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September 11, 2025
Montana Democrats will pick new leaders when they meet this weekend in Livingston.
The party’s three-term chair, Robin Driscoll, isn’t seeking reelection. Three candidates are vying for the chair, but delegates will first have to vote on a motion to immediately adjourn, an apparent attempt to avoid several proposed changes to party rules, said Jesse Mullen, the party’s 2024 candidate for secretary of state.
Mike Jopek, of Whitefish, who farms in the Flathead Valley and served four terms in the Montana Legislature, is a chair candidate. He’s joined by former state Sen. Shannon O’Brien, of Missoula, who was the party’s 2024 candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction and the education adviser to Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock from 2013 through 2015. The third candidate is Max Johansen, chair of the Park County Democrats, who is campaigning for both chair and vice chair of the state party. Johansen is also a Livingston City Commission candidate. The city race will be decided in November.
Montana Democrats are headed to their convention without a federal or statewide officeholder, a very rare occurrence in Montana history, in the wake of former Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s loss to Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy in 2024. The party hasn’t won a statewide race since Tester’s last win in 2018.
Democrats did pick up a dozen state legislative seats in 2024, the first election using new legislative districts drawn in accordance with the 2020 U.S. census. Several members of the Democratic minority collaborated with Republicans in the House and Senate to renew Montana’s expanded Medicaid program, balance a budget, increase teacher pay and lower property taxes on primary residences. Those bipartisan efforts frustrated the Democratic House minority leader, who wasn’t at the negotiating table, and later said her peers had held more leverage than they used.
In the Senate, Republican President Matt Regier met with his party’s executive board in March to talk about the bipartisan stand of several Senate Republicans. The board then issued a press release announcing that it no longer recognized those lawmakers as Republicans.
—Tom Lutey
The GOP’s latest loyalty test
In June, when Republicans picked new party leadership at their convention in Helena, newly elected MTGOP president Art Wittich promised a vetting of Republican candidates before the June 2026 primary, with the potential for the party to campaign for its preferred candidates.
In August, the GOP’s Conservative Governance Committee, chaired by former state legislator Keith Regier, emailed 14 questions to every Republican legislative candidate who has a registered campaign committee. Party spokesperson Ethan Holmes told Capitolized the questions are designed simply to show where Republican candidates stand.
But incumbent legislators who led a bipartisan effort to pass a state budget and other key bills in the 2025 Legislature are dismissing the questionnaire as a gauge to see whether candidates prioritize the preferences of party leadership over what their constituents want. They’ve made their answers public.
Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, described the questions as an attempt to purge Republicans who disagree with Wittich and the executive board from the party.
The questions were about “taxes, property rights, and government regulation,” Jones said. “But it quickly became clear: it wasn’t really about issues — it was about loyalty. Only ‘approved’ answers, as defined by State Republican Chairman Art Wittich and his cabal, would qualify a candidate as ‘Republican enough.’”
In a newsletter to constituents, Jones recounted how Wittich, as Senate majority leader in 2013, “plotted to purge independent Republicans” from the caucus.
One of the Republicans targeted by hardline conservatives in the 2014 primaries was then-Sen. Duane Ankney, R-Colstrip, who died Sept. 6.
Ankney, a fierce advocate for keeping the coal-fired power plant operating in his adopted hometown, was all about his constituents. He also supported the repeal of Montana’s outdated law against same-sex intercourse in 2013, much to the dismay of his party’s religious right. When Medicaid expansion looked like it was going to fail, Ankney joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers to pass the bill, which was estimated at the time to extend health care coverage to an additional 45,000 Montanans.
In the 2014 primary, Ankney was attacked for supporting gay marriage and a state budget passed in 2013 when he was chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
The Montana GOP platform says “The best government is the government closest to the people,” Jones told his constituents. “But this new committee flips that upside down. Instead of trusting local voters to decide who represents them, party bosses want to enforce their own narrow definition of conservatism. It’s not enough to stand for low taxes, balanced budgets, and property rights — you must stand for them exactly as they prescribe, or you’re out.”
At the GOP officer’s convention where Wittich was appointed, delegates also voted to disenfranchise nine Republican members of the state Senate for their bipartisan work during the legislative session earlier this year.
“At this year’s GOP convention, nine Republican senators were stripped of their voting rights and branded ‘traitors’ for putting their districts first,” Jones said. “In one vote, 130 delegates disenfranchised nearly 190,000 Montanans. Now, with this new ‘loyalty test,’ the purge threatens to spread statewide.”
—Tom Lutey
