30 May 2017 — 1712 mdt
Graphical history of single U.S. House district Montana
Following the 1990 Census, Montana lost one of its two U.S. House districts. The incumbent congressmen, eastern district Republican Rep. Ron Marlenee and western district Democrat Pat Williams, squared off against each other in 1992, an election that Williams won with an absolute majority of both all votes and the two-party vote (download Excel spreadsheet).
Williams won re-election in 1994, solidly defeating Republican Cy Jamison. Steve Kelly, who would win the Democratic nomination in 2002, ran as a liberal leaning independent, winning 9.1 percent of the vote and denying Williams a majority of the total vote.
Williams retired after completing that term. No Democrat has won the seat since. Nancy Keenan, running for an open seat in 2000, came the closest. After that, Democrats did not make a serious attempt to reclaim the seat until at least 2012, when Kim Gillan, under-funded and charisma deprived, became the first Democrat since Keenan to win 40 percent or more of the total vote. In the 2017 special congressional election, Rob Quist won 44.1 percent of the total vote, and 46.8 percent of the two-party vote, a performance bettered only by Keenan and Williams.
Third party and independent candidates were not a factor in any of these single district elections. Except for 1994, when Williams won with a plurality, all the winners received majorities of the total vote. In 1994, Kelly took votes away from Williams, not Jamison. In the rest of the elections, conservative third party candidates, almost always Libertarians, won two to six percent of the vote.
One should not assume that all votes for a third party or independent candidate are defections from the major party candidate closest in ideology to the minor party candidate. In the just concluded special election, had Libertarian Mark Wicks not been on the ballot, those who voted for him would have had these choices:
- Not voting (abstention).
- Greg Gianforte, the Republican and closest ideological match.
- Rob Quist, the Democrat.
- Doug Campbell, the only officially recognized write-in candidate and associated with the Green Party.
- Writing in someone else, a vote that would not have been recognized.
My rule of thumb, derived from the academic research I’ve examined, is that approximately half of a third party or independent candidate’s votes are drawn from the best ideological match, and that the other half of the votes would not have been cast.
