In May 2023, Shelly Fyant was driving through Missoula, Montana, when Scott McNeil, who directs legislative races for the state Democratic party, called to ask if she would consider running for House District 91. Just a few months earlier, Montana’s bipartisan redistricting commission had approved a new map for the state’s 150 legislative districts, and the district where Fyant lived was now more culturally diverse and politically complicated.
The old district had been solidly blue, but it was confined to a single county, with most of its constituents clustered in the liberal college town of Missoula. The new district was many times larger, mainly rural, and a lot more competitive: It stretched from North Missoula across three counties. Nearly 20% of its constituents were Indigenous residents of the Flathead Reservation, where Fyant also lives as an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
Fyant, who turned 67 this year, initially had mixed feelings; her bid for a third term on the reservation’s Tribal Council ended with a bruising loss in 2021, and her eight years of public service had taken a toll. Whoever represented HD91 would have to work across tribal and state jurisdictions, collaborate with three different county commissions, and spend lots of windshield time crisscrossing the 60-mile-long district.
But lately, her confidence had returned. “Heck, I’ve led a sovereign nation through a pandemic,” she said to herself. “I can do this!”
So she knocked on doors across the district, from tiny reservation towns just six blocks long to woodsy precincts full of expensive Missoula bungalows, explaining her priorities: affordable health care, quality education, and environmental protection. On Election Day, 18 months later, she outperformed Kamala Harris by almost 3 points, earning enough Trump voters to win handily and contributing to a local Democratic resurgence in Montana. The party flipped 12 Republican-held seats in the state Legislature, the second most in the country after Wisconsin, where Democrats tallied 14 new seats.
At first glance, these two states have little in common. Montana is a red state that President Donald Trump won by 20 points, and Wisconsin is a purple state where he eked out a victory by less than 1%. Yet they are the only states where Democrats made double-digit gains in state chambers. They are also two of the three states where the party broke Republican supermajorities. (North Carolina is the third.)
As Democrats across the country count their losses and squabble over the causes of a Republican trifecta in Washington D.C., they would be wise to consider the root cause of these legislative rallies: fair maps drawn by nonpartisan and bipartisan institutions. In the future, the balance of power in state legislatures will depend not only on the strength of candidates hoping to enter the halls of government but whether partisan lawmakers are allowed to continue fitting the locks.
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION requires states to redraw electoral boundaries every 10 years, based on new census data, to ensure voters have equal representation in Congress and state legislatures. Legal standards for this process differ widely by state, but most require decision-makers to ensure the district’s contiguity, consider its compactness, and avoid arbitrarily dividing communities of interest, like tribal nations, counties and school districts. In many states, however, the legislature still controls this process, and partisan politicians often gerrymander boundaries.
During this last round of redistricting, state legislatures drew electoral boundaries in 23 red states, nine blue states, and one purple state: Maine. Of the remaining 17 states, courts drew boundaries in eight states, while bipartisan commissions handled five other states, and independent commissions tackled boundaries in the remaining four states.
“You can quibble over this line or that line, but you can’t argue that we violated that goal.”
Montana has the oldest bipartisan commission in the country, composed of two commissioners from each major party and a chairperson selected by the nonpartisan state Supreme Court. From 2019 to 2022, the commission held live-streamed and digitally recorded meetings on 49 separate days, gathered nearly 8,000 written and oral comments on congressional redistricting and more than 1,600 on legislative redistricting. Ultimately, Maylinn Smith, the chairwoman and former director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana, supported Republican commissioners on the boundaries of Montana’s new congressional district but sided with Democrats on the state legislative map.
Of the five goals the commission established to guide these decisions, Kendra Miller, a Democratic commissioner, said the most important was not to “unduly favor a political party.” To achieve this goal, she argued for boundaries that could reasonably enable proportionality between the vote share of statewide candidates for each party and the number of seats the parties held in the Legislature.
“In 2022, Democrats got 40% of the statewide vote but our (old) maps produced a Republican supermajority in the State Legislature, so it was totally disproportionate,” she explained.
In November 2024, Democrats won eight additional seats in the House and four in the Senate to reach 40% of seats in each chamber, a number that precisely matches the average vote share earned by Democrats who ran for statewide office this year.
