How a bipartisan coalition dominated the Montana Senate and fractured the Republican Party

Temperatures were well below freezing in Helena in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, the second day of the 2025 Montana legislative session. But the feeling inside the Senate president’s office was "colder in that room than it was outside" as Republican and Democratic Senate leadership sat silently across the table from each other.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Democrats — who are nearly in the super minority in the upper chamber — had aligned with nine other GOP senators on a key first-day rules vote, effectively creating a 27-member majority, unexpectedly outnumbering leadership and their allies.

Offerings of small talk were rebuffed as they waited for all the top Democrats to arrive to begin the discussions. Senate President Matt Regier and other members of Republican leadership had called in their Democratic colleagues to let them know how the maneuver had made them feel.

"They weren’t happy, to say the least," said Democratic Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers.

Regier later said the first day left them "embarrassed."

"It's a big shift to go from, you think you're 32 out of 50, and all of a sudden, now you're minority — 23," Regier said. "I hope that carries over to the voters that sent 32 Republicans to the Senate and the 18 Democrats controlled."

It wasn’t clear to anyone in the room at the time, but that tension and the bipartisan voting bloc would last for the next four months, with a 27-23 tally beaming through the chamber’s vote board again and again. In short order, the nine Republican defectors earned from their hardline colleagues the moniker "The Nasty Nine."

At times, the voting bloc was held together with tape and glue, requiring almost daily conversations to find common ground. And even after the group held solid on major issues, there were "rumblings in the hall" that the purple love affair wouldn’t last past February.

That never came to pass. Instead, barbs flew across the Senate floor weekly — if not multiple times a week — when the 23 Republicans grew frustrated over repeated 23-27 vote margins.

"We as Republicans did better with a Democrat governor than we are this time," Sen. Barry Usher, R-Yellowstone County, said before a mid-April floor vote. "We all know this will be 23-27."

Something that began as a bipartisan attempt to use a procedural vote to assert influence over the rightward flank of the Montana Republican Party eventually morphed into a lasting coalition that took control of the Senate chamber for four months and sent a number of bills to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk. But while what happened in the upper chamber during the 69th legislative session will be felt by its members for years to come, it remains to be seen if Gianforte will sign their bills into law or if the coalition will last.

On the heels of historic electoral losses

The power play came after Montana Democrats, and Democrats across the nation, saw historic losses in the 2024 elections. While Democrats won a handful of key legislative races and knocked out the Republican supermajority in the Legislature thanks to newly drawn maps, Montana’s statewide Democratic candidates were resoundingly crushed by their Republican opponents, many by double-digit margins.

The losses mean that for the first time in 113 years, the highest-ranking Democrat in Montana is Flowers, one of the main organizers behind the Senate’s working majority.

Post-election, Republicans took a victory lap and called their sweeping wins a mandate from voters. There was a sentiment coming into the legislative session that the Republican Party was in charge — or at least some version of the party.

"I do believe voters sent the Republican Party here to be in control," Regier, who often speaks from the farther-right flank of the party, said on the final day of the session. "And from Day One, it was not, and I don’t see that as sustainable. I think that, in the future, the voters are going to speak their mind."

When the nine Republicans partnered with Senate Democrats, it wasn’t all that novel. The two parties have worked across the aisle on major items for decades, and divisions among the GOP were a feature of both the 2013 and 2015 sessions.

In 2007, lawmakers adjourned without passing a budget, forcing them into a special session. Conrad Republican Rep. Llew Jones, then a sophomore lawmaker, helped put together a meeting between a few Republicans and Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer to hammer out a deal before it convened.

Eighteen years later, those legislators are remembered in political circles as the "Log Cabin Republicans" in memory of their clandestine meetup. Jones, who’s still in the Legislature, is still wrangling votes and coalitions behind the scenes and was one of the main advisers guiding the Senate’s breakoff Republicans.

Jones called himself a "cornerstone adviser" to the Nine, and has hammered the idea that the alliances weren’t out of the ordinary because nothing gets done in the Capitol without the "magic 26-51-1," a reference to the votes in each chamber and governor’s signature needed for a bill to become law.

What can be said about the 2025 session, though, is the intensity of the divisions, the tenor in the Senate and the longevity of the alliances stand apart.

"I think this last session was obviously off the charts compared to earlier divisions in earlier sessions," said Former Senate President Jeff Essmann, a Billings Republican who served in the Legislature from 2005 to 2017. "I think this will be talked about for a long time."

