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This election cycle could be described in many ways — frenzied, surprising, inspiring, emotional. But for Montanans, the most widely agreed-upon definition might just be obscenely expensive.
We all felt it. The barrage of television advertisements, mailers, text messages, fliers left on cars, incessant telephone calls from unknown numbers, digital ads stalking us around the internet, people physically knocking on our doors, yard signs, billboards visually shouting at us when we drove in and out of Bozeman or Billings. The deluge of money that led to a cacophony of political messaging even earned us sympathy from The New York Times (“It’s incessant. I feel for these people. They’ve been bombarded”) and Slate (“It is a besieging of the commercial breaks of historic proportions”).
As the campaign dust settles, we wanted to know: Just how much money did political groups throw at us during Montana’s 2024 election?
Unsurprisingly, the most expensive race in Montana this cycle was that between Democrat U.S. Sen. Jon Tester and Republican challenger Tim Sheehy, now the state’s senator-elect. All told, political action committees have reported spending $169.6 million trying to influence the outcome of Montana’s Senate race, the vast majority of that on negative spending.
Add another $7 million to the spending ledger from Montana’s western U.S. House race between Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, Democrat Monica Tranel and Libertarian Dennis Hayes. Add a smidgen more for $758,000 in PAC money spent promoting the victorious Republican Troy Downing in the eastern congressional district.
But wait, there’s more! Spending from the actual candidates, rather than external committees, stacked up to $103.1 million in the Senate and $15.3 million by House candidates. More still will likely be reported in January.
That totals to a whopping sum of $296 million in spending on Montana’s federal elections this year. That pencils out to $495.47 for every Montana voter who cast a ballot.
Further down the ticket, tabs for state level races and ballot issues added up, too. We tracked registered political committees in Montana spending more than $106 million on those contests since 2023. The top spender was Montanans for Election Reform, the group backing the pair of election measures C-126 and CI-127, which shelled out about $22.7 million as of campaign finance reporting from late October. Both initiatives failed to pass.
All these numbers may be underestimated since campaign finance raising and spending are notoriously difficult to pin down comprehensively.
We still do not know how much federal money washed into Montana’s ballot initiatives, for example. But, as we reported in the closing weeks of the cycle, joint fundraising committees for Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (who is not up for reelection until 2026), Downing and Zinke began buying ads against ballot measures, particularly CI-126. More information about that eleventh-hour avalanche might be available in later filing reports.
Have questions about these or other spending trends we haven’t addressed here? We’d love to hear them. Drop us a line at [email protected].
—Mara Silvers, Tom Lutey
The Viz
With the 2024 election now behind us, it’s a good moment to look back at the question I posed before Election Day: was Montana’s record-high voter turnout in 2020 a one-time spike or the start of an upward trend in civic participation? With the numbers in, it looks like turnout has settled back closer to the state’s post-1976 presidential year election average of just under 75% turnout.
Voter turnout in Montana was above 80% for much of the 20th century but declined in the mid-1970s and didn’t cross the 80% mark again until 2020. Seven of the last 13 presidential elections, this year’s included, have all come within half a percentage point of the longstanding 75% average.
There have been some ups and downs in recent decades. In 1992, when George H.W. Bush ran for reelection against Bill Clinton, turnout rose to 79% — a high point that also marked the last time a Democratic presidential candidate won Montana. By contrast, turnout hit a historic low in 2000, with just 59% of registered voters participating in the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Of course, the biggest recent outlier was 2020, when voter participation hit its highest percentage in almost 50 years, aided by Gov. Steve Bullock’s one-time directive allowing counties to conduct their elections by mail.
—Jacob Olness
Glad You Asked
As results rolled in on election night, many readers (and MTFP staff members) had questions about how the Associated Press decided to call the outcomes of Montana races at different times.
Specifically, readers wondered about the governor’s race between Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte and Democrat Ryan Busse, which the AP called immediately after polls closed and before hardly any vote counts had been released by election officials.
