Flathead GOP Committee Chair Announces Exit Amid ‘Battle of the Bylaws’

Depending on whom you ask, the Flathead County Republicans either did or did not call a lawful meeting to order on Thursday night.

Although precinct leaders and executive committee members of the Flathead County Republican Central Committee (FCRCC) could not reach consensus on even that seemingly straightforward question — of whether a valid meeting to conduct official party business occurred in the basement conference room of Syke’s Diner in downtown Kalispell — there was broad agreement on one major development: Al “Doc” Olszewski’s tenure as chairman of the local party apparatus is drawing to a bitter end.

“I am not running again. It’s obvious that you want me gone, for whatever cause,” Olszewski told attendees at Thursday night’s would-be meeting after announcing its cancellation. “Then I will go.”

So, he went, stepping away from the podium, ascending the basement stairs and heading straight to his vehicle parked outside. More than a dozen other party members, including current and former elected leaders, departed on his heels. Some left abruptly, in support of the party’s local leader, while others trickled out gradually, believing the evening’s proceedings to be over after the meeting’s abrupt ending. But in their wake, a quorum of newly elected precinct members reconstituted an ad hoc leadership committee and gaveled the meeting into session, with Jakoby Isle, an 18-year-old Glacier High School graduate — who, as the FCRCC’s elected secretary, represented the only remaining executive officer in the room — serving as chair pro tempore.

Within a few minutes, the proceedings were back underway, although Olszewski said he would challenge the meeting’s validity in a grievance he intends to file within 10 days.

“I will file a formal complaint and grievance that this was an unlawful meeting and any actions that occurred last night were unlawful,” Olszewski told the Beacon Friday morning.

Isles said his decision to assume a temporary leadership role wasn’t intended as an affront to current or past leadership, but rather born of a desire to help the party forge a unified path forward.

“That was completely impromptu,” Isles said after the meeting. “I’ve never led a meeting. But a lot of people want to see us get organized and united so that we can help elect Republicans, and the only thing we’ve actually been doing of any substance is debating these bylaws.

“It was an eventful meeting,” Isles added.

For his part, Olszewski said he understands that simmering tensions have boiled over at the state, local and federal level of Republican politics in Montana, and he believes the party needs to coalesce before the general election in November. But with party infighting so widespread that GOP leaders cannot even agree on whether to adopt a new set of bylaws for 2026, the precise root of the tensions is challenging to locate.

“The frustration is real,” Olszewski, who last month lost his bid to run as the GOP candidate for western Montana’s open U.S. House district, said Friday. “I do feel bad for people who earnestly want to promote the Republican Party, and we’re currently caught in the battle of the bylaws. I feel for them. But in no way am I going to abandon the rules and my fiduciary responsibility to run the meeting in a lawful way. And on Thursday, that meeting did not occur in a lawful way.”

The recent tremors upsetting the local party’s ranks mirror the schism dividing the state GOP, whose disrepair was on prominent display earlier this week when a bloc of current and former elected Republican leaders filed a lawsuit challenging the state party’s new bylaws. Those new rules, which are currently enjoined by a Lewis and Clark County court order — with a hearing for a preliminary injunction to keep the laws from going into effect for the duration of the court proceedings set for Monday, July 13, at 10 a.m. — include provisions requiring party members to pay dues and sign loyalty or affirmation pledges, as well as outline terms for discipline, revocation of party affiliation, and the removal or replacement of precinct committee representatives.  

“The implication of that,” said Bill Moseley, a newly elected Precinct 54 committeeman, “is that they could tell Republicans that they can’t run on a Republican primary ballot. There are lots of Republicans in Flathead County, so winning your primary and having your Republican label is essential to winning elections.”

In lieu of the 2026 bylaws, the 2024 Montana GOP bylaws were ordered to remain in effect until further order of the court.

According to Moseley, it was under those bylaws that Thursday night’s meeting was able to lawfully proceed. And while Moseley helped guide those proceedings, he said he’s not interested in assuming a leadership role in the FCRCC. Rather, he hopes to help right a listing ship.

“My primary intent right now is to help this committee become stable and the party unified,” Moseley told the Beacon on Friday. “Right now there is a Civil War in the Republican Party in Montana. Some people think it should be a small tent and some people think it should be a big tent. And I’m in the big tent category. I think we all support conservative ideologies in general, but right now the small tent people are in leadership and we just saw them run primary opponents against some very popular candidates who still won by a landslide. It’s a power grab, and it’s meant to limit dissent within the Republican Party.”

Olszewski’s interpretation of the court order differed from Moseley’s, however. Olszewski said the restraining order only stalls the state GOP’s bylaws from taking effect, but does not inhibit county central committees from adopting them.

