Montana Republicans gathered in Missoula this month to set their party’s rules and policy agenda. Lee Newspapers State Bureau reporter Seaborn Larson joined MTPR’s Austin Amestoy to share highlights from the convention.
Austin Amestoy: So let's start with the meat of the convention here. The party published a new platform that outlined its policy priorities. Are there any notable changes from the previous iteration of this document listeners should know about?
Seaborn Larson: Yeah, there's a couple of changes. There's not a ton, but one of the big ones I noticed is that the Montana Republican Party now supports a rewrite of the state constitution in 2030. That's if voters choose to go that route and have that convention. The document's seen as a pretty progressive constitution across the country, actually. Its provisions for a clean and healthful environment often are stifling natural resource extraction. A former state Republican legislator, Derek Skees, infamously once called it a "socialist rag," so that was a big change — as well as data centers.
It's a hot political issue this year. There's multiple references to data centers in the new Republican platform that generally will allow for development as long as the data centers themselves don't Hoover up a lot of Montana's limited natural resources. All of the platform debates and votes were closed to the press, so we've been waiting these last couple weeks to see the final products.
Austin Amestoy: And I think that data center point's really interesting because of course that was a big topic of conversation at the Democratic convention this month as well in Billings and that party opted for a sort of two-year moratorium on large developments, which is sort of a shade of what's happening in the GOP convention; maybe a little bit on the stricter side. So be interesting to see if any of that makes it into actual policy down the road.
Seaborn Larson: Absolutely.
Austin Amestoy: Seaborn, this convention, of course, came after a major push by GOP party chair Art Wittich to oust long-time moderate Republicans from the Legislature during this month's primary, and he had mixed success with that effort, but what did that effort to bring Republicans into the conservative fold of the party look like on the ground at the convention?
Seaborn Larson: Right, so one of the bigger news items to me that came out of the convention were the new bylaws that passed. There's a membership section there that says Republicans membership to the party can be revoked for working with Democrats at the Legislature or working with democratically aligned groups on elections. And we saw some of that in the primary elections and we saw that at the 2025 Legislature. So that felt pretty targeted towards the party's more moderate flank.
Art Wittich gave a speech at the convention that drew a hard line between the old guard and the party that he leads today — this idea that, "We're better together" is the old way, Wittich said, and that meant tolerating or accepting the minority of the party, which does work with Democrats on occasion. There will be no more of that. And that's a pretty clear coming out of that convention earlier this month.
Austin Amestoy: This is kind of a practical question, Seaborn, but does it mean anything for a party organization to reject the membership of someone who self-declares as a Republican? Does that have a practical effect?
Seaborn Larson: Yeah, it's a great question, Austin. And the reality is that neither Art Wittich nor the party can stop anybody from running as a Republican. There's freedom of association that we have in the Constitution that allows people to identify with whatever party they like. But there's also something to the idea that the Republican Party is an individual organization that can determine its membership and who can participate in party business and things like that. There's some lines that these Republicans can't cross anymore if they're deemed not worthy of the party, but certainly anyone can still run as a Republican in this state.
Austin Amestoy: We're heading into a new season of governance in Montana with the Legislature convening in January. What did the new GOP platform and the tone of this convention tell us, if anything, about the trajectory of the Montana Republican Party moving forward?
Seaborn Larson: Despite all this discord in the Republican Party, Montana is still very much a Republican state, and I think we're going to continue to see Republican majorities at the state Legislature. After these primaries, moderates have the numbers to wield power again at the Capitol, and Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte has been a willing partner with that faction at the session before. So we're really waiting to see now who's gonna emerge as leadership for the Republican caucus and how that kind of controls the traffic at the Legislature.
Austin Amestoy: Seaborn Larson: is a reporter with the Lee Newspapers State Bureau. Seaborn, thanks for joining us.
Seaborn Larson: Thank you, Austin.
