Women voted in the election of 1920, but it didn’t do Democrats much good. Republicans won the White House and huge majorities in Congress. Montana not only elected a Republican governor, Joseph M. Dixon of Initiative 28 fame, but sent the largest majorities, Republican majorities, in modern Montana history to the Montana Legislature.
Since then Republicans have won majorities in Montana’s house and senate 26 times, although not always controlling both houses in the same session. Democrats have won 18 majorities in each chamber. And each chamber has been tied twice, with control usually going to the party of the governor. In the Montana House, 51.5 percent of the representatives for the 1920 - 2008 period have been Republicans; in the Montana Senate, 54.1 percent. Only 20 third party legislators served during that period, although there were of course many more third party candidates.
| Seats in MT Legislature 1920–2008 | ||
|---|---|---|
| House | Senate | |
| Republican | 2,289 | 1,301 |
| Democratic | 2,146 | 1,086 |
| Constitution | 1 | 0 |
| Farmer-Labor | 4 | 3 |
| Independent | 4 | 8 |
| Total | 4,448 | 2,406 |
Where the modern era in Montana politics begins can be debated. The state’s voting eligible population doubled in size when women became enfranchised in the summer of 1920. But a case can also be made that the modern era actually commenced in the 1970’s when Montana adopted a new constitution and “one man, one vote” became the law of the land, and in 1992, Montana reverted to a single seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, so be mindful of those points in time when evaluating the graph.
Insofar as I can determine, Montana’s Secretary of State does not maintain a full, let along a full and fully digitized, record of all elections in Montana. For recent elections, spreadsheets (Excel) of state and county level results can be downloaded, which is useful, but not as useful as making the information available in a relational database organized by precinct. Prior to around 1990, the records are (a) incomplete; some years are missing, and (b) available only as scanned paper records from the state library. I simply do not have the time to hand enter the vote totals for 10,000-plus elections.
I strongly suspect that this information exists at one or more of Montana’s public universities, collected and organized by a special species of public employee known as professors. In the tradition of academia, they consider such collections of information, gathered on the public’s dime, as their private intellectual property. They’re wrong about that, and they should help Montana’s Secretary of State put together a database of all Montana election results that everyone can download from the Secretary of State’s website.
Above. The absence of a bar indicates a tie. I obtained my data from Majority and Minority Party Numbers 1889 – Present at the Montana State Library. You can download the data used in the graphs on this page as an Excel Spreadsheet.
Above, the cumulative total (running sum) of Republican, Democratic, and Third Party legislators in each chamber. Below, the running sum of Republicans subtracted from the running sum of Democrats for each legislature.