Day 1 to Day 85

The first bomb detonated 15 minutes into the Senate’s first full floor hearing on Jan. 6, what’s ordinarily a day of ceremonial speeches and leadership setting the table for the 90 days to come.

Senate Majority Leader Tom McGillvray, R-Billings, stood with a motion to adopt rules that govern the chamber. The room turned tense when Flowers rose with a surprise substitute motion that gave both Democrats and moderate Republicans better positioning on key committees.

Committee assignments are one example of the levers of power at the Legislature, where lawmakers can maneuver the flow of traffic, hijack legislation for their own purposes or tactically eliminate proposals.

Heading into the session, Democrats and the group of nine mostly moderate Republican senators had been put on committees by GOP leadership that they felt removed them from key debates and undermined their influence.

Multiple lawmakers told the Montana State News Bureau they felt the move was designed to alienate more moderate thinkers, though Republican leadership denies this allegation.

Senate President's bid to unite GOP caucus fails

With nine Republicans joining all 18 Democrats to support Flowers’ rules package, McGillvray looked over the 50-member chamber with some disbelief. Regier, despite his pleas to his caucus in the following days, never fully regained control of the chamber.

The first-day move had been in the works since the caucus meetings roughly six weeks earlier, when Regier had been elected by his peers as Senate president.

At the mid-November meeting, he preached a message of unity.

"Imagine if we all band together around the tax policy that prioritizes Montana families and the Montana taxpayer first, the state government second," Regier said. "Or imagine if we all united around the education policy that had kids the priority and not the bureaucracy."

His victory did not signal widespread buy-in to that vision.

While Regier placed phone calls to almost every member of the caucus in the build-up to the session, including the Nine, early conversations were already taking place between a handful of House and Senate legislators to determine how to regain sway after being sidelined in committee assignments.

Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, was one of the people working earliest with Jones to chart a path forward. Though not in the Senate, the fourth-term representative saw it as "my business" to make sure that priorities coming out of the House didn’t die in the Senate at the hands of conservative "kill committees."

"My interest … was to make sure that we had a smoothly operating Legislature where people are treated fairly and legislation moved and passed or failed on its own merits," he said.

Up until the hour before the Senate floor convened on the first day of the 69th Legislature, it was unclear if they had the votes to pull off the procedural coup, according to George Wolcott, chief of staff for the Senate Democrats who was one of the people orchestrating the votes throughout the session.

Half a dozen Democrats and Republicans told the Montana State News Bureau the committee assignments sparked the alliance, which was then hardened by intense backlash from within the GOP.

"As we went further into the session, of course, because of the over-the-top reaction and the bullying of the nine legislators, I’m confident that Senate leadership thought that they could bully people into submission," Bedey said. "It didn’t work. Matter of fact, what it did was made that group tighter and tighter and tighter."

Regier disputes that notion. He claims the committee assignment narrative is a convenient cover-up to explain why they co-opted the majority of the chamber, when really it was "so that they could just take the control," he said as he signed bills in his office a day after sine die.

Democrats' coalition exercises control over Montana Senate in series of late-night votes

Regier had wielded large, factional caucuses before; in 2023, he was the Speaker of the House of a Republican supermajority. He reached out to the Nine in the first week of the session to right the wrongs, but he said they weren’t interested. Two different members said it was too little, too late.

"I think probably having supermajorities, you know, allowed them to forget about the importance of getting to 51 and 26," Essmann said, referring to the simple majorities in both chambers needed to pass a bill.

While Montana’s GOP establishment unleashed a social media firestorm with claims of a nefarious conspiracy to wrangle control from duly-elected Senate leadership, the bipartisan group that first banded together insists it didn’t see the move as a long-term partnership that would continue well into the session.

According to multiple interviews, the working majority was sustained and tensions remained high in part because the 27 banded together again when it was revealed by the Montana State News Bureau that one of the members of the Nine, Sen. Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, had used leftover state funds he controlled from his time in leadership to contract his close friend and longtime business associate for a job he wasn’t qualified for. How to address those revelations plunged the Senate chamber into deeper chaos as the Nine and Democrats largely shielded him, and the 23 other Republicans sought to levy punishments.

Emails: Legislative staff blocked senator's initial request for controversial contract

"I don't think the coalition was seen as long term," Jones said. "The system never cooled off, right? It just kept getting hotter and hotter."

