In Selecting a New Leader, the Montana Democratic Party Seeks Someone to Right the Ship

LIVINGSTON — After years of stinging election defeats, Montana Democrats said last weekend that it was time for a fresh start. 

Inside the Livingston Depot Center, nearly 160 party members gathered Sunday morning for their biennial election of a new party chair. The position oversees the executive board, the group of Democrats responsible for selecting the party’s executive director and helping coordinate campaigns statewide. 

Elections have been difficult for Democrats in Montana going back to 2020, when they were trounced up and down the ballot, losing every statewide race and operating with a minority in the state Legislature. In 2024, Democrats did pick up 12 legislative seats across both chambers — a gain partly thanks to agreeable redistricting that still left the party in the minority — but lost their last statewide man standing when former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester was defeated by political newcomer Tim Sheehy.

Tester didn’t attend this year’s officers’ convention, but did address the crowd through a phone that Patti Prinkki Keebler, a former staffer for past Gov. Brian Schweitzer, held up to a microphone.

“The Democratic Party is in trouble. We have done it to ourselves. We have focused on blue districts and not on other districts throughout the state. We are seen in polling as woke and weak,” Tester said before endorsing Mike Jopek, a Whitefish farmer with eight years of legislative experience during the 2000s overlapping the Schweitzer era, for the party’s top leadership position.

Jopek ran against former Missoula state senator Shannon O’Brien, who centered her message on “something new in the Democratic Party.” She won 112 to 39 in a single round of voting.

After the leadership vote, freshly elected Vice Chair Max Johansen, an energetic Park County Democrat working at a carbon capture startup, spoke to reporters on a narrow staircase away from the main convention hall.

“I think a lot of people are upset with Tester for not being more proactive and forthright in coming after [Sheehy],” Johansen said. The new vice chair advocated for more aggressive stances on kitchen-table issues. 

“We want to see direct aid being given to the most vulnerable groups,” Johansen said. “These are things that are often called socialist. We got to stop running away from that word because the voters that are entering the electorate or just entered the electorate don’t find that term as radioactive as a lot of people in that room — that have been in it for 30, 40, sometimes 50 years — may find it.” 

The Montana Democratic Party’s three-term chair, Robyn Driscoll, did not seek re-election. 

Johansen will report to O’Brien alongside the other 14 executive board members elected last weekend. New statewide officers include Secretary Melody Cunningham, a state representative from Missoula, and incumbent Treasurer Lance FourStar, a former candidate for the Montana House of Representatives. 

Republicans held their convention in early July.

Prior to defeating Jopek last weekend, O’Brien ran for Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2024 and served as the education adviser to former Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock from 2013 through 2015. 

O’Brien took more moderate stances than Johansen. She built a platform on both standard Democratic positions, including health care access and quality public education, and traditionally centrist viewpoints, like business development and protected civil liberties. Both O’Brien and Johansen acknowledged a desire to expand the party’s pool of politicians. 

“We don’t just provide lip service for our rural Democrats, we really travel, go out and get to them — listen to them — and recruit candidates,” O’Brien said. 

O’Brien acknowledged the party’s electoral challenges but expressed steadfast optimism. 

“We had a rough November last year. I was on the ticket. It was a gut punch for all of us,” O’Brien said. “And we’re ready to get together and go into the black hole.”

This story originally appeared in the Montana Free Press, which can be found online at montanafreepress.org.