Montana’s Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives have taken terrible beatings at the polls since 1996, when Pat Williams retired, and Republican Rick Hill (now seeking the GOP nomination for governor) clobbered Bill Yellowtail. The only exception was Nancy Keenan’s narrow defeat in the 2000 election won by Dennis Rehberg (Hill retired because of vision problems following eye surgery).
It wasn’t always that way. As the graphs below show, Montana’s voters were much kinder to Democrats running for Congress for the last 90 years, especially when Montana had two seats in the House and eastern and western districts.
If you look just at the numbers for the House elections, the shift to supporting Republicans appears to have begun in the mid-1990’s, after Williams retired. But there’s a good argument that it actually began in 1988 when an affable Republican mediocrity, Conrad Burns, defeated incumbent Democratic Senator John Melcher. Because eastern district Republican Ron Marlenee and western district Democrat Pat Williams faced weak opposition in 1988 and 1990, their successful re-election campaigns led some to wonder whether Melcher’s was the victim of campaign malpractice rather than a sea change in party preference. And Melcher did make some mistakes. But 1988 was the turning point.