News of the contract broke just a week after the coalition had emerged, presenting a political dilemma to an alliance that both sought to claim the moral high ground and needed their numbers in order to remain in control. If the coalition split on any of the numerous votes pertaining to how to address Ellsworth’s attempted business deal, they had a sense the splintering would continue over each successive fight.

Because of the alliance with Democrats, GOP Senate leadership was irate with the nine Republicans, who found themselves on the outskirts of their caucus. That meant if they defected from the coalition, they would be left without allies entirely, forcing the working majority train to stay on its tracks.

"One of the critical parts of it is that as these beatings occurred and the Nine became more defiant, it forced them closer to us," Wolcott said. "We had kind of been bound together in blood a little bit."

"There was no way that we could kind of keep going down this road without each other. … We had to walk it down together, or, like, we weren't going to walk down at all," he added.

Policy wins and losses

Resentment over lopsided committee assignments formed a desire among the coalition to create an antidote to GOP hardliners' vision of an extremely limited government which called for slashing spending and social services, even on key programs like Medicaid expansion.

"It was definitely already about budget and spending," Wolcott said. "In a lot of ways, it’s always about budget and spending."

Up for renewal in 2025, Medicaid expansion, the $1 billion-a-year program serving roughly 77,000 Montanans, has long been a target for conservatives. When committee assignments were unveiled and both the Senate Public Health, Safety and Welfare and Senate Finance and Claims were stacked with anti-Medicaid votes, the path to getting it through felt "really bleak."

But that picture quickly changed once the 27 senators coalesced around shared priorities, with Medicaid expansion at the center, and deployed their Day One procedural maneuver to expand the number of moderate and Democratic senators on the Senate’s main budget committee. The committee could no longer kill or gut the expansion bill without going through the newly cemented coalition.

Gov. Gianforte signs bill to renew Medicaid expansion, health care for 77,000 Montanans

The bill to continue Medicaid expansion without a sunset date, meaning the Legislature will no longer be required to take action to renew it every handful of years, was passed in less than two months. Battles over expansion in 2015 and 2019, by comparison, were fought until each session’s bitter end.

"I know that was one of their main targets," said Sen. Gayle Lammers, a freshman Republican from Hardin, when asked about Medicaid and the policy rift between him and his caucus. "There was a whole slew of other things that I couldn’t go along with."

Although a freshman, Lammers said he knew the session would present challenges if he did not align with hardliners in legislative leadership or, when "brow beating" him in the Capitol hallways didn’t push him back into the fold, the state party. Still, he said after adjournment the work he accomplished with the coalition has paid off in his relatively purple district back home.

"I never got much support from the far-right," Lammers said. "Let's be honest, the guys running the GOP are pretty far-right guys. That’s no secret."

With expansion in the rear view, the coalition set its sights on other common goals, many of which overlapped with Gianforte’s agenda. Having just been elected to his second term, the Republican governor had already been at odds with the more conservative GOP members following political and policy spats dating back to 2023.

Together, the nine Republicans and 18 Democrats passed a budget similar to what Gianforte had proposed and rife with his priorities. The $16.6 billion, two-year spending plan grew by about 18% from the last biennium, sparking consternation among the rest of the GOP caucus.

"Within 15 minutes of the first day, this session was off the rails," Sen. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, said in a scathing speech on the Senate floor to round out the session. "The balanced budget was a failure because we have way overspent. ... If this is how people legislate, then we have a problem."

Together, the working majority steered two large omnibus spending packages, both sponsored by Jones and carried in the Senate by Kassmier, even when it seemed on the Senate floor that few people understood their details. And using the insurance policy crafted for themselves during the Day One rules fight, the 27 were able to "blast" bills out of committees where they had been stalled, meaning initiatives involving school lunches, child care, doulas and more were given a floor vote and, unsurprisingly, often passed 27-23.

The coalition helped thwart one of Republicans’ meatiest ambitions of overhauling judicial elections. What began with a slate of 27 bills to scale back the judicial branch’s power and inject campaigns with more partisanship became just a few bills that made it past the coalition.

Republican efforts to recast Montana's judicial elections as partisan falls short

For many Democrats, like Bozeman freshman Sen. Cora Neumann, the bloc was seen as a way to stymie the farthest-right policy items.