An AP editor contacted by MTFP about the race calls and timing pointed us to a piece where the outlet explains its methodology for making “polls close” calls. It says, in part, that in uncontested or noncompetitive races, the news outlet often issues calls based on other data sources besides vote tallies.
In some cases, AP says it calls races in areas where “one political party has an established history of lopsided victories.” The outlet gives examples from 2020, when it called the presidential contests in Wyoming and Massachusetts soon after polls closed, states that had consistently voted for presidential candidates from the same party for decades and had last voted for Donald Trump and Joe Biden by between 34 and 44 percentage points.
But, as many Montana voters know, Gianforte is the Republican disrupter to the state’s history of electing Democrats to the governor’s office as recently as 2016. When historical precedent doesn’t clarify a likely outcome, the AP says it consults other information, including “an area’s voting history from recent elections, voter registration statistics and pre-Election Day polling.”
In publicly available polls throughout the election season, Gianforte was consistently favored over Busse by double digits, leading by as much as 22 percentage points.
AP calls in other races, such as the MT-02 U.S. House race between Republican Troy Downing and Democrat John Driscoll, came later in the night. That could be because the district is quite new, drawn after the population growth recorded in the 2020 U.S. Census. Public polling for races further down the ballot is often sparse because of a lack of national interest and funding.
The AP calls turned out to be reliable across the board, including in the governor’s race. Gianforte trounced Busse by a margin of 21 percentage points.
—Mara Silvers
By the Numbers 🔢
Approximate number of Montana National Guardsmen deployed overseas as of Veterans Day this Monday, Nov. 11. A year ago, the number was 150.
Maj. Ryan Finnegan, the Montana National Guard’s public affairs officer, said in an email that the state’s active deployments include individual deployments to the Middle East, Europe and Africa. He said there are around 10 Montana soldiers and 10 airmen currently deployed on missions supporting active-duty units. They are scheduled to return home at different times throughout 2025.
Montana previously had two guard units deployed overseas that returned home in April, including around 80 soldiers of the 1889th Regional Support Group, based in Butte, and around 60 soldiers of the 190th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, based in Billings.
Finnegan told MTFP he couldn’t provide more specific details, such as the precise number of guardsmen currently deployed, due to security concerns.
—Zeke Lloyd
Say What 🤔
A small thing, easily overlooked amid the chaos of a busy election season, caught my eye last week — a statistic shared on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by the head of a right-leaning Montana think tank. During a back-and-forth about the state’s political climate, he shared a figure, attributed to MTFP, indicating that a majority of Montanans were born outside the state.
The problem? That’s not true. As such, it is not something MTFP actually reported.
Getting to the truth here is actually pretty easy. If you go to the U.S. Census Bureau, the definitive source for these sorts of things, its website will tell you that as of last year, an estimated 579,000 of the 1.1 million people living in Montana were born here. Do some elementary-school math on those two figures and you can calculate that the Montana-born portion of the state’s population, 51%, remains a slim majority.
As to why the correct stat wasn’t the one shared in that particular political argument? Answering that question, which took me down a hell of a rabbit hole, provides some insight into how facts do and don’t translate into public consciousness in the world we get to live in.
The tweet that caught my eye included what looked like a screenshot of one of the artificial intelligence-generated summaries Google has been adding to its search results pages. I was able to pull up a similar AI summary with a search of my own, attributed in part to this MTFP story from last year.
In big text at the top of our story? “Census data collected in 2022 indicates the state still has a majority Montana-born population — for now.” Which is correct.
Google’s summary? “According to the Montana Free Press, 57% of Montana residents were born outside the state.” To be clear, this is incorrect. At this point I threw up my hands and did some ranting with my coworkers.
Continuing down the rabbit hole, I realized that Google’s AI system apparently wasn’t actually pulling from the text of our story. Instead, I’m pretty sure, it was citing the text description attached to a YouTube video archive of a Billings TV news broadcast that had been adapted from a data visualization included in our story. As near as I can tell, somewhere along the line someone had swapped in the incorrect 57% stat, which is actually how many Yellowstone County residents were born in Montana. For some reason, Google’s AI system decided to hone in on that YouTube video description, as opposed to our original story or, God forbid, the Census Bureau website.