The answer to the question of which set of bylaws are in effect at the local level — and, by extension, of whether or not Thursday’s meeting occurred — lies somewhere in the space separating those rival interpretations. Because the 2024 and 2026 bylaws spell out competing criteria to determine what constitutes a quorum of committee members necessary to hold a business meeting, as well as how proxies are determined, their validity not only holds bearing on Thursday’s proceedings, but could also make the party vulnerable to litigation.

“I believe the risk of litigation was real, so I canceled the meeting for the good of the party,” Olszewski said. “If there’s a risk of litigation by holding our meetings, then we need to wait until there is a final judgment on the 2026 Montana GOP bylaws. It’s anticipated that the temporary restraining order will likely be removed early next week, but at the risk that it isn’t, we need to let it play out in the courts.”

According to Moseley, Olszewski’s decision to cancel the meeting, as well as his plans to file a grievance challenging the subsequent meeting’s validity, and to call for a county convention to elect executive leadership in September, amounts to an attempt to hijack the party even as he plans to relinquish control of it.

“It’s the kind of self-dealing, backroom behavior that people are sick of,” Moseley said. “You saw it last night. People were upset.”

Although Olszewski said he was encouraged by the groundswell of interest by new members of the local Republican Party, the seismic scale of the shift toward dissent is disorienting, and could leave the party vulnerable to litigation.

“There were probably 45 people there, I don’t even know who they are,” Olszewski said. “I can’t put a face to a name.”

“There is a tremendous amount of passion and energy right now, and that is encouraging,” he continued. “But for the first time, at least it was the first time I saw it confirmed publicly in an open meeting, there is also a tremendous amount of animosity toward me as chairman.”

Extraordinary by local political party standards but not unprecedented, the warring factions of local Republicans are the product of a schism that began after the GOP endured a raft of losses in Kalispell’s 2025 municipal election, when Flathead County’s official party apparatus failed to coalesce around a handful of popular GOP candidates. Specifically, Republicans lost Kalispell’s mayoral race, which is technically nonpartisan, due to what critics of the party’s leadership frame as its strict adherence to “small tent” party doctrine. The infighting grew to a fever pitch in the lead-up to June’s primary election, when the party released its official endorsements of candidates, dividing Flathead-area Republicans over whether to support candidates backed by the party, or popular incumbents, such as Kalispell Rep. Courtenay Sprunger and Flathead County Sheriff Brian Heino, who did not receive the party’s blessing.

To that end, a bloc of newly elected precinct leaders have joined forces to effectively coordinate Olszewski’s expulsion. On Thursday, Travis Davison, the Precinct 27 committeeman and husband to Kisa Davison, the Republican businesswoman who campaigned in Kalispell’s mayoral race but was defeated by the more left-leaning candidate Ryan Hunter, gave notice of a resolution to remove Olszewski from his post as committee chair, with a vote slated to occur at the next regularly scheduled meeting on Aug. 13.

“Notice is hereby given that cause exists for the removal of the chairman and that a motion for removal will be considered at the next general meeting,” Davison said. “The causes are failure to properly administer candidate vetting and endorsement procedures; failure to properly administer candidate funding procedures; seeking to involve this committee and the Montana GOP in violating a temporary restraining order, and risking civil contempt, criminal contempt, and additional sanctions to our entire state party and this body in particular. This is an announcement only. A vote on the removal of the chair will occur at the next meeting.”

Because the removal of a committee chair requires a three-quarters majority vote, and requires the committee as a whole to call to order a lawful meeting, Olszewski was dubious as to the announcement’s validity.

“The committee as a whole needs to have their own officers,” he said. “But I am not going to be bullied into resigning. I am going to faithfully perform my duties as a chairman until I have the chance to hold a lawful meeting.”

That the undercurrent of Republican infighting has dominated the public’s perception of local and statewide party leadership in recent years wasn’t lost on those in attendance.

“This is nothing new,” Bob Keenan, a veteran Republican lawmaker from Bigfork, said Thursday. “It’s an evolution of something that’s been going on for more than 20 years. What we need to get through this is leadership. And sometimes leadership means going into uncharted waters. Tonight, there wasn’t any leadership.”

Remington Jankowski, who’s in charge of running the party’s “ground game” in the lead-up to the November election, said it’s critical for committee members to remember that “our overarching goal is to get Republicans elected.”

“This party has gotten a lot of bad press this past year, particularly surrounding the mayoral debacle,” he said. “The people who walked out of the room tonight, a lot of them are running for office, and we need to remember that in November, it’s either them or a Democrat. We need to show a unified face.”

For Lynn Ogle, a former Flathead County sheriff’s deputy and Polebridge fire chief, “we’ve done the hurting. It’s time to do the healing.”

“This is a perfect example of committees and organizations tearing themselves apart,” he said.

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