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March 5, 2026
Posting losses in Kalispell’s 2025 municipal elections wasn’t just humiliating for Flathead County Republicans — it was dumbfounding. This month they did something about it.
The northwest Montana community is known for punching above its weight in Republican politics. Fourth among Montana counties in population, Flathead is second in Republican votes. Only Yellowstone County, with 58,000 more residents, produces more Republican votes in statewide elections.
So losing the mayor’s race and three of eight City Commission seats to liberals in the 2025 November election was little like the Harlem Globetrotters losing to the Washington Generals. The Flathead Valley is home to both Montana Senate President Matt Regier and Montana GOP Chair Art Wittich, who was elected less than a year ago on a promise to make Montana “more red.”
Infuriated by the local losses, Republicans in the Flathead business community captured 48 Republican precinct seats on March 4, this year’s candidate filing deadline. By law, each political party has to offer a male seat and a female seat to residents in every voting precinct. Precinct captains are the voting members of county central committees. They elect county and state party leadership. Precinct seats often go empty because behind-the-scenes work in party politics is typically thankless. If you get to march in the parade, it is usually to clean up after the pachyderms. The mass filers kept their powder dry until the final minutes of the filing window, which assured that they became uncontested candidates.
“What we’re seeing is a grassroots reaction to what happened in November,” said Kisa Davison, a Republican businesswoman who campaigned in Kalispell’s nonpartisan mayor’s race, but emerged defeated by liberal candidate Ryan Hunter and frustrated that the local Republican Party hadn’t done more to signal which candidate was theirs. “A lot of people decided that enough was enough. The people who had been at the helm for too long failed us,” Davison said.
Davison was among the upstart filers for the precinct seats. For lack of a primary election competitor, she will become committeewoman for Precinct 27. Davison’s husband, Travis, will be Precinct 27 committeeman. No one will be officially seated until sometime after primary election voting ends Tuesday, June 2.
While 48 of the filers are running unopposed, a few seats will be contested.
Giuseppe “GMan” Caltabiano is challenging Wittich for Republican committeeman of Precinct 5, which includes Whitefish. Roxanne Ross is challenging Candace Wittich, Art Wittich’s wife, for committeewoman in the same precinct.
Caltabiano also serves on the Whitefish City Council and owns a business in Kalispell. He told Capitolized that he first ran for City Council after hitting a pothole in his sports car. He concluded that complaining was pointless. It was better to get elected to City Council and get the pothole fixed.
Now the Flathead Republican Party has a political pothole that needs fixing, Caltabiano said, which is why he’s running.
Businesses in Kalispell were expecting a Republican mayor and council, said Corinne Kuntz, who runs a daycare business in town. She said it has become increasingly difficult to navigate city rules for things like business landscaping. Just getting approval to plant shrubbery was becoming tedious.
Kuntz expected her local Republican Party to promote Kalispell conservatives for office. When that support didn’t materialize early and loudly, she grew frustrated.
“I ran for Precinct 42 committeewoman because I’m done watching decisions get made about our community by people who don’t feel the day-to-day consequences. I’m a local business owner in childcare — something many communities now recognize as essential infrastructure — and I’ve lived firsthand how unpredictable processes, shifting interpretations, and avoidable city-imposed costs can stall projects and hurt working families.”
Visiting with contractors who work in several Montana cities, Kuntz learned that several preferred working in Bozeman, which she said has more strict regulations but a clearer process.
Leading up to the election, business owners grew frustrated that the Flathead Republican Party wasn’t doing more to support Davison. The local party had formed a candidate vetting committee that concluded Davison didn’t have enough experience to get the party’s endorsement. Davison told Capitolized she was shocked that her years of business experience and participation on a local business committee weren’t enough.
Then the Republican vetting committee weighed the merits of endorsing Sid Daoud, the former chairman of the Montana Libertarian Party and 2024 Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate. Daoud was already a City Council member and had run for Kalispell mayor once before.
Republicans like Daoud, who produced an endorsement from former U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, who has a following in the Flathead.
