This story is excerpted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday.
A couple of years back, longtime Montana reporter Chuck Johnson, whom we lost last week at age 74, sent me a spreadsheet he’d compiled detailing which political party had controlled the Montana House, Senate and governorship year-by-year over the course of the state’s history. Chuck being Chuck, it included figures stretching back nearly to statehood in 1889, painstakingly tallied and color-coded.
I experimented with various techniques to represent his data visually, but unfortunately, I couldn’t complete the project on time to present it to him for publication. However, I revisited the project this week and included the data from this year’s legislative session.
Despite the current stronghold of Republicans in both chambers of the Montana Legislature for over ten years, this has not always been the prevailing situation throughout Montana’s extensive history. Democrats held control over the Montana Senate and shared power in the House with Republicans, as evidenced in the 2005 Legislature, which marked the inauguration of Democrat Brian Schweitzer as governor.
Democrats who feel disheartened by the current state of their party’s political fortunes can find some comfort in the fact that the Legislature is not as heavily dominated by Republicans as it was in the 1920s. For instance, during the 1921 House, there were 98 Republicans out of the 108 available seats. It is worth noting that the Legislature’s size was not set at its present capacity of 100 representatives and 50 senators until the state’s modern Constitution was passed in 1972.
Likewise, those Republicans who anticipate that their existing supremacy in Montana politics will endure indefinitely might benefit from examining the past. In the mid-1930s, Democrats made a remarkable comeback and claimed dominance, holding 81 out of 102 seats in the House in 1937.
Correction: As a result of a production error, a prior version of the graphic in this story mistakenly labeled former Republican governors Stan Stephens, Marc Racicot and Judy Martz as a Democrats. The graphic was updated March 16, 2023. MTFP regrets the mistake.
