MT voters: Record registration, second highest turnout for 2024 election

The 2024 election cycle yielded the second-highest turnout rate in Montana’s history. But that was down from the last time a presidential race was on the ticket — about 76% this year compared to 81% in 2020 — despite this election being widely characterized as the most consequential in recent history.

While turnout ticked down, more people registered than ever before. More than 802,200 Montanans registered to vote, according to the Montana Secretary of State, a 50,000-person jump since the last presidential race four years ago. Some of this increase can be tied to population growth during that time, including migration of new residents into the state.

GOP dominance continues

Republicans swept statewide races up and down the ballot and voters delivered a decisive victory to the GOP in federal contests, a strong indicator that Montana’s rightward march is no fluke.

In the race for the White House, Republican Donald Trump took Montana’s electoral votes in 2020. He increased his margin of victory slightly this year, winning with 58% of the votes cast versus 38% for Democrat Kamala Harris.

Three-term incumbent Democrat Jon Tester was unseated by Republican challenger and political newcomer Tim Sheehy. But his loss came even as he won more total votes than he secured during his victory in 2018 — over 275,700 this November as compared to 253,876 six years ago. That’s 45% this year versus about 50% in 2018.

All statewide Republican candidates — such as governor and attorney general — beat their Democratic opponents by double digits. Every federal and statewide elected official is now a Republican in Montana.

“In some ways, the Democrats were on borrowed time. Some victories from very popular Democrats helped mask that but it still wasn’t enough,” Carroll College professor Jeremy Johnson previously told the Montana State News Bureau, referring to Tester’s win in 2018 and Bullock’s win in 2016. “Montana, like many other states, is moving in a Republican direction. Montana has been a little bit slower.”

Some speculate the tightening grasp of Republicans over Montana politics could be attributed to the types of people moving into the state.

Both Pam Purinton and Al Olszewski, chairs of the Republican Central Committees in Yellowstone and Flathead counties, respectively, said they have reason to believe many of the new residents in their areas are more conservative voters.

“These are people who, when I’ve talked to them, they have said they’re getting away from shelter-in-place orders back in places like Oregon or Washington,” Olszewski said. “Then people from all over the country who have come in, taken service jobs so they could move to Montana. We have seen a huge uptick.”

These thoughts aren’t just anecdotal. There is evidence to suggest that more red voters are moving to the state than blue voters.

“The state going red happened relatively recently. Montana was solidly purple,” said Eric Raile, political science professor at Montana State University. “Some of that is demographic change.”

Early voting

Whereas Republicans sought to undermine absentee ballots in 2020, lodging unsubstantiated claims that mail-in voting was responsible for Trump’s loss, they embraced it this cycle.

Purinton said local GOP operations were getting direction from the Republican National Committee to push absentee and early voting. They used advertisements, email blasts and political mailers to encourage voters to send back their ballots well ahead of Election Day.

“As Republicans, we were encouraging people to vote early so that you know your vote was counted,” she said. Yellowstone County’s turnout this year mirrored the state average, and it dropped by about the same amount from 2020. However, Trump’s share of the vote held steady at about 61%.

Ultimately, 552,669 absentee ballots were sent to Montanans and 494,967, about 89%, were returned as votes. Those with the 13 highest return rates — all at or above 93% — went for Trump by enormous margins.

Perhaps an early sign that Democratic strongholds weren’t turning out the way party operatives hoped was just one day before Election Day, when majority-Native American counties lagged far behind in absentee ballot returns. The Indigenous voting bloc is considered a linchpin of Democratic success in Montana.

The three counties that ranked lowest in return rates were the same three where the largest share of Native Americans reside.

With almost all votes tallied as of Nov. 13, Glacier County, which overlaps with the Blackfeet Reservation, had the third-lowest rate of absentee ballots returned at 81%. Roosevelt County, where part of the Fort Peck reservation is, and Big Horn County, which encompasses much of the Crow Reservation and some of the Northern Cheyenne, had the lowest return rates of 80% and 78%, respectively.

Blaine County, which includes the Fort Belknap Reservation, performed slightly better, though still in the bottom 10 of all 56 counties with a return rate of 88.3%.

Indian Country’s role

Though by all accounts Harris stood no real chance in Montana, Tester saw a path to victory, albeit a narrow one more akin to a tightrope. For Tester to win, he needed Native voters to turn out.

While tribes are sovereign entities, local, state and federal elections have tremendous consequences for Indian Country. The United States Congress allocates funding for essential resources like broadband, law enforcement, natural resource management and health care in tribal communities.

