Let’s say you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of Montana voters who sit out primary elections, like the one coming up Tuesday. (The state’s primaries typically draw only about half as many voters as general elections in November.) You might think: Why bother? November is when candidates actually win office, after all.
Yes, but also no. Primary elections — especially in a state as dominated by a single party as Montana currently is — carry outsized importance. When a seat is safely Republican, it’s the Republican primary that decides which — and what kind of — Republicans get sent to Washington, D.C., or to Helena. (Same with safely Democratic seats, to the extent that’s even a thing in Montana.) By the time November rolls around, many of the most meaningful decisions will have already been made.
On Tuesday, June 2, a minority of registered Montanans will vote in dozens of primaries, deciding who’ll have a shot at — or in many cases a virtual lock on — seats in Congress, the state Public Service Commission and Montana’s Legislature. By picking winners and losers in competitive GOP primaries, Tuesday’s vote will exert a huge influence on the future direction of the state’s Republican Party. And by choosing standard-bearers for minority-party challenges, it may also help decide the Democratic Party’s future in Montana.
Because a significantly smaller number of Montanans will be making these decisions, you could argue that each primary vote in June carries more weight than a vote in November. With the June 2 primary election approaching, let’s walk through why those votes matter.
No Democrat has been elected to the Public Service Commission, which regulates the utilities that serve (and bill) a majority of Montanans, since 2008. And each of the commission’s five districts, as redrawn in 2023, are majority Republican. That means the victors in Tuesday’s Republican primary are very likely to win the general election.
Primary voting carries a similar weight across much of eastern Montana, which in modern times has sent very few Democrats to the state Legislature, according to political historian Jon Bennion.
“As in much of the rest of the country, non-reservation rural counties in Montana have been almost unanimous in their support of Republican candidates in the current era,” Bennion wrote in the 2026 edition of “Big Sky Politics.”
Even in races that could be competitive in the general election, like the U.S. House seat for Montana’s Western Congressional District, the primary will determine what flavor of Democrat or Republican voters have a chance to send to D.C. in November.
(Independent candidates, like Western District House candidate Kimberly Persico, U.S. Senate candidate Seth Bodnar and Eastern District House candidate Michael Einsenhauer, do not appear on primary ballots because they are not affiliated with a political party. If their signature petitions are certified this summer by the secretary of state, they will appear on the general election ballot in November.)
The partisan-flavor question is even more pronounced in dozens of state legislative races. Dueling Republican factions are competing in primaries across 43 races for the state Legislature, with ideological control of the levers of power in the statehouse at stake.
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Rob Saldin, a political science professor at the University of Montana, notes several high-stakes face-offs that have grown out of that dynamic. One pits incumbent power broker Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, against challenger Rep. Zack Wirth, R-Wolf Creek. Another paints a target on Rep. Ed Buttrey, R-Great Falls, a key architect of Medicaid expansion, who’s facing hardliner-approved former Republican lawmaker Steven Galloway.
Great Falls, which just in the past decade has recently shifted to the right, has a number of high-interest Republican primaries this cycle.
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Though primary elections shape the direction of political parties and often determine local representation, they draw less public interest than general elections.
About half the number of people (roughly 300,000) voted in Montana’s 2024 primary election as voted in the 2024 general (about 600,000). Exacerbating the low participation is the fact that voter turnout is lower across the board during midterm years, like this one, when there’s no publicity-generating presidential race on the ballot.
But the participation dip in primaries also means the ballots cast by Montanans who do vote count even more.
For instance: In the presidential election in 2024, more than half a million Montanans voted on which candidate to support with the state’s four electoral votes. In a state legislative primary, one person’s vote competes for influence with only a few thousand others — or sometimes just a few hundred.
Veterans, low-income voters and voters without a college degree participate less in primary elections, according to the Bipartisan Policy Institute. That means nonveteran, higher-income and more educated voters hold disproportionate sway over which candidates will appear on November ballots.
Primary voters are also more likely to be highly ideological than general election voters, who are more likely to hold casual political preferences. That means primary voters have a bigger hand in steering party identity.
But Saldin notes that as much as news outlets and political analysts like to talk about the importance of primary politics, lots of voters simply aren’t that into it.
“Most people have other interests and other concerns,” Saldin said. “And they aren’t doing a deep dive on Alani Bankhead or Llew Jones’ primary or how the budget gets put together in Helena or any of these things.”
That’s reflected in diminished public participation in primary elections — and provides a healthy dose of perspective for political enthusiasts and pundits.
“It’s always struck me as a little bit of a depressing insight, because it’s so much of what folks like us talk about,” Saldin said.
This story was updated June 2, 2026, to remove an erroneous reference to partisan shift in an Anaconda-area House district.