The Flathead County Republican Party chair is Al Olszewski, who tells Capitolized that backing Davison was complicated. The committee as a whole voted on the second Thursday in October to recommend, not endorse, Davison for the job. After the vote, the committee produced flyers for precinct officers to hand out if they so chose. Davison’s campaign then asked for the flyers, which were provided. The flyers, Davison supporters told Capitolized, appeared to be printed on white copy paper. “Kisa is brand-new to the process. She was on a board, I think one city board, and didn’t jump into the race until late,” Olszewski said.
“Kisa is brand-new to the process. She was on a board, I think one city board, and didn’t jump into the race until late,” Olszewski said.
The mayor’s race is nonpartisan and Daoud had experience. So, Republicans heard him out, Olszewski said.
The race’s nonpartisan status was also a challenge.
“We can’t endorse — best we could do is recommend. So, our hands are really tied as a political party,” Olszewski said. “What can we really do? It’s a city race, and we’re a county organization. As the chairman of the party, I encourage everybody to get involved as precinct captains, get involved in your school elections, and if it’s your city, you should be involved.”
The issue of endorsements in nonpartisan races is a bone of contention in Republican politics. Conservatives in the 2025 Montana Legislature tried and failed to make Montana’s currently nonpartisan judicial elections partisan.
The same law that governs nonpartisan judicial elections governs nonpartisan municipal elections. A candidate in a nonpartisan race cannot declare a party affiliation and cannot signal to voters that they are Republican, Democrat or Libertarian.
The nonpartisan endorsements question has been battled all the way to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded in 2017 that Montana’s political parties have a First Amendment right to endorse candidates. And that the state is within its rights to prohibit candidates in nonpartisan races from using party endorsements.
The lawsuit that settled the endorsement issue involved Mark French, a candidate for Justice of the Peace in Sanders County, which neighbors the Flathead.
French wanted to use the endorsement of the Sanders County Republican Central Committee, which was chaired by French’s wife. The state Judicial Conduct Committee forbade French from using the endorsement.
French lost, but in the process the Republican Party secured its right to free speech in nonpartisan races.
—Tom Lutey
Bozeman’s Jeremy Carl withdraws from consideration as assistant U.S. secretary of state
Jeremy Carl, a conservative provocateur at the Claremont Institute think tank and President Donald Trump’s nominee for assistant U.S. secretary of state, foreclosed on the bid Tuesday following criticism by members of a Senate confirmation committee of the Bozeman resident’s musings about “anti-white racism.”
Announcing his withdrawal from consideration on X, Carl said he doesn’t have the necessary support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Carl didn’t name names, but Republican Sen. John Curtis, of Utah, made his opposition clear after Carl’s confirmation hearing in February, at which Curtis questioned Carl’s opinion about the United States spending too much time on Israel.
“I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about Jews unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis told Deseret News.
Carl suggested on social media Tuesday that Republicans who didn’t support his nomination deserved scrutiny from their constituents.
“Our voters need to pay attention in primaries and if you have a good Senator, make sure that Senator is holding his weaker colleagues’ feet to the fire,” Carl wrote.
Carl’s nomination was brought to the committee by Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines, a Foreign Relations Committee member who offered Carl a warm introduction, describing him as a fellow Bozeman resident with a shared admiration for Ronald Reagan.
Lawmakers opposing Carl raised questions about the views expressed in Carl’s 2024 book “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”
Though Daines introduced Carl to the committee, he posted no comments about Carl on his Senate webpage, where he has frequently commented on other Trump-nominated Montanans, most recently federal judge nominee Katie Lane, U.S. District Court Judge Bill Mercer, and former Montana U.S District Attorney Kurt Alme. Alme later emerged as Daines’s chosen candidate for U.S. Senate after Daines withdrew his reelection bid at the last minute on March 4.
Similarly, Montana Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, who sometimes commends Trump nominees in tandem with Daines, made no official mention of Carl and doesn’t seem to have posted about Carl on social media.
Daines did not respond to a request for comment on Carl’s withdrawal.
This isn’t the first time Carl’s government appointments have drawn criticism.
