Montana
Montana Republicans gather for kickoff event in Great Falls
Republicans from across Montana gathered in Great Falls on Friday to kick off the 2026 campaign cycle, highlighting taxes and judicial reform as issues the party is looking to address.
The Montana GOP Winter Kickoff is a two-day event and includes campaign training, networking opportunities and discussion. An inter-party debate over property taxes is set for Saturday afternoon, an issue that has divided Republicans in the state.
Multiple guest speakers, including U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke and Robert Natelson, a constitutional scholar at the Federalist Society, spoke on Friday afternoon. Gov. Greg Gianforte and Judge Dan Wilson, running for a Supreme Court seat, are expected to speak on Friday night.
Natelson, appearing remotely, spoke about Constitutional Initiative 132, which would change the state’s constitution to protect a nonpartisan judiciary. He is a former University of Montana law professor and twice ran for governor.
The state supreme court has been partisan in favor of Democrats, Natelson said, echoing a Republican theme in the Montana Legislature.
“The fault here is not with the legislature,” Natelson said Friday. “Republican legislators have not been deliberately or inadvertently passing unconstitutional bills. The problem arises because the courts are both misinterpreting the state constitution and because they are ignoring their own rule that democratically adopted laws must be sustained unless they’re proved unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Natelson then launched into examples of overturned bills, several of which dealt with LGBTQ+ issues and others regarding voting laws.
Republicans have tried to legislate bathroom use, transgender athletes and medical treatment for minors with the bills, saying they’re protecting women, but human rights activists have decried some legislation as “devastating” to that community.
Courts have overturned or paused some of the bills, calling several — including SB 99, a ban on gender-affirming care, and another, House Bill 121, dealing with who can go in what bathroom — “discriminatory.”
However, Republicans have also praised certain decisions by state courts, including recently when Judge Christopher Abbott, a Lewis and Clark County District Court judge, ruled for the state party in a decision that said it had the right to strip voting rights from more moderate members of the party.
Montana GOP Chairman Art Wittich spoke on that during Friday remarks.
“It’s not very often you get a district court judge from Helena, Montana, to rule for Republicans,” Wittich said.
As a rule, Republicans see a judiciary stacked against their agenda.
“The attack of the Montana Legislature by leftist litigators and the state judiciary is unprecedented in its scope and audacity anywhere in the United States, anytime in history,” Natelson said.
Natelson went on to point to North Carolina as an example for Montana Republicans. The state switched to partisan judge races, and that state’s supreme court flipped to a Republican majority in two election cycles, he said.
“I urge you to consider CI-132, against that backdrop,” Natelson said.
Zinke, meanwhile, spoke of what President Donald Trump has done during his first year back in office, speaking about immigration, gas prices and decried “fraud, waste and abuse” while pointing to Minnesota.
He also signaled his support for the SAVE Act, which would require some form of proof of citizenship to vote, which could include a birth certificate or passport.
Zinke pointed to a California policy that allows those without proof of legal presence to obtain a driver’s licence.
“You can’t vote twice, and you have to show an ID, a Real ID, in order to vote,” Zinke said of the SAVE Act. “Now in California, you can get a California driver’s license, and you can be illegal. So that’s why you have to show the US citizen ID. You have to show that you’re actually a citizen.”
Advocates of the California policy have pointed to its impacts helping immigrants find better jobs, helping the economy and less criminalization of their daily lives.
Zinke said he is a supporter of NATO, but wants other countries to “pay their share.” He also said progressives are angry, going on to say he hoped differences could be settled over “a beer or a root beer.”
“Sometimes we go across Montana and the other side is angry,” Zinke said. “They’re angry because their world that they thought was being created, DEI and men playing women’s sports, and everyone equal, not on the basis of hard work and merit, but just equal in checks in the mail. You know it’s being crushed under Trump, and I’m happy it’s being crushed.”
The Montana Republican Legislative Campaign Committee also held a brief press conference to introduce candidates, with Wittich, Sen. Greg Hertz, of Polson, and House Speaker Brandon Ler, from Savage, all speaking.
“There’s some crazy ideology that the Democrats are pushing, and so the Republicans have responded to that, but as far as general themes, it’s taxing and spending,” Wittich said. “It’s the same old thing.”
