Montanas New Governor Could Remake The State
Greg Gianfortes victory is another step in the Republicans ideological conquest of the American West.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
MISSOULA, Mont. This state is now red. Not the light red it used to be not a red-and-blue checkerboard coaxing the eyes to see purple. Just a deep red.
Every statewide race in Montana went Republican this week, with record voter turnout: president, Senate, House, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditor. And both houses of the state Legislature retained a Republican majority. Come 2021, for just the fourth time since 1921, Republicans will hold Montanas house, senate and governorship.
This once proudly nonpartisan state is on the brink of becoming like North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho, where Republicans rule everything and theres no question about whos going to be in power, Mike Dennison, chief political reporter for Montana Television Network, told me.
Montana has had a Democratic governor since 2004, but he and other veterans of the political scene were not surprised by this years result. Just before Election Day, Mr. Dennison predicted that the Democrats would be routed. Republicans have been increasing their strength for the last 30 to 40 years, he told me.
E. Tammy Kim is a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on , and .
Presidential Election In Montana 2020
| Presidential election by state, 2020 |
President Donald Trump won the presidential election in Montana on November 3, 2020.
The Democratic and Republican parties held primary elections in Montana on June 2, 2020. Former Vice President Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, and President Donald Trump won the Republican primary.
Montana was one of seven states with three votes in the Electoral College, making it tied for fewest. Montana was carried by the Republican presidential candidate in every election between 1996 and 2016 the last Democrat to carry the state was Bill Clinton . Between 1900 and 2016, Montana backed the Republican presidential candidate in 66.67% of elections and the Democratic candidate in 33.33%.
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump carried Montana with 56.2% of the vote to Hillary Clinton‘s 35.7% and Gary Johnson‘s 5.6%.
This page includes the following sections:
Presidential election results in Montana, 2020
|
Incumbents are bolded and underlined The results have been certified. |
Total votes: 603,695 |
Montana Democratic presidential primary on June 2, 2020
| Total votes: 149,973 Total pledged delegates: 19 |
Montana Republican presidential primary on June 2, 2020
| Total votes: 213,358 Total pledged delegates: 27 |
Republicans Are Running Unopposed For The State Legislature
The Montana candidates running for office in the 2022 election are filed. Some voters will only see one name on the ballot for their legislative district.
Montana Democrats running for the state Legislature are already facing an uphill battle. Republicans hold a solid majority in both the House and Senate. And in two dozen districts this cycle, Republican candidates will go unchallenged.
Two Democratic candidates are running unopposed.
In a news release, Montana GOP Chairman Don K Kaltschmidt said “one thing is absolutely clear: Republicans in Montana are on track to grow our majorities this November.”
If the party picks up three seats in the Senate and doesn’t lose any in the House, it will hold a supermajority.
Scott McNeil, director of the Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, says his party focused on the quality of candidates rather than filling each race.
So, I think it is a different strategy.
Some Democrats are trying to win back districts lost in the last election.
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Mt Republican Party Platform
This Platform sets forth the Montana Republican Partyâs positions on major issues facing the citizensof the Treasure State. It is meant to communicate what the Party stands for to instruct local, state,and federal GOP officeholders and to serve as a basis for crafting strategies for both legislative andcivic action.
These Are The 10 Most Conservative Cities In Montana For 2019
We used science and data to determine which cities in Montana are probably voting for Trump.
Well this has been one heck of a couple of years for the Republican Party. Never in my life time have I see anything like it given thats a relatively short lifetime, but whos counting?
And now that were headed towards the next big election, we wanted to get a better sense of what parts of Montana would be the most likely to back Donald Trump again.
Specifically, which cities have the highest number of conservative voters in the Treasure State?
In order to do so, we turned our sites on measuring how each city in Montana with populations greater than 5,000 voted and contributed to political campaigns in the past several years. The cities with the highest percentage of voters who voted republican and gave the most to conservatives where named the most conservative cities in the state.
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Voter Fraud Worries Lead Gop Chapter To Count 2020 Mail
A Republican Party chapter in Montana is counting the number of mail-in envelopes received in connection to the 2020 presidential election.
The Missoula County Republican Central Committee agreed to pay up to $5,000 in order to recount mail-in envelopes from November 2020 filed in the county, the Associated Press reported. The count was initiated after a private group not affiliated with the committee said its count indicated that there were about 4,600 more mail-in votes than envelopes used in the election, which was held by mail due to the pandemic.
