By the time the 2025 session of the Montana Legislature concludes in late April or early May, the state’s 150 lawmakers will have cast thousands of votes on proposals affecting everything from property taxes to pet insurance to human health care, ultimately forwarding hundreds of bills to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte.
The often-turbulent legislative firehose is a lot to keep track of even if you’re a seasoned journalist or lobbyist working in the Capitol — much less if you’re an everyday Montanan trying to follow what your representatives are doing from elsewhere in the state. The sheer volume of bills, votes and debate that flows through the Capitol halls can quite easily sweep a casual observer off their feet.
Launching for the 2025 session today, our digital Capitol Tracker guide is intended to offer a lifeline in that storm, helping Montanans ranging from Capitol insiders to bewildered citizens make sense of the quantifiable aspects of legislative proceedings. (For insight on the unquantifiable ones, subscribe to Tom Lutey’s Capitolized newsletter.)
The digital guide mirrors information presented on the Legislature’s newly revamped official website, but is intended to load faster and be easier to use, especially on mobile phones. We’re also able to supplement the sometimes-terse official data with additional information such as links to stories MTFP reporters have written about particular bills or analyses of specific lawmakers’ voting records.
You can find the guide here:
This year’s version of the tracker will be largely familiar to readers who used the 2023 edition. However, we’ve had to rework much of the logic that moves information around behind the scenes (sometimes repeatedly) to accommodate the new legislative website’s various birthing pains. As part of that work, we’ve also removed a few features we had on the prior edition while we think through how we can reconceptualize them.
As of today, the 2025 tracker includes the following functionality:
A page with information for each introduced bill (all 664 of them as of this writing), including the sponsor and the bill’s progression through the various legislative hurdles that stand between a bill and its enactment as law. Bill pages also include links to the full bill text and proposed amendments, as well as fiscal and legal notes for bills that have them.
A page for each of the Legislature’s 100 representatives and 50 senators, including their public contact information, their committee assignments, a list of bills they’ve sponsored and the results of their most recent election. Those pages also include an analysis of how often lawmakers are voting with their Republican and Democratic colleagues.
Lookup tools that let you search bills by title and number and lawmakers by name. You can also look up your district’s lawmakers by entering your address.
A couple of other notes: Due to the sheer volume of information included in the Capitol Tracker and our ongoing efforts to work with the new legislative website, we expect we’ll have a few bugs to sort out in the coming weeks. We’d greatly appreciate your help (and patience) on that front.
Additionally, while we already have some plans for features we’re hoping to add in the coming weeks, we’d love to hear suggestions about ways we could make this tool more useful to you.
You can reach our data team, Data Reporter Jacob Olness and Deputy Editor Eric Dietrich, at [email protected] and [email protected].
TAKE A LOOK: MTFP’s 2025 Capitol Tracker.
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