Five charts from the 2025 Montana Legislature

There are hundreds of storylines that came from the 2025 Montana Legislature (The Daily Montanan wrote more than 236 stories covering the session since the start of the year), which can make it hard to see some bigger picture views of what went on in Helena.

The Daily Montanan made a few visualizations of some stats from the session — using data derived from the Legislative Services Division and the Montana Free Press, which does a great job of crafting a database of LSD data.

More bills than ever were introduced during the 2025 session

Lawmakers come to Helena with more ideas for legislation than would ever be heard, much less end up on the Gov. Greg Gianforte’s desk.

The last two sessions saw a big jump in the number of bill drafts requested by legislators — around 4,500 — up more than 1,000 from the 2021 and 2019 sessions. That has translated into back-to-back record numbers of bills actually introduced into the body — discounting the 1973-1974 sessions, the first following the adoption of the new Montana Constitution — with 39.1% of drafts receiving an official introduction this year.

The 2025 session saw 1,759 bills, resolutions and initiatives make it to at least one committee vote. In the 85 days lawmakers were in Helena, 884 bills passed both chambers. As of May 12, 570 bills have become law so far, with more than 200 awaiting action, while Gov. Greg Gianforte has already vetoed a handful.

The Montana Legislative Services Division keeps track of the passage of bills throughout the legislative process and produces visualizations to show the winnowing down of potential laws.

The below chart, taken from the LSD’s interactive “Billboard,” shows that most bills that don’t make it out of the Legislature, die in their original chambers. After that, it’s more likely the second chamber will approve a bill and it will end up heading to Gianforte’s desk. In 2025, just more than half of all bills introduced made it all the way through the process, not counting single-chamber resolutions.

In 2023, the total number of bill passed, including single-chamber resolutions, was 907. In 2025, that number jumped to 996.

Visualizing voting statistics

Lawmakers in both chamber pressed their green or red buttons a lot of times this year — there were 2,659 votes taken in the Senate, and 2,706 in the House, according to the bill tracking data compiled by the Montana Free Press.

Of those votes, a vast majority of them were bipartisan votes, and many near-unanimous ones, which might seem odd, given that it is often highly partisan rhetoric stemming from politicians pointing fingers back and forth on myriad issues that breaks through the Capitol to the outside world.

But it’s possible to visualize the bipartisan nature of most votes, by looking at how often each lawmaker’s vote aligned with the majority of a chamber.

Take the Senate for example. The following chart shows how often each senator was on the winning side of an issue.

The lowest percentages were 66% for Democratic Sen. Andrea Olsen of Missoula and 68% for Republican Sen. Daniel Emrich of Great Falls, while 10 lawmakers were in the winning coalition more than 90% of the time.

The average Republican was in the majority 84% of the time, while the average Democrat was 78% of the time, which makes sense because the GOP held the majority in the chamber and could theoretically pass any law without any Democrat support.

Of course, that wasn’t the case, as anyone following the session closely might be aware. A major storyline from the Legislature was that the Senate chamber was effectively run by a working majority coalition of nine Republicans and all Democrats — 27 lawmakers that could pass laws on a bipartisan basis.

By plotting how often a lawmaker voted with the majority of each party, the breakout of the nine Republicans who joined Democrats in many votes is clearly visible.

Note that the axes start around 50% in order to illustrate the differences between lawmakers better.

The Nine are highlighted, and are shown clearly apart from the majority of their caucus, and dragging the “average Republican” statistic over. It’s also clear that two more Republican senators, Mike Yakawich of Billings and Mike Cuffe of Eureka, were also more likely to align with Democrats than most of their GOP members.

This chart also shows that Sen. Dave Fern, D-Whitefish, was more bipartisan that the rest of the Democrat caucus.

Another interesting statistic — Sen. Emrich, shown at the far left side of the chart, voted against Democrats more than anyone else in the Senate, but also voted against his own party more often than anyone except Sen. Russ Tempel, one of The Nine.

Of course, a reminder that these charts show general statistics, so individual votes or subject area votes can’t be inferred.

The House had a much more clear partisan divide. The following chart is a little different, plotting how often a lawmaker voted with the majority party Republicans, and how often they voted on the winning side of an issue.

The trend among Democrats — the more often a lawmaker voted with Republicans, the more likely they were to be on the winning side of an issue — is an obvious one given the Republicans’ 58-42 control of the chamber.

Among Republicans, however, the correlation between how often a representative votes with their party (96% of the time for Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe) and how often they voted on the winning side (97% for Rep. Valerie Moore) is much less clear.

The biggest outlier in the chamber is freshman lawmaker Rep. Lukas Schubert of Kalispell, who voted with his own party 4% less often than the next lawmakers, and voted on the losing side of an issue more than any Republican other than Reps. Caleb Hinkle of Belgrade and Kathy Love of Hamilton.