After months of hard-fought battles between two factions of the Montana Republican Party, it appears that each camp of the GOP won a significant number of races in Tuesday’s primary election, according to results from The Associated Press.
Divisions among Montana’s Republican legislators — which led to these fierce and expensive primary battles — have been one of the hallmark features of the state’s politics in recent years. On Tuesday evening, these contests were some of the most closely watched in the state, in part because millions of dollars poured into these races on both sides.
These races included more centrist Republican incumbents who were running against farther-right candidates backed by the Montana Republican Party, despite the fact that it is rare for state parties to involve themselves in elections before the primary.
Very few legislative districts are toss-ups in the general election, meaning that many of these Republican candidates who won the primary are likely to win the seat in November.
Leaders of both factions expressed satisfaction with the outcomes Wednesday morning.
“I think it was a good night,” Montana Republican Party Chairman Art Wittich said in an email to the MTFP, adding that the state is on its way “to a Bright. Red. Future.”
Arguably the most prominent contest was between Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, and Rep. Zack Wirth, R-Wolf Creek. Jones, the leader of the centrist faction and a longtime thorn in the side of the far-right, prevailed in the race for Senate District 9 by 4 points, according to The Associated Press.
Jones called the contests “ugly,” but said that “it was a good night overall” for the centrists.
Rep. George Nikolakakos beat Public Service Commissioner Randy Pinocci by a resounding 36 percentage points in the Republican primary race for Senate District 12 in Great Falls. Like Jones, Nikolakakos leans more moderate and has been at odds with the Montana GOP.
One key race between a centrist and a firebrand conservative was still tight and had not been called as of Wednesday morning, however. In Senate District 43, Rep. David Bedey, an ally of Jones and a member of the centrist faction, was leading Rep. Kathy Love by 1.2 percentage points, or 76 votes, with 99% of votes tallied.
On the other side of the Republican divide, moderate Rep. Linda Reksten, R-Polson, lost by 29 points to 20-year-old college student Finley Warden — who aimed to challenge her conservative bonafides from the right — in their contest for the statehouse. Rep. John Fitzpatrick, R-Anaconda, another incumbent Republican who was competing with a state party-backed hardliner, lost his primary, also by 21 points, in a House race to Trish Schreiber, The Associated Press reported.
Former Republican Rep. Steven Galloway beat Rep. Ed Buttrey by 32 percentage points in the race for Great Falls’ Senate District 11. Galloway is another staunch Republican who is aligned with the Montana GOP; he testified last summer that he wanted moderates expelled from the state GOP. Buttrey, meanwhile, was the main architect behind maintaining Medicaid expansion in Montana at the 2025 legislative session, a chief policy goal among Democrats and centrist Republicans that was opposed by hard-right Republicans.
Jason Ellsworth, a state senator who has been embroiled in scandal and an ongoing criminal case, lost his Republican primary for the state House against a Freedom Caucus candidate. Ellsworth is not a historically moderate legislator, but he aligned himself with the more centrist faction in the Senate in 2025.
RELATED
Who’s spending big to define ‘Republican’ in the 2027 Legislature?
Outside spending in Montana’s 2026 legislative races is dominated by four PACs. Who’s behind them, and what do they want?
Former Senate President Ellsworth lost to Rep. Jerry Schillinger, R-Circle, by nearly 72 percentage points. With 99% of votes reported, Ellsworth secured 483 votes compared to Schillinger’s 2,949.
Ellsworth has represented Ravalli County since 2019, but he was running for a district hundreds of miles away in Eastern Montana by using an address in Ismay where he said he splits his time.
Ellsworth allegedly tried to secure a no-bid contract for a longtime friend using state money he had control over, which spurred his Senate colleagues to ban him for life from the chamber and led to an ongoing criminal case brought by the Montana Department of Justice. Ellsworth pleaded not guilty in that case.
Some of these primary contests have been over a year in the making.
Republicans at the Capitol came to blows on the first day of the 2025 legislative session when nine more centrist Republican senators allied with Democrats, creating a pseudo majority coalition that put hardline Republicans in an effective minority.
Those intra-party divisions also created divisions with the state GOP and lasted for the next four months the legislators were in Helena. The coalition, with the help of allied Republicans in the House, passed a number of policies — such as Medicaid expansion, a $900 million trust fund and their preferred property tax measure — that enraged the hardliners.
RELATED
Why some Republican legislative candidates are attracting longtime Democratic donors
When the 2025 session ended, many lawmakers, lobbyists and political observers questioned whether a similar cross-party coalition of Republicans and Democrats would take shape in 2027 when legislators gavel back in. The recent campaign spending of some donors indicates that a strategic effort to ensure bipartisan alliances may already be underway.
After it was clear that the alliance between the nine GOP senators and Democrats was enduring the pressures of the Legislature, the Montana Republican Party disowned the nine senators and said they would withhold support from their future campaigns. It is rare for the state party to weigh in on primaries.
On the heels of the 2025 legislative session, Jeff Essmann, a Republican who served in the Legislature from 2005 to 2017, which also included numerous battles among his party, predicted these intense primaries.
“My experience is that these kinds of divisions lead to spirited primaries,” Jeff Essmann told Lee Newspapers at the time.
Multiple onlookers have said it was one of the nastiest sessions they’d seen in recent political history.
“This is probably one of the most contentious primaries I’ve seen in my legislative career from 2012, no doubt about it,” said Sen. Greg Hertz, chairman of the Republican Legislative Campaign Committee.
In Gallatin County, a pair of far-right conservative brothers, Rep. Caleb Hinkle, who is running in Senate District 34, and Rep. Jedediah Hinkle, running in House District 67, beat their more moderate opponents by 47 and 41 points, respectively.
In the race for Senate District 34, Hinkle bested Sen. Shelley Vance, the only senator out of nine who was up for reelection in the same district. Jedediah Hinkle beat out Belgrade’s longest-serving mayor.
According to his initial analysis, Jones said that he believes that members of his centrist faction largely succeeded in their primaries where turnout was high, and lost in districts where it was lower.
Jones explained that once absentee ballots were sent out, he and his campaign team started an onslaught of calls to registered voters who had not yet returned their ballots in an effort to drive turnout. “It’s just a brutal dance to try to turn people out,” Jones said.
Asked how he felt after his victory, he said, “tired.”