In 2022, when Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte appointed Carl to the board of Humanities Montana, the appointee was decried for what critics called transphobic remarks and for suggesting that nonwhite immigrants were being allowed into the United States to replace whites.
—Tom Lutey
The initiatives initiative
Montanans attempting to secure the right to change state laws via citizen initiative won a Supreme Court ruling last week against Attorney General Austin Knudsen.
The group Montanans Decide can now proceed to gather signatures for Ballot Initiative 8, which would make it a constitutional right to change laws through initiative and referendum.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on March 6 to reverse Knudsen’s decision that BI-8 was legally insufficient for signature gathering. The attorney general had concluded Dec. 4, 2025, that the initiative would present voters with too many constitutional changes.
The court concluded that BI-8 doesn’t violate the “separate vote law” cited by Knudsen. Montana’s separate vote law prohibits the bundling of multiple proposed constitutional changes into a single vote.
The law, which applies only to proposed constitutional amendments, states that voters must be able to decide on changes to the Constitution one at a time, both to avoid confusion and to prevent voters from being pushed into all-or-none decisions.
“BI-8 does not combine distinct, unrelated constitutional subjects in a manner that forces voters to trade one amendment for another,” Justice Katherine Bidegaray wrote in the majority opinion.
Knudsen had also appended a fiscal statement to BI-8, forecasting future litigation costs for the state. The court ruled that the attorney general lacks the authority to append a fiscal statement to a constitutional initiative.
Associate Justice Jim Rice and Chief Justice Cory Swanson dissented, agreeing with Knudsen that BI-8 presents distinct changes to the Constitution that aren’t closely related.
As written, BI-8 “reserves to the people the powers of initiative and referendum. This act amends the Constitution to protect this fundamental right from unjustified interference by the government. Specifically, this act requires impartial, predictable, open, and timely process for ballot issues, including approving petitions and ballot statements, resolving legal challenges, and verifying signatures. It requires the state to allow ample time for signature gathering, prohibits disqualification of petitions because of minor or technical issues, and allows voters to withdraw their signatures if they so choose.”
Rice concluded that the parts of BI-8 protecting public initiatives were not closely related to BI-8 restrictions on government involvement in initiative matters, including campaigning for or against an initiative.
In his dissent, Rice said the Supreme Court in 2022 upheld the right of the state Board of Regents to support passage of the six-mill levy, a statewide property tax to fund the Montana University System that appears on ballots once every decade.
“We rejected the contention that Regent Martha Sheehy had violated the ethics code by making statements of support of the six-mill levy,” Rice said. The court had concluded that Sheehy had constitutional authority to explain her position on the ballot issue.
Swanson concurred with Rice but said in a separate dissent that BI-8 also limits judicial powers by setting timelines at two different stages for how lawsuits against an initiative must be processed.
“The ballot language mandates that no matter how Gordian the legal knot may be, the court proceeding shall be completed within 90 days of the initial submission of the ballot issue to the government (not submission to the court) for the pre-signature phase and not later than the ballot submission deadline for the post-signature phase,” Swanson wrote.
Yet another issue was how deadlines for challenging initiatives would change the right of petition opponents to sue, Swanson wrote.
“On the other side of every ballot issue lawsuit is an opponent who enjoys a due process right to a fair procedure based on that case’s circumstances, so the matter can be fully adjudicated by the court,” Swanson wrote.
Bidegaray argued in the majority opinion that the BI-8 language drawing Rice and Swanson’s dissent is “related” to provisions protecting the public’s right to change laws through initiative because judicial timelines and limits on government involvement protect the initiative’s main objective.
“Today, we are celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Ballot Initiative 8 and its refusal to allow political interference in the ballot initiative process,” Montanans Decide spokesperson SK Rossi said in a Feb. 27 statement. “We hope this puts an end to Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s attempts to use his powers to stop ballot issues he doesn’t like. Voters, not politicians, should decide which issues reach the ballot. The state Constitution reserves that right for the people of Montana.”
Knudsen has not responded to a Feb. 27 request for comment.
—Tom Lutey
The story was updated March 13, 2026, to include specific Republican committee action concerning the 2025 Kalispell mayoral race.