This count comes amid election-related accusations and skepticism surrounding 2020 vote totals in other states as well. An ongoing battle in Wisconsin began with a report by the state’s Republican Party recommending the decertification of the state’s 2020 election, something that both Democrats and Republicans have said was unconstitutional. In Pennsylvania, a state court struck down the 2019 law that expanded mail-in voting earlier this year, a decision praised by former President Donald Trump, who has been an outspoken detractor of mail-in voting.
According to the AP, the Montana envelope audit began on Monday and is expected to end on Tuesday. The Montana Election Integrity Project, the private group claiming that its 2021 envelope count fell short of the number of votes cast, published a statement urging the county to undergo a full vote recount.
State Political Party Revenue
State political parties typically deposit revenue in separate state and federal accounts in order to comply with state and federal campaign finance laws.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party maintain state affiliates in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and select U.S. territories. The following map displays total state political party revenue per capita for the Republican state party affiliates.
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Presidential Election Voting Record In Montana 1900
Between 1900 and 2016:
- Montana participated in 30 presidential elections.
- Montana voted for the winning presidential candidate 80 percent of the time. The average accuracy of voting for winning presidential candidates for all 50 states in this time frame was 72.31 percent.
- Montana voted Democratic 33.33 percent of the time and Republican 66.67 percent of the time.
Presidential Voting Trends In Montana
A bellwether is any indicator or predictor of something. In presidential electoral politics, states may be considered bellwethers of future electoral outcomes because of how many times they have voted for the winning candidate or party. Below is an analysis of Montana‘s voting record in presidential elections from 1900 to 2020. The state’s accuracy is based on the number of times the state has voted for the winning presidential candidate. The majority of statistical data is from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and compiled, here, by Ballotpedia, unless otherwise noted.
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Montana Republican Rebuked For Saying Socialists Should Be Jailed Or Shot’
State legislator Rodney Garcia insists constitution says socialists should be jailed or shot, according to Billings Gazette
The Republican party of Montana has rebuked a state legislator who insists the US constitution says socialists should be jailed or shot.
According to the Billings Gazette, in responding to a speech in Helena on Friday by former US interior secretary Ryan Zinke, Billings state representative Rodney Garcia said he was concerned about socialists entering our government and socialists everywhere in Billings, before saying the constitution says to either shoot socialists or put them in jail.
According to the paper, Zinke, who served in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2018, replied: You know, Montanas a great state.
Garcia said: We have to do something.
Zinke did not continue the exchange, the Gazette reported.
As the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a Democratic socialist, has surged in the Democratic primary, Donald Trump has focused much of his political messaging on the supposed dangers of socialism.
In his Super Bowl interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, for example, the president said: I think of communism when I think of Bernie I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist.
He also claimed Sanders got married in Moscow. Sanders has called his 10-day visit to Soviet Russia in 1988 a very strange honeymoon.
Asked by the Gazette to clarify his remarks, Garcia was unrepentant.
Foreign Policy And National Defense
Some, including , in the Republican Party support on issues of national security, believing in the ability and right of the United States to act without external support in matters of its national defense. In general, Republican thinking on defense and is heavily influenced by the theories of and , characterizing conflicts between nations as struggles between faceless forces of an international structure as opposed to being the result of the ideas and actions of individual leaders. The realist school’s influence shows in Reagan’s “” stance on the and George W. Bush’s stance.
Since the , many in the party have supported policies with regard to the War on Terror, including the and the . The George W. Bush administration took the position that the do not apply to , while other prominent Republicans strongly oppose the use of , which they view as torture.
Republicans have frequently advocated for restricting foreign aid as a means of asserting the national security and immigration interests of the United States.
The Republican Party generally supports a strong alliance with and efforts to secure peace in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors. In recent years, Republicans have begun to move away from the approach to resolving the . In a 2014 poll, 59% of Republicans favored doing less abroad and focusing on the country’s own problems instead.
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Summary Of Changes To Election Dates And Procedures
Montana modified its absentee/mail-in voting procedures for the November 3, 2020, general election as follows:
- Absentee/mail-in voting: Counties were authorized to conduct the general election entirely by mail.
For a full timeline about election modifications made in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, .