Montana
Montana Lottery Mega Millions, Big Sky Bonus results for May 8, 2026
The Montana Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at May 8, 2026, results for each game:
Winning Mega Millions numbers from May 8 drawing
37-47-49-51-58, Mega Ball: 16
Check Mega Millions payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Big Sky Bonus numbers from May 8 drawing
09-14-18-20, Bonus: 16
Check Big Sky Bonus payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from May 8 drawing
14-16-21-43-51, Bonus: 03
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
When are the Montana Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 8:59 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 9 p.m. MT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lucky For Life: 8:38 p.m. MT daily.
- Lotto America: 9 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
- Big Sky Bonus: 7:30 p.m. MT daily.
- Powerball Double Play: 8:59 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Montana Cash: 8 p.m. MT on Wednesday and Saturday.
- Millionaire for Life: 9:15 p.m. MT daily.
Missed a draw? Peek at the past week’s winning numbers.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Great Falls Tribune editor. You can send feedback using this form.
Montana
“It’s Life Alert or rent”: Montana trailer park tenants are on rent strike
Mobile home residents in Bozeman, Montana, say they’re being forced to choose between paying rent and paying medical costs.Courtesy of Jered McCafferty
35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.
On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer.
Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord.
Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing.
For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said.
Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions.
“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”
For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move.
The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.
This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.
Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”
Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.”
Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.
Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.
Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.
“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”
Montana
Montana’s fastest man who started as a walk on
MISSOULA, Mt. — Karsen Beitz arrived at Montana with no scholarship offers, one remaining walk-on spot and no guarantee that his track career would last.
Now, the former Sentinel High School standout is one of the fastest athletes in Montana history.
Beitz, a Missoula native and junior sprinter for the Grizzlies, has turned an unlikely college opportunity into a record-setting career. He owns Montana’s 100-meter and 200-meter program records and enters next week’s Big Sky Conference Outdoor Championships as one of the top sprinters in the league.
Coming out of high school, Beitz was a football and track athlete without a Division I offer.
“I was upset about it,” Beitz said. “But at the same time, I was fine with just going to college and living a normal college life.”
That changed after conversations between Sentinel coach Dylan Reynolds and Montana coach Doug Fraley.
“You may not think he’s a D-I prospect based on his times,” Reynolds told Fraley, “but I’m just telling you, if he gets in the right program, he’s going to be a D-I runner.”
Fraley had one walk-on spot left on his roster. He brought Beitz into his office, talked with him and decided to take a chance.
“I liked him. We had a good conversation, so I decided to give him the last walk-on spot,” Fraley said. “I’m sure glad I did.”
Beitz became a Division I athlete in his hometown, but his first goal was modest. He wanted to prove he belonged and earn a scholarship.
He did that quickly.
As a freshman, Beitz placed at the Big Sky Outdoor Championships and helped Montana’s 4×100-meter relay reach the podium with a school-record performance.
“There was no doubt he earned that scholarship,” Fraley said.
Beitz continued to climb in 2025. He placed second in the 200 meters at the Big Sky indoor meet, but a hamstring injury kept him out of the outdoor championships.
“It sucked to deal with,” Beitz said. “But I’m young and still had two years left, so I shifted my mindset to how I could come out these next two years.”
He has not looked back.
Beitz won the 200 meters at the 2026 Big Sky indoor championships, the first individual conference title of his track career. His time of 21.09 seconds edged Idaho State’s Alex Conner by one-hundredth of a second.
“I think the best part about it was seeing how happy Doug was,” Beitz said. “He was jumping up and down, gave me a big hug. After last year, I knew what I was capable of, so to go out there and do it was amazing.”
Then came the outdoor season.
In April, Beitz broke Montana’s 58-year-old 200-meter record, running 20.55 seconds at the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate in Long Beach, California. The previous record had stood since 1968.
Two weeks later, he added the school’s wind-legal 100-meter record, running 10.25 seconds at the Bengal Invitational in Pocatello, Idaho. Which broke a 44-year-old program record and gave Beitz both sprint marks.
“He’s a really competitive guy, and he wants to be the best in the Big Sky,” Fraley said.
The records have not left Beitz satisfied. They have made him hungrier.
“You have all these goals and numbers in your mind,” Beitz said. “Then once you hit those numbers, you’re not satisfied. There’s just more numbers to chase.”
The next chase begins at the Big Sky Conference Outdoor Championships, scheduled for May 13-16 in Portland, Oregon.
After college, Beitz hopes to follow his mother’s footsteps and become a pharmacist. Maybe even the world’s fastest pharmacist.
“If I’m running around the hospital talking to doctors,” Beitz said, “I’ll do it pretty fast.”
From a walk-on few people noticed to a conference champion and school-record holder, Beitz has become Montana’s fastest man — and he is not done running.
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