Her election night party started at 8 p.m. on Tuesday—the same time the polls for Missoula’s mayoral primary race closed. So candidate Andrea Davis was right on schedule to be fashionably late to the Union Club at 8:15.
These gatherings tend to be hurry-up-and-wait-for-results affairs. Thing is, those results came in about 10 minutes before Davis did.
That’s when a campaign volunteer relayed that roughly 90 percent of the ballots were already in and counted. Some years, that last 10 percent could mean a much bigger bar tab at the end of the night. This time, the outcome was decisive.
Davis clocked in with nearly 44 percent of the total votes cast, or just over 9,000. She’ll advance to November’s general election along with Mike Nugent, who sat at 28 percent post-primary. Trickling in at third, with less than 16 percent, was current Mayor Jordan Hess, appointed by Missoula City Council to fill out the end of John Engen’s term after thelongtime mayor died of cancer in 2022. If Davis has another victory to celebrate in November, she’d be only the second woman elected mayor of this city and the first since Juliet Gregory in 1947. (Just after Engen’s death, city councilor Gwen Jones served as acting mayor until the appointment of Hess.)
By the time Davis walked into the Union, she did so to a dance floor of cheering supporters. “We were all kind of freaking out,” said Dillon Sarb, Davis’ campaign manager.
Just after 9 p.m., Davis was again MIA, this time calling the other candidates outside the bar.
Inside, campaign banners drooped over cast-aside folding chairs, as supporters milled around finishing their drinks. It had been an abrupt celebration, akin to ordering a late-night pizza slice and, since the shop is closing up, getting a whole pie.
Karen Concannon, who canvassed for Davis this summer, said she thought the race between Davis and Hess would be tighter. She saw political crossover between the two on issues like housing and green energy. But she said Davis approached her campaign with a bit more hope, a note that Davis hit on, too, during a short speech to the crowd earlier in the night.
In the dark front hall of the bar, Daniel Kiely noted Davis’s “quiet, consensus-building style of leadership.” He was confident Davis would make it to the top two, but “didn’t think she’d crush it.”
His friend John Bennett had predicted that Hess and Nugent would take the top spots and Davis would come in third.
They were pleasantly surprised and encouraged about what the actual numbers could mean for Missoula.
“It’s about time for a woman to be in charge,” Kiely said.
While he paused, waffling aloud between whether he wanted that statement on or off the record, Bennett chimed in: “That’s the fuckin’ quote right there.”
Campaign manager Sarb was also surprised by the wide margin of Davis’s lead. He watched the party dwindle from the back, wearing a UM ball cap and a distinctly phonetic campaign button: “Andre-yah is my may-yah.”
Sarb took on the role of campaign manager on June 1, and felt he had some catching up to do in terms of name recognition and fundraising. But these setbacks were “clearly not insurmountable,” he said.
Less than two hours after polls closed, he was already strategizing on how to adjust the campaign to oppose Nugent. “Literally right now, we are in a different race,” Sarb said.