The Gop Claimed Victory On Every Statewide Down
Greg Gianforte joins Donald Trump at a Make America Great Again rally at the Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport.
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For years, Montanans have sneered at out-of-state pundits and journalists who characterized the state as deep red, ignoring its century-old purple hue due to a legacy of union activism and general ticket-splitting pragmatism.
That changed Tuesday. Red now glows as brightly in Montana as it does in the surrounding states of Idaho, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.
Republicans increased their majorities in the both houses of the Legislature. And, with 76 percent of the vote counted Wednesday morning, the GOP claimed all the statewide down-ballot racesattorney general, auditor, secretary of state, and state schools superintendent.
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This split political personality comes through loud and clear in Montanas election results for the past two decades.
The state usually goes Republican in presidential elections, and the GOP has controlled the state Legislature in all but one or two sessions since the early 1990s. But Democrats have proven themselves more than able to win key statewide offices, such as governor and U.S. senator and sometimes have kept things close in the Legislature.
Montana is definitely not Idaho or Wyoming, says Dave Fern, who chairs the Democratic Central Committee in the Republican stronghold of northwest Montanas Flathead County. And Im hoping well stay a lot more diverse than those states for a long time.
Yet while Montanas politics are diverse, veterans of its political trenches worry that partisanship here is hardening, as the red and blue elements become more isolated and entrenched and less apt to work together.
Its a rural-urban dividing line where there are almost no competitive rural seats and almost no competitive urban seats, says Dave Hunter, whos run or helped run numerous statewide Democratic campaigns. If we lose our ability to compromise, then this form of government doesnt work very well. I dont see anything thats changing this trend.
In Bozeman, one of Montanas fastest-growing areas, many of the trends shaping statewide politics are clearly visible.
Editors Note
Is Montana A Red Or Blue State Lots Of Both Actually And Very Much Divided
Bozeman Mayor Jeff Krauss describes the politics of Gallatin County as like a jelly doughnut Democratic blue at its core and Republican red in the outlying areas. The same urban-rural, Democratic-Republican split often defines politics as a whole in the Treasure State, where neither party clearly has the upper hand.
- MIKE DENNISON/Gazette State Bureau photos
Franke Wilmer, a Montana State University political science professor and Bozeman Democrat running for the state Senate, said a growing sector of Montanas voters are independents who can be persuaded to go with either party. The conventional wisdom is that independents lean Republican in Montana, but Wilmer said that may be changing.
- MIKE DENNISON/Gazette State Bureau
Editors note: This is the first installment of a two-day series on the divided political landscape in Montana, which is neither red nor blue, but somewhere in between.
BOZEMAN As Bozeman mayor Jeff Krauss sips his coffee at The Leaf and Bean on Main Street, he compares the politics of his county to something you might find in the coffeehouses pastry case.
If you consider us Gallatin County, were more like a jelly doughnut, with the center being ‘blue’ and the doughnut part being ‘red,’ he said. And Im not sure theres a lot of purple in there. Its mostly either blue or red.
This split political personality comes through loud and clear in Montanas election results for the past two decades.
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Republican Congressional Candidates Face Off In Kalispell Debate
Four of the five Republican candidates for Montanas western U.S. House seat squared off Tuesday in a primary election debate in Kalispell. Mitch Heuer, Matt Jette, Albert Olszewski and Mary Todd attended the debate hosted by the Flathead County Republican Central Committee. Ryan Zinke declined the invitation to the debate, according to the central committee.
Mitch Heuer, Matt Jette, Albert Olszewski and Mary Todd attended the debate hosted by the Flathead County Republican Central Committee. Ryan Zinke declined the invitation to the debate, according to the central committee.
The candidates are running to represent Montana in the newly created 1st Congressional District in western Montana. Over the past two decades Montanans have picked exclusively Republicans to represent them in the U.S. House. Three democrats are running in their partys primary for the Western District.
The Flathead GOP debate started off with former President Donald Trumps hold on the party. Every candidate voiced some level of support for Trump. Heuer, Olszewski and Todd repeated baseless claims of fraud during the 2020 election.
So, yes I think this election was stolen, and who in their right mind would allow a baby to be stolen and not try to get it back, Todd said.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Jette also differed in saying that U.S. ground forces should be sent in to help fight the Russian army in Ukraine.
