Montana GOP Weighs In on Primaries, Bypassing Flathead Incumbents

After months of speculation that it would become involved in primaries this year, the state GOP released a slate of its preferred candidates in legislative primaries Wednesday afternoon, referring to them as “Honor Roll” candidates. The state GOP’s preferred candidates in the Flathead area’s contested primaries aligned with endorsements the Flathead County Republican Central Committee handed out last month.

Candidates in competitive primary contests who received nods from both the local and state party are: Cathy Mitchell in House District 3, Shaun Pandina in House District 4, Jim Riley in House District 6, and Luke Maxwell in House District 7.

Finley Warden, who is running in House District 13, which encompasses parts of Lake and Sanders counties, and Steve Gunderson in Senate District 1, which runs through Lincoln and Flathead counties, also both received honor roll designations from the state party.

In districts 4, 7 and 13, the state party passed over supporting incumbent legislators in Reps. Lyn Bennett, Courtenay Sprunger and Linda Reksten, instead throwing weight behind their respective opponents.

The move to name preferred candidates bucks a longstanding tradition of the state party declining to meddle in the primaries. But in recent years, calls for the state party arm to become more involved on the primary level have gained traction. In part, those calls have come as a result of legislative sessions where some Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats on key issues.

The longtime intraparty feuding on the issue reached new heights during the 2025 legislative session. Nine more-moderate Republicans in the state Senate sided with Democrats to form a working majority that took the knees out from under the majority Republican Senate. The state party publicly rebuked those nine members for joining forces with Democrats, referring to them as the “Nasty Nine.”

Those rebukes have continued well beyond the session. The resolution announcing the honor roll candidates cited the nine Republicans as the reason the Montana GOP formed a Conservative Governance Committee that vetted legislative candidates via a questionnaire process this year.

“… it is the desire of the State Central Committee to identify and honor candidates who support Republican policies and principles,” the resolution stated.

Some incumbents in the state’s House of Representatives — the main legislators at-odds with the party in the Flathead — now experiencing headwinds from the state party said they feel left behind with their party, and took concern with the honor roll.

Sprunger, the incumbent in Kalispell’s House District 7, explained the choice for local central committees and the state party to play in primaries is relatively new. But in her view, the attempt to narrowly define who is considered a Republican has the effect of shrinking the party.

“Ironically, I think what our party is doing is the same thing that you’re seeing in the Democratic Party, where there’s so many people that feel like if they’re not willing to be, you know, ultra extreme, or willing to sign pledge cards to the party, that they’re simply targeted,” Sprunger said. “And it disenfranchises a wide swath of the Republican Party, and it undermines the big tent that Reagan established, that helped make the party so strong.”

For candidates, like Warden, who received recognition from the state party, it symbolizes a position as the “true Republican” in their primary races.

“I am supportive of the party doing this for the first time because the last legislative session was unprecedented with how explicit these groups of Republicans are,” Warden, a candidate for House District 13 in Polson, said. “The Nasty Nine and Dirty Dozen were siding with the Democrats on almost all major pieces of legislation.”

The “Dirty Dozen” nickname was bestowed upon a dozen state legislators in the House, including Reksten, Warden’s opponent.

“And this has been a problem that’s been going on for a long time, but it really reached a boiling point the last session: how explicit the problem was, with the nine voting for the Democrat leadership, with the Dirty Dozen in the House just voting alongside Democrats more than they ever had before,” Warden continued.

Reksten, Warden’s opponent, who has served three terms in the state legislature and is running for a fourth, said the primary cycle has been “crazy.”

In addition to the state party’s selection of her challenger for its honor roll, the seasoned legislator’s home county GOP also gave its endorsement to Warden. And the state party rebuked Reksten and other legislators last month for working with Fireweed Campaigns, Inc., a campaign consulting firm based in Helena. She said that group was helping her with online campaigning, and that she brought them on largely to combat attacks that she and other legislators say have been particularly intense this primary cycle. But some conservatives have lambasted Republicans for working with Fireweed, thanks to its staff members’ past Democratic connections.  

Warden is among those conservatives who expresses concern with Fireweed’s involvement in primary races. He said he considers Reksten a Democrat running in a Republican primary, both for Fireweed’s involvement in her campaign and for some of her donors. The Montana Free Press reported Thursday that Reksten was on a list of Republican candidates some Democrat donors have backed.

“What they’re doing is disenfranchising Republican primary voters,” Warden said. “When Republican primary voters go to vote in a Republican primary, they expect all the candidates they get to choose from to be generally aligned with the Montana Republican Party, which is not the case for my opponent and lots of these candidates running in Republican primaries and legislative seats across the state.”

Reksten, however, clings to her conservative roots, arguing her votes on some issues were the best choices for her district, even if they didn’t align with the GOP party line. She pointed to Medicaid expansion as an example, and said she chose to vote for it in 2025 after talking with local hospitals in Polson who expressed hefty implications, should that issue not make it through the legislature.

It’s the party around her that has become unrecognizable, in Reksten’s view.

“The Republican Party has left many of us behind,” she said.  

She’s not alone in feeling that sentiment.

“My perspective is I wish I saw our state party working as hard in the general as they seem to be working in the primary to separate out and make our party as small as possible,” Sprunger said.

The state GOP also passed over supporting Bennett, the incumbent in House District 4, a swath of land that stretches through parts of Whitefish and Columbia Falls. The freshman legislator and lifelong Republican running for her second term previously described a district inundated with outside noise this cycle — much of it against her, as she has lost support from corners of her own party that did throw their weight behind her in 2024. One of her two primary opponents, Shaun Pandina, clinched the local and state party’s backing.

In a statement about the GOP’s honor roll, she said she was disappointed to be excluded from the Montana GOP’s list of preferred candidates.

“I firmly believe the party should not pick winners in a primary — especially when it means excluding proven, effective conservatives like our own Sheriff Brian Heino, Republican Speaker of the House Brandon Ler, Representative Jennifer Carlson, and many other highly respected Republican leaders,” Bennett wrote in her statement.

The local party passed over the sheriff in its endorsements at the end of March. Heino’s opponent, Evie Cahalen, garnered the local party’s support instead. Rep. Ler, R-Sidney, represents House District 33, where the state GOP tapped his opponent, Ric Holden, for the honor roll. And Carlson is running in a contested primary in House District 68, outside of Bozeman, for a seat previously held by Rep. Caleb Hinkle, who’s looking to move up to the Senate.

Bennett, in her statement, also highlighted her long record of serving the Republican Party as a precinct captain, on the board of the Flathead County Republican Women and as president of the Glacier Country Pachyderm.

“Lately, politics has become unrecognizable,” Bennett wrote. “From A(mericans) F(or) P(rosperity) attack ads and attacks from ‘Accountability in State Government’ to AI-edited photos and being confronted by angry citizens in parking lots, the focus has shifted away from conservative values toward forced uniformity. As Montesquieu argued, the principle of despotism is fear. This isn’t about policy; it’s about falling in line with specific groups who use the threat of scorecards and censures to stifle independent thought.”

She continued: “I refuse to be governed by fear or party bosses. I work for you, the constituents of HD 4. I am moving forward, focused on the only endorsement that truly counts: yours on June 2^nd.”

Primary elections will take place June 2. To see which legislative district you reside in, visit: https://www.legmt.gov/districts/. And to see your sample ballot, visit: https://voterportal.mt.gov/WhereToVote.aspx.

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