Here’s What Happened in City Elections in Montana

What happened in some of the big municipal elections in Montana on Tuesday?

Let's start with Missoula.

This one was was sad to see because I thought that Mike Nugent, the candidate for mayor of Missoula, really had a chance to bring about some change in Missoula. He's a local business owner. He's a well liked local business owner. I saw some labor unions were endorsing him and backing him. But instead, a far left candidate named Andrea Davis was elected mayor of Missoula by a big margin. So it kind of reminds me of when Chicago had the opportunity to get rid of Lori Lightfoot- they voted for somebody who was even worse than Lori Lightfoot. And so here you have these cities that, like Missoula, are faced with a transient crisis, a homeless crisis. They've got some of the worst property taxes, and they just voted for more of the same or potentially something that's even worse. It's like an addiction in these places like Missoula. They'll still vote for the Democrats, no matter how bad the Democrats make it.

What about Billings?

By a huge margin, voters voted against that massive $143 million Parks and Recs bond that went down in flames. Around 22,000 voted no and about 10,000 voted yes. So that thing got smoked due to concerns about high property taxes.

On the city council elections, Scott Aspenlieder pulled off a win. He's a solid local business owner.

Ward 3 was another big one. Charlie Loveridge almost pulled it off. He came within 200 votes of defeating former Democrat Yellowstone County Commissioner Bill Kennedy in a very left-leaning district. In fact, I was looking at the primary election numbers- Bill Kennedy had 1300 votes in the primary, Charlie Loveridge had almost 1300 votes in the primary, while incumbent far leftist Danny Choriki had almost 1100 votes. So you when you combine the votes for the two liberal candidates in that race, they had what 20 2300 almost 2400 votes combined between the two of them? Charlie was at about 1300 votes. And yet Charlie picked up a significant chunk of those voters to nearly pull off a victory in that left leaning City Council race on election day.

And, in Bozeman?

I think you can tell that even the voters in Bozeman were not happy with the way things have been going within the Bozeman city government because the incumbent mayor got smoked by both of the other candidates. Joey Morrison has been elected as the new mayor of Bozeman. What's interesting about joey Morrison is that he sounds like  he's far left. But he was opposed to an all out ban on new development that one of the other candidates had been promoting. Instead, he was focused on developing more affordable housing. Now, the challenge for those of you taxpayers is, well- they're probably gonna want you to pay for it, which means you're gonna pay even more on property taxes in Bozeman to pay for the so called affordable housing.

As for the Flathead, the Flathead Beacon had a report showing most incumbents held on to their seats.

This was my quick take on Tuesday morning. Did I get it right? Did I miss something? Any other interesting takeaways from your perspective? Shoot me a message on the app, or e-mail aaron (at) montanatalks.com