicans.

“We were running against the stream in a much more Republican-leaning year compared to 2020,” McNeil said.

Using historical election data compiled by Dave’s Redistricting, Montana Free Press previously identified seven of the newly drawn House districts and two of the newly drawn Senate districts as toss-up seats where past voting patterns inside their new boundaries have averaged to no more than five percentage points in favor of Democrats or Republicans.

Of those nine toss-up districts, Democrats lost seven races to Republicans, claiming victory in the Whitefish-area Senate District 2 seat won by Rep. Dave Fern, and the central Great Falls House District 19 seat won by former Cascade County Commissioner Jane Weber. Another Democratic incumbent, Rep. Paul Tuss, successfully defended his seat in a Republican-leaning district that, in both its former and current incarnations, centers on Havre.

In an interview, Tuss said he welcomed the opportunity to campaign in what’s now House District 27, which includes many Republican voters. 

“It really is one of those districts that is more purple than red or blue, and I certainly wish that we had more districts like that to give the Montana electorate a real choice in the elections,” Tuss said.

As they have historically, Democrats won most legislative races in Montana’s Indian reservation-area districts this year. An exception is Senate District 21, which spans Hardin and part of south Billings as well as the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations. There, Hardin business owner Gayle Lammers won election over longtime lawmaker Sharon Stewart-Peregoy, a Crow tribal member.

In an interview, Peregoy attributed her loss to a combination of factors, including attack ads, Republican turnout boosted by the national election and the impact of new-to-Montana voters.

“We have people that are coming into Montana who don’t necessarily know our history nor know the issues here in Montana, who have come and infiltrated us, bringing their attitudes and their biases,” she said.

In post-election interviews, winning candidates in competitive races, Republicans and Democrats alike, attributed their wins to diligent grassroots campaigning.

“I went out and I knocked every single door in the district,” said Melissa Nikolakakos, a Great Falls Republican who defeated Democrat Rina Fontana Moore, formerly the county’s clerk and recorder, in House District 20.

“I canvassed on doors for five months,” said Fern, in Whitefish. “I’d do at least five to six days a week. When I say days — I have a business, I have a full-time job — so it’d be in the evenings, on the weekends.”

Fern, who previously won four elections in a pre-redistricting House district centered on left-leaning Whitefish, acknowledged that redistricting gave him a realistic opportunity to win election to a larger Senate district in the otherwise typically Republican Flathead Valley. Previously, the Senate that included Whitefish was much more heavily Republican, but now loops in a left-leaning electorate around West Glacier instead of a right-leaning swath of the Flathead Valley.

Fern, who was termed out of the state House, said he’d considered retiring from politics rather than running for the Whitefish Senate seat. He probably would have passed on making a likely futile bid under the old legislative map. “I think I would have lost,” he said.

Jacob Olness contributed reporting.