So to recap: Accurate, simple information from the U.S. Census Bureau was transformed into bad information deployed in a political debate via a virtual game of telephone that included the MTFP newsroom, local TV news, a free market think tank and three global tech companies. If you’re reading this at work, feel free to stop at this point and do some ranting with your coworkers.
When I edit MTFP stories — the one step in that chain I have any personal control over — I ask reporters assorted variations on a single question over and over again: “How do we know this fact we’re putting in here is true?” Generally, their answer is that we’re citing a reliable source of information, as opposed to one that’s potentially distorted by being several steps removed from hard evidence.
It’s disappointing, of course, that the most prominent weak link in this particular situation appears to be Google, a company that has built a multi-billion-dollar business around effectively organizing the world’s information and that now appears to be publishing AI-generated search summaries that are less reliable than work you’d get out of an effectively supervised high school intern.
But that, again, is the world we get to live in.
—Eric Dietrich
Highlights ☀️
Here are a few not-to-be-missed insights from the firehose of election coverage we published this week:
Newly elected eastern district Montana U.S. Rep. Troy Downing says he wants to serve on financial services and natural resource committees in the U.S. House. Tom Lutey reports that Downing sees the financial services committee in particular as a place he could work on issues dealing with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. Newly reelected western district U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke sits on the chamber’s foreign affairs and appropriations committees. Zinke’s foreign affairs work is focused on the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and his appropriations work on energy, military construction, veterans affairs, interior, transportation and housing.
Democrats lost Montana’s statewide and federal races this year but picked up seats against the Republican majority in the Montana House and Senate. Eric Dietrich and Zeke Lloyd report that’s largely due to how elections played out on the state’s newly drawn legislative maps.
Voters split the preferences of liberal and conservative interest groups in electing Montana Supreme Court justices this year. Mara Silvers reports that Broadwater County Attorney Cory Swanson, who had been supported by Republican-aligned groups, and Sidney-area District Court Judge Katherine Bidegaray, who had been backed by progressive groups, won their respective races.
On Our Radar 
Alex — Now that the work frenzy of covering the 2024 election is (mostly) over, I’ll be decompressing this weekend with a hot springs soak and a bit of fiction: Alan Furst’s period piece Night Soldiers, an espionage thriller set in 1930s Europe that’s been languishing on my “to-read” list for months.
Brad — I’ve spent late nights the last few weeks re-reading “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic cult classic about the 1972 presidential election, because, well, tis been the season. It’s hard to say whether it holds up as political reporting, because I’ve never covered a presidential campaign, but it definitely still sparkles with the obsessive hope and terror that has since become calcified in popular discourse around the race to elect a president.
Katie — I found this recent feature in High Country News detailing the effects of declining chinook salmon numbers on an Alaska Native community fascinating — and not just because my dad spent years working on a commercial fishing boat in the area. I particularly enjoyed the immersive descriptions of the village’s traditional fishing practices.
Zeke — Monday’s Veterans Day provides an opportunity to reflect on the sacrifice of Americans who have served and who continue to serve in the armed forces. I plan to reread “Speaking of Courage,” a short story from Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s book, “The Things They Carried,” which presents a peacetime narrative about a soldier’s underwhelming return to a lonely, small-town life.
Mara — It’s still sunny and not too cold to get out on the trails around Helena — a perfect time to binge-listen to good podcasts while hitting them. I’ve been enjoying Question Everything, a rumination on journalism from former This American Life producer Brian Reed. Friends have told me it’s listenable and intriguing for people outside of our perhaps-damned profession, too. Give it an ear and let me know what you think.
Eric — It’s been one hell of a week. Here’s a video of my puppy playing in our newsroom on election night.
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