The Nine were quick to point out their conservative bonafides on social issues, though.

When given the chance to restrict or limit access to the legal procedure of abortion, they did. On nearly all of the roughly two-dozen bills that sought to curb transgender rights, most Senate Republicans sided with the rest of the party.

"It was really a non-starter," said Sen. Derek Harvey, a Butte Democrat. "They wouldn’t really even talk about it."

In addition to the policy votes, there were also brief discussions on whether to oust Regier, an extraordinary step for Montana politics, and cement the working majority into a bipartisan formal majority that controlled leadership posts and other key administrative powers, according to Harvey. The state Senate in Alaska has formed this type of governing majority, also with nine Republicans joining Democrats to create a caucus that does not conform to party lines.

That never came to pass in part because there was more of a desire to tamp down the tensions rather than heat them up. Sen. Josh Kassmier, the Fort Benton Republican who ended up leading the Nine, said their restraint proves they weren’t after a legislative takeover.

"If we really wanted a coup, we would have taken over everything, right?" he said.

Progressive policy proposals, such as paid family leave, appeared to be another bridge too far for the Nine. Though it came up in some of the early planning meetings around what priorities the 27 senators could achieve together, it was booted from the list. The Nine would often use the governor and his veto power as a backstop in those negotiations.

"Most of the time they’d default to, ‘It’s something the governor wouldn’t be willing to sign,’" Harvey said. "We were in that space of: ‘Is that true or not?’"

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A spokesperson for the governor’s office on Wednesday said Gianforte did not "reveal" his priorities with a small group of legislators but did make his policy preferences known through his State of the State address and budget proposals.

"As you may know, the governor kept an open line of communication with legislative leaders, scheduling weekly meetings with Republican and Democrat leaders," spokesperson Kaitlin Price said in an email. "As he has said repeatedly, a good idea can come from anyone, and he was happy to work with legislators on good ideas that would help Montanans prosper, while sticking to his core principles."

Bedey said he and Jones never met with Gianforte directly, but there was and always had been "natural" and "normal" coordination with the governor’s budget office on key priorities.

"It is foolish to operate in the Legislature without having an ear toward the guy who has the veto pen,” Bedey said, adding the same would have happened even without any working relationship with the Democrats.

Montana GOP nixes support, funding for nine Republican senators following votes with Dems

Toward the end of the legislative session, the Montana Republican Party disowned the nine Republicans and said they would not support or fund their campaigns going forward. Five of those seats are up in the next election cycle, but it’s unclear how many of those five will run for reelection. Gillespie, for one, is terming out and Jones has already filed for that seat, while Vance has filed for reelection.

"My experience is that these kinds of divisions lead to spirited primaries," Essmann said. "It'll be hashed out in these open seats which direction this goes."

What’s next?

Once the session adjourned, Flowers did not have long to relish in the coalition’s power. Interim committees, unlike those that meet during the session, allow only two legislators from the minority party — too few for the coalition to play a leading role.

"I think it’s going to be a challenge to collaborate on some of these things," Flowers told reporters.

A few of the Senate’s final acts last week indicated that the coalition was, at least on some items, starting to crumble around the edges. Just as the session began, a rules proposal that would have given the working majority power to assemble new committees in the interim was scuttled on its final day — by Harvey, a Democrat who said the 27 should reach a broader consensus with the chamber in order to wield such legislative power.

"First day to last day fighting over the rules," Essmann remarked.

The coalition also failed to muster its members to pass Senate Bill 324, a priority for the group that had just shaped the state’s budget. Through new taxes on luxury vehicle registrations, the bill would have raised $70 million for bridges in the next four years, along with $8 million for a new crime victims fund and more than $14 million for pay raises and a retention program at the Montana Highway Patrol. Kassmier sponsored the bill.

Montana Legislature wraps after passing property tax relief, but not without final drama

After all its trials, the coalition that began the session together failed to unite around the bill, and it died on a 25-25 vote.

Seated alone on a bench on the back side of the Capitol a few hours after sine die, Jones called 324's failure "the only loss all session."

He said it meant Gianforte would now have no other option than to start vetoing spending bills, meaning the coalition’s goals could be on the chopping block.

In the coming days, the governor’s veto pen will ultimately decide what moderate Republicans and Democrats will have to show for their unconventional control of the chamber.

"We’ll see what the governor is willing to sign," Harvey said.