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October 23, 2025
If there was even a crumb of positive information for Democrats following their 2024 drubbing in statewide races, it was that unseated former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, despite losing the state by 43,000 votes, still carried the day in the 16 counties comprising Montana’s western U.S. House District.
“Tester won the West” is the assurance being offered to voters by candidates who say their best chance of flipping a federal seat in 2026 is to oust Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, though Zinke won a rubber match against Democratic candidate Monica Tranel by 24,746 votes; In 2022, Zinke defeated Tranel by 7,837 votes.
The strategy involves retail politics, knocking on a lot of doors to earn face time with voters, particularly in rural areas where Democrats’ vote share has tanked.
“I’m in St. Regis,” said Russell Cleveland, one of two Democratic candidates running in the western district. “It’s very rural, a town of 400 people, very spread out, but that’s a lot of towns in Montana. You have your post office, a couple of bars and a school. But then most people live out on some acreage and kind of keep to themselves. It makes it hard to communicate with those people and they don’t feel represented.”
Even in the 16 counties making up the western U.S. House district, results for Democrats were woefully low in the 2024 Senate race. Voters turned out against Tester almost 2 to 1 in half of those counties, according to state election data. In Sanders and Lincoln counties, Tester’s share of the vote was less than 28%.
The main reason Democrats seek face time with voters is to counter the unpopularity of their party nationally, said Jeremy Johnson, political science department chair at Carroll College in Helena. When Republicans are relying on a national message, as they did with border security in 2024, working the doorsteps as a retail candidate can be brutal.
“The nationalization of politics, which is really what’s been going on for some time, it’s become extreme in the last 10 years, especially since the rise of Donald Trump. It’s really hurt Democrats in states like Montana,” Johnson said. “You lose that local flavor. You lose the local issues, which could really help individual Democratic candidates stand out. Nationalization really just consumes anything local.”
Conditions might be more favorable this midterm cycle as the consequences of Washington, D.C., politics are felt locally, as the economy sputters and prices for must-have items like health care and electricity continue to rise sharply.
“Probably the voters who are most willing to move or be persuaded are those who are willing to vote, or even just to sit at home based on how they feel economically,” Johnson said. “There’s already a lot of evidence that a large segment of the workforce has not been doing well. Financially, wage growth has not been great for as many as three-fifths of workers. It’s gone on for decades, but it’s been accentuated recently by tariffs and lackluster job growth. You take that together with high housing prices and higher insurance prices for low-income individuals. That affects different sorts of people.”
Matt Rains, a Simms rancher running as a Democrat in the western House district, said there needs to be more discussion with voters about the pending cuts to health care subsidies, stemming from Medicaid cuts approved by Republicans in Congress last summer. Restoring those funds is what Senate Democrats say they are currently holding out for in their government shutdown standoff with Republicans.
“That is the real threat that’s coming down on us, our rural clinics. They’re going to start closing. The Medicaid cuts coming from the Big Beautiful Bill, those really threaten us,” Rains said. “And so, we need to have a voice that makes sure that we can actually afford health care.”
While congressional Democrats warn that Medicaid cuts could edge 300 rural hospitals toward closure, Republicans point to a $50 billion fund created to provide state-administered grants to rural hospitals.
The challenge baked into the western district for Democrats is that in past elections, there were simply more Republican House votes. The district doesn’t include Helena, in part because Lewis and Clark County commissioners opposed splitting the city and the rest of the county into two areas back in 2021 when the district was created.
“They really had to get Helena in there,” Johnson said. “Not Lewis and Clark County, Helena. By not getting the Democratic-leaning voters of Helena in there, it does have a Republican edge.”
Montana’s two congressional districts were approved 3 to 2 by the state’s redistricting and apportionment commission. The districts were proposed by Republicans who successfully argued that in two statewide House races back in Montana’s single-district days, Democrats carried the west. Those races both involved congressional runs by current Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, who defeated Democrats Rob Quist in the 2017 special election and Kathleen Williams in the 2018 general election. The Democrats on the commission argued that the district as approved favored Republicans by 7%, which is what Zinke won by in 2024 with Donald Trump on the ballot, though Zinke won by just 4% in 2022.
— Tom Lutey
New Legislative districts take two
Speaking of redistricting, voters will get a second helping of state Senate districts redrawn after the 2020 U.S.Census. Senate terms are four years. Half of the state’s 50 Senate districts on the ballot in 2024 were newly drawn; the other half of the new crop are on the ballot in 2026.
Democrats and Republicans who were on the redistricting commission tell Capitolized to keep an eye on legislative districts in Great Falls. The Electric City was once a legislative stronghold for Democrats, but Republicans have built a majority there over the last decade.
All three Senate districts overlapping the city are on the ballot this cycle. Senate District 10, which is central Great Falls, would have favored Republicans by just 184 votes in elections from 2016 through 2020. A closer look under the hood shows one of the two House districts within SD 10 breaking for the Democratic candidate in 2024, despite going plus-5 for Donald Trump in the presidential race. Rep. Jane Weber, D-Great Falls, won that House District a year ago. The other House District in SD 10 is held by incumbent Republican Melissa Nikolakakos, who briefly filed to run in SD 10, where the current Republican incumbent Jeremy Trebas is termed out. Nikolakakos has since filed for reelection in HD 20.
The other Senate district to keep an eye on is Senate District 29, a swath of Park and Gallatin counties that in 2024 produced one of the closest Montana House races in the last decade. Bozeman Democrat Scott Rosenzweig won that race for HD 57. The same area is likely to produce a tough Senate race for Republicans, who maintained control of the area during the 2025 Legislature, which ended in early May. Republican Sen. John Esp, of Big Timber, “the dean of the Senate,” was assigned to SD 29 for the 2025 session, but is termed out. There are no early filers for the Senate district, which in past elections would have favored Democrats by a few hundred votes.
Democrats picked up 12 legislative seats in 2024 because of new political mapping.
— Tom Lutey
PROGRAMMING NOTE: The online edition of the Oct. 9, 2025, Capitolized was updated to include the Legislative Audit Division finding that Scott Osterman’s reimbursed travel expenses didn’t violate state travel policy.
