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December 04, 2025

For several election cycles, students of Alexander Street have waited outside Montana polling places attempting to spot an increasingly rare political bird: the ticket splitter.

Voters selecting a presidential candidate from one party while choosing candidates from a different party further down their ballots have proven a powerful handicap for Democrats in tight political races, but that share of the electorate is thinning. The split-ticket voters who backed Democrats like Steve Bullock in his successful bid for re-election to governor in 2016 and former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, who won in 2018 but lost last year, have declined dramatically. 

“We had a rate around 20% for a candidate like Bullock in 2016,” said Street, who teaches political science at Carroll College in Helena. “Tester was getting like 20% of Trump voters and then he got 8% in 2024.” 

Precinct-level analysis of split-ticket voting by Montana Free Press aligns with the observations of Street’s classes and election analysts who visited with Capitolized this week.

The calculation isn’t difficult, said Joe Lamson, the most experienced of political mappers within Montana Democratic circles. The overlap in votes between the down-ballot winning Democrat and the Republican presidential candidate tells the story, as does the difference between the winning Democrat and the performance of the party’s other statewide candidates. 

Voters who selected a Republican for president in 2012 and 2016 were difference-makers for top-ticket Democrats down ballot who won by the slimmest of margins. Tester, for example, won reelection in 2012 with 48.6% of the vote. Republican challenger Denny Rehberg won 44.8%, with the difference going to Libertarian Dan Cox.

The voters shared between Tester and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that year numbered 32,284, based on a precinct-level analysis by MTFP of votes for Romney and Tester. This is the net number of Republican presidential voters also supporting Tester down ballot.

Tester also had 33,957 more votes than the incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama, and Romney had 49,877 more votes than Rehberg. 

Similarly, in 2016, now-President Donald Trump and then-Gov. Bullock shared 78,224 voters, based on the overlap in those races, in which Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received 177,709 compared to Bullock’s 255,648.

The split-ticket voters were decisive for Bullock, who won just 50.3% of the vote, enough to defeat Republican challenger Greg Gianforte by 16,000 votes. Gianforte won the governorship four years later in a race against Bullock’s lieutenant governor. 

In 2020 and 2024, the splits weren’t enough for Democrats to prevail, as incumbent U.S. Sen. Steve Daines was reelected. Bullock, in his Senate race against Daines, and Trump shared 27,677 ballots, about one-third as many as they shared in 2016. This is also the lowest point for split-ticket voting in the four presidential cycles analyzed by MTFP. Again in 2024, there aren’t enough voters selecting both Trump and Tester to elect the Democrat to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate. The split tickets number 44,339, or 7.3% of the total votes cast for the Senate, a race won by Republican Tim Sheehy 

What’s happened with Montana split-ticket voting is a few steps behind the national trend, but both are on a path of decline, said Evan Wilson, a Republican campaign veteran who conducts polling for Peak Insights. 

Split-ticket voting nationally peaked in the 1970s with about 30% of the electorate choosing candidates of different parties for president and Congress, Wilson said. But the number of split-ticket voters drops to 7.1% for Senate races by 2020 and 4% for U.S. House, according to Wilson.

He said that the trend reflects votes aligning more with a political party than with a particular candidate. Montanans split their Senate and presidential outcomes in five of six elections between 1992 and 2012.

Street said Montana’s western U.S. House District, held by Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, has the potential to be the state’s most competitive race in 2026, with Daines up for reelection in the Senate. 

— Tom Lutey and Jacob Olness. 

The replacements 

For the second time this month, a member of the 2025 Legislature will be replaced.

Gallatin County commissioners are expected to name a replacement for Rep. Ed Stafman, D-Bozeman. Stafman resigned in November, telling Capitolized that he has a new granddaughter in western Washington and plans to spend as much time with her as possible.

Gallatin County Democrats have submitted three potential Stafman replacements to the county commission, which makes the final decision. They include:

• JP Pomnichowski, who served eight years in the state Senate from 2015  through 2022. She also served three terms in the state House.
• Katie Fire Thunder, an organizer of Bozeman Tenants United. 
• Tanya Reinhardt, a former Bozeman Public Schools board member whose term ended earlier this yearr.

On Dec. 2, Yellowstone County commissioners selected Republican Stacy Zinn to replace former Rep. Bill Mercer, R-Billings, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to a federal judgeship in October.  

— Tom Lutey