“There’s no way that anyone could argue this map unduly favors either party,” Miller said. “You can quibble over this line or that line, but you can’t argue that we violated that goal.”
Republicans, though, are determined to quibble. “Frankly, I don’t consider the commission to be bipartisan because our state Supreme Court has historically been populated by Democrats,” Jeff Essman, a former legislator and one of two Republican members of the Redistricting Commission, told me.
“It’s fundamentally a political decision,” he said. “Fairness and independence, that’s academic. I hear about it in media outlets and high-minded 501(c)(3)s, but when I talk to voters, they just want their team to win.”
When asked what process he would prefer, he said, “Put it back in the State Legislature.”
Wisconsin shows how that process usually plays out. The state’s Republican lawmakers flourished after drawing legislative maps in 2011 and 2021 that reduced the proportionality between Democrats’ statewide vote share and legislative seats.
The 2021 gerrymander was so extreme that some voters lived in areas completely disconnected from the rest of their district, prompting the state Supreme Court to order a new map. This map — drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, mainly because they preferred it over a map drawn by the courts — ended 20 years of gerrymandered districts last February.
“When it comes to gerrymandering, Republicans have no shame. At least that’s how it has been in the state of Wisconsin,” Dianne Hesselbein, Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader, told me. “We saw years that our Sen. Tammy Baldwin won by a landslide and we didn‘t pick up any seats (in the state Legislature).”
“When it comes to gerrymandering, Republicans have no shame.”
Legislative control of redistricting has produced similar results across the nation, particularly in red states. All 13 states that received a “D” or “F” from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project during the 2020 redistricting cycle, allow legislators to draw their own districts as well as congressional districts. Republicans controlled redistricting in ten of these states, including North Carolina and Wisconsin where courts struck down legislator drawn maps as partisan gerrymanders. But Colorado and Michigan created independent commissions in 2018, and both states recently drew A-grade maps, according to Princeton.
ON DEC. 27, I met Fyant at a coffee shop near the edge of her district in northeast Missoula. Gray clouds billowed above Lower Rattlesnake Creek, which tumbles into the Clark Fork River a few blocks away.
Whether House District 91 would include this scenic section of the city was a serious point of contention throughout the redistricting process. Republican commissioners argued the new district wasn’t compact and said Missoulians had little in common with the Bitterroot Salish and Kootenai people living more than an hour’s drive north. Democrats countered that tribal members and rural residents often commute to Missoula for work and multi-county, urban-rural districts were impossible to avoid in a large rural state like Montana. Ultimately, Smith, the commission chair and deciding vote, backed the Democratic argument.
When I asked Fyant for her take on whether her district and the larger legislative map were fairly drawn, she offered two answers. First, she emphasized the need for proportionality, not only between statewide party identification and the makeup of the House and Senate but also between Indigenous voters and representatives in the state Legislature.
“I don’t think you can chunk up districts and make it absolutely fair,” she said. “But you can make the larger scheme fair. When it‘s done, who‘s at the table?” Indigenous lawmakers now occupy 8% of Montana’s legislative seats in a state where 7% of the population is Indigenous.
Fyant’s second response took a much broader and decidedly apolitical view. “Part of our original instructions from the Creator was to speak for those who cannot,” she said, gesturing north toward the Upper Rattlesnake neighborhood, where houses eventually give way to the 95,000-acre Rattlesnake Recreation and Wilderness Areas and a 67,000-acre Tribal Wilderness Area, conservation lands within her district that support vast elk herds and at least three animals protected under the Endangered Species Act: grizzly bear, Canada lynx and bull trout.
“We need to protect the ‘last best place,’” she said, using one of Montana’s well-known nicknames. “That includes rural character, clean water, clean air, this beautiful natural environment that brings us together. In the grander scheme of things, it’s all one community of interest.”
Gabriel Furshong writes from Helena, Montana. A correspondent at Montana Quarterly, his reporting and narrative nonfiction have appeared in The Nation, Yes! Magazine, Tahoma Review, and elsewhere. A widely published poet, his small collection “Around the Country A Chasm” was a finalist for the 2023 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