Indigenous voters in Montana have long faced institutional barriers to casting their ballots — distrust toward a system of government that’s marginalized their communities, long drives to reach the polls, slow postal service and low availability of voter information, among others. But those who do cast a ballot tend to do so for the Democrats.

Voter registration forms in Montana don’t require people to report their race or ethnicity, meaning there’s no complete or perfectly accurate data on Native American voting behavior. Some organizations look at precinct level data to estimate the Native vote, others look at Montana’s four majority-Native American counties. Both methods are somewhat flawed, as they overlook Montana’s urban Indigenous population, but they do tend to capture at least high-level trends.

Take 2020. Trump took Montana with 56% of the vote. But in the three counties where populations had the highest share of Native residents — Glacier, Big Horn and Roosevelt — President Joe Biden secured roughly the same percentage.

This year, all four counties with Native majorities supported Tester over Sheehy. The most decisive margins were in Glacier County and Big Horn County, home to the Crow Reservation that Sheehy was caught insulting in private recorded remarks in August.

Of note, three of those counties supported Trump over Harris this year. In 2020, just one of those counties supported the Republican candidate for president.

Indigenous people comprise about 6.5% of Montana’s population of roughly 1.1 million, and they play an outsize role on electoral politics, historically delivering victories for Democrats in statewide offices and ensuring that the American Indian Caucus at the Montana State Legislature leans overwhelmingly Democratic.

Tester himself told rally goers at an Oct. 23 event at Aaniiih Nakoda College on the Fort Belknap Reservation that Native Americans could be credited with his victories in his past three bids for office. Supported by grassroots organizations, the senator’s camp invested millions in turnout operations and door-knocking efforts to get people to the polls. One organizing group on the Blackfeet Reservation even rented a Hummer limousine on Election Day to transport voters in the middle of a snowstorm.

But that wasn’t enough to make up for strong Republican margins elsewhere.

Looking again at Glacier, Roosevelt and Big Horn, overall turnout numbers are far lower than the state average, despite gargantuan efforts to encourage voters to show up beforehand or on Election Day.

As of Nov. 11, Big Horn County had 57% turnout. Glacier and Roosevelt had 61% and 65%, respectively. These are the lowest statewide. Blaine County, which has a 50.1% Native American population, outperformed its peers with 69% voter turnout.

Patrick Yawakie, co-founder of Red Medicine LLC, an organization that works to engage Native American voters, said low turnout rates can be, at least in part, attributed to structural and resource issues at polling places on reservations.

In Glacier County, according to Yawakie, voting lines were long, some people didn’t receive absentee ballots on time and others were told conflicting information on whether their address was acceptable.

“These are the tactics that Indian Country faces every election, and they can deter a person from voting,” he said. “We know there were people leaving the lines just due to them being so long.”

That said, declines were the norm all over Montana, where turnout dropped an average of six percentage points statewide. Decreases in these Native-majority counties, then, were relatively comparable.

Long lines on Election Day

Voters in Bozeman bundled up with pizza in the midst of a winter storm warning to be able to register on election night. Lines were around the block in Missoula and Great Falls, and Flathead County Fairgrounds had a steady overflow on Election Day as well as the days preceding.

During the 2020 election, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging, 46 of 56 counties in the state used exclusively mail-in ballots to make sure people could vote without risking contracting the virus. That led to historically high turnout but far less chaos at voting locations. 

A report from the Montana Election Observation Initiative (MTEOI), a nonpartisan effort to enhance election transparency, concluded that more people voted in person on Election Day this year, which could have contributed to the long waits at polling places.

MTEOI, a partnership between the University of Montana, the Carter Center and former legislators Jeff Mangan and Geraldine Custer, deployed 120 trained observers to 76 voting locations in 16 counties. Observers focused on adherence to election procedures as well as the efficiency and accuracy of absentee and in-person ballot processing. It said that 20% of the voting centers it observed still had lines when polls closed at 8 p.m., but election staff worked after-hours to ensure everyone in line was able to vote. 

Staff shortages and insufficient quantities of essential materials such as voter registration forms and provisional ballot envelopes slowed progress at election centers, according to MTEOI’s findings, but the watchdog group affirmed the integrity of Montana’s elections. 

“I witnessed the strong commitment of our communities to democratic engagement,” said Mangan, co-chair of MTEOI’s cross-partisan advisory board, in the written report. “It was encouraging to see so many people actively shaping the future of our state — both those voting and those administering the election — reflecting the deep value Montanans place on civic participation.”

Victoria Eavis and Nora Mabie contributed reporting for this story.