MONTANA'S OPEN PRIMARIES: YESTERDAY’S FIX, NOW TODAY’S FLAW!
When Reform Goes Rotten
Written by Bill Lussenheide
Montana’s open primary didn’t just appear out of thin air—it was born in 1912, when voters finally got tired of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company running the show like it owned the place (because, more or less, it did). Party bosses and smoke-filled conventions were picking candidates in back rooms, and regular Montanans were expected to clap politely and fall in line. So voters grabbed their shiny new initiative powers and blew that system up. The open primary let anyone walk in, pick a ballot, and have a say. At the time, it was a political jailbreak—and a justified one.
Fast forward 114 years, and the jailbreak is still running… long after the prison closed.
The copper kings are gone, the party machines are fossils, and Montana is now so solidly Republican that the GOP primary is often the only election that matters. But we’re still using a system designed to fight a century-old corporate monopoly, as if the ghost of Anaconda might come back and start picking legislators again.
Meanwhile, the modern reality is less dramatic but more absurd: the system is getting gamed.
With no party registration, anyone can show up, grab a Republican ballot, and help decide the outcome. In safe GOP districts, that’s not a minor detail—that is the election. The result? Fake RINO candidates who wear the Republican label just long enough to win, then govern however they please, with no regard or loyalty to the Montana GOP Platform!
What was once a reform has become a loophole you could drive a campaign bus through.
A closed primary would simply mean Republicans choose Republican candidates, Democrats choose theirs, and everyone stops pretending this open system is still some noble Progressive relic. It’s not—it’s a century-old workaround that’s outlived the problem it was designed to fix.
Retiring it wouldn’t dishonor the reformers of 1912. It would recognize the obvious: they solved their problem. We’re just stuck with their solution—long past its expiration date.
Bill Lussenheide
