Following a flurry of amendments and familiar partisan feuding, the chair of the Districting and Apportionment Commission sided with Democrats on new state House and Senate districts.
The Montana Districting and Apportionment Commission finalized new state legislative district lines Saturday on a 3-2 vote, with commission chair Maylinn Smith breaking a tie in favor of the panel’s Democrats.
The new House and Senate districts, which will take effect in the 2024 election cycle and remain in place through 2032, are the product of a day-long work session this weekend, reams of public comment — including from the Legislature — and months of pitched negotiations between the commission’s partisan members.
But when it came time for a final vote on the commission’s plan Saturday, those negotiations resulted, as they have often done, in a stalemate. Smith, who has long maintained that the commission’s two Democrats and two Republicans should reach consensus, sided with Democrats. The commission will now file the maps, barring any last-minute technical changes, with the Montana Secretary of State.
“I didn’t see any sense in drawing it out longer,” Smith said Monday. “I didn’t see where we could meet consensus in the future.”
The Districting and Apportionment Commission meets every 10 years following the census to draw new U.S. House and state legislative maps. The maps produced this weekend derive in large part from a tentative Democratic-supported plan passed on a split vote late last year, though with several amendments to reflect bipartisan recommendations from the state Legislature.
The House plan divides Montana’s roughly one million people into 100 roughly population-equal districts, around 60 of which, in an average election year, favor Republicans to varying degrees, with the remainder favoring Democrats. The 50 Senate districts, which each comprise two adjacent House districts, would yield proportionally similar outcomes in that theoretical political environment. A handful of potentially competitive districts would exist in each chamber.
The Legislature is currently divided based on district lines adopted following the 2010 census. Republicans hold two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers, with 68 seats in the House and 34 in the Senate. In sum, the new maps could cost Republicans several seats while still leaving them a sizable majority that at least suggests the GOP’s dominance in recent elections.
The final vote Saturday followed a flurry of amendments from both sides, in addition to the changes recommended by the Legislature. Several came from what Democratic commissioner Kendra Miller dubbed a “Republican wishlist” that would give the GOP more seats. The most significant of these was a redraw of a pair of north-reaching Missoula House districts to create more separation between rural and urban communities in the region. The change would switch a Democratic district to a Republican-leaning district.
“It would have made it more compact and better reflect communities of interest,” Republican commissioner Dan Stusek said.
Smith voted with Stusek and fellow Republican Jeff Essmann on the amendment, which Miller and commissioner Denise Juneau opposed. But the amendment, instead of bringing the commissioners closer together, merely aggravated the stalemate.
