Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis cruised to victory in Tuesday’s municipal election, defeating challenger Shawn Knopp and clinching her first full, four-year term in office.
First elected to carry out the remainder of the late John Engen’s term in 2023, Davis captured more than 16,200 of the almost 24,000 ballots cast in the mayoral contest, enough to beat Knopp by about 40 percentage points.
“It feels like Missoula has continued to send a message that they appreciate my leadership, and I feel extraordinarily grateful, and I feel extraordinarily humbled, to be at this point,” Davis told the Pulp Tuesday at a Union Club election night watch party, something of a local political tradition.
On Election Day, Missoulians also cast votes in city council races across all six wards:
- Ward 1: Betsy Craske defeated Lucas Moody.
- Ward 2: Incumbent Sierra Farmer declined to seek re-election, and Justin Ponton defeated Rebecca Dawson.
- Ward 3: In a contest between two incumbents, Jennifer Savage beat Daniel Carlino.
- Ward 4: Incumbent Mike Nugent fended off a challenge from David Quattrocchi.
- Ward 5: Incumbent Stacie Anderson ran unopposed.
- Ward 6: Sean Patrick McCoy emerged victorious in his rematch against incumbent Sandra Vasecka, and incumbent Kristen Jordan defeated Chris Foster.
Outside of city hall races, voters re-elected a slate of municipal judges and shot down a county infrastructure levy. Collectively, voters cast about 38,000 ballots this election, a roughly 42 percent turnout rate.
The results at this stage are technically unofficial, and will be confirmed during an election canvas later this month.
Davis said re-election means continuing the work from her first term, which has seen the city develop new affordable housing, negotiate deals to develop some long-idle parcels, rewrite its land use plan and begin updating the city’s building codes to encourage infill residential development and sustainable growth. More controversially, she’s overseen the city’s closure of the Johnson Street homeless shelter and banning camping in city parks.
“The issues that I ran on in 2023 are the same fundamental issues that I ran on in 2025,” Davis said. “It’s dealing with cost of living issues. It’s dealing with attainable and affordable housing. It’s responsive government. Thinking about a four-year term … I think we will be basically building off of those. Because those are major things that we aren’t going to be able to flip a switch on quickly. These are incremental steps that you take to actually improve a situation in which the government is not solely responsible.”
Knopp, a project manager at Montana Glass making his third bid for mayor, also ran a campaign centered on the cost of living — a theme that pervaded races up and down the ballot this year. But his particular focus was rising property taxes, the main mechanism for generating new city revenue. (The city budget increased property taxes by more than 16 percent in 2024 and more than 3 percent this year). He said the city should only be funding services beyond police, fire and roads on an as-needed basis. But that message wasn’t enough to make a meaningful dent in Davis’ mandate. Knopp’s minimal fundraising and Davis’ demonstrated expertise with the mechanisms of city government likely didn’t help him, either.
When Davis sat down for an interview with The Pulp, the mood at the Union was high and beery. The first batch of results had arrived shortly after 8 p.m. and showed Davis with 67 percent of the vote. She was repeatedly interrupted for handshakes and backslaps as friends, family, and local politicos came to offer their congratulations. Davis had reason to celebrate beyond her own presumptive victory, as all but one of the candidates she endorsed for city council won their races Tuesday, as well.
“What these election results tell me is the direction we’ve been leading the city, the direction I’ve been leading the city, is what people want to see. I think people appreciate pragmatism.” —Mayor Andrea Davis
These were races that demonstrated a clear divide in Missoula politics even among (for the most part) self-described progressives. This division is less about the issues — it’d be hard to find someone running for office in Missoula today who doesn’t acknowledge the cost of living crisis, for example — and more about the proper posture toward them.
On one side, candidates carrying endorsements from groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Missoula Tenants Union advocated for a more radical response to the challenges of the moment — more social housing, more shelter space, and more active debate in city council, which often votes with near unanimity. On the other, candidates with endorsements from the mayor and other officials advocated public-private partnerships, code reform and other more technical approaches, arguing that the city only has so much power to intercede in property markets and only so much money to fund social services.
Craske, Ponton, Savage and Foster all carried endorsements from Davis, and all but Foster won their races Tuesday. Carlino, Quattrocchi, Moody and Jordan, on the other hand, all represented the left wing of local politics, and all but Jordan lost. In most cases, it wasn’t particularly close — only Carlino, himself an incumbent, came within 10 points of the victor.
“What these election results tell me is the direction we’ve been leading the city, the direction I’ve been leading the city, is what people want to see,” Davis said. “I think people appreciate pragmatism. I think it’s pretty clear across the board that every candidate identified the same issues. I think there’s recognition of people who have the ability, the wherewithal to get it done, and I think that’s what we saw in the results tonight.”
The factional divide was perhaps hottest in the race between Savage and Carlino, a contest between two incumbents triggered by Savage’s move from Ward 1 to Ward 3. The race saw dueling accusations of campaign finance law violations — one against Carlino partly substantiated, and one against Savage dismissed — and fiery op-eds and social media posts. To his detractors, Carlino is a firebrand more interested in scoring points than making change. To hers, Savage represents the city council status quo, her move to a new district intended in part — as some critics claimed — to knock off a perennial agitator and working class advocate on the council.
“People have been hostile, and they’ve said things about both me and Daniel that aren’t true, aren’t fair to either of us,” Savage told The Pulp Wednesday morning. There were two progressives running in the race, she said, “but it wasn’t always framed that way.”
Savage said she understands the desire for immediate change from people with their backs up against the wall. She said she even gets why people would paint the council as too friendly with landlords or developers. Savage herself acknowledges owning rental units, the basis of a line of attack from the left this cycle (one perhaps fueled by the fact that a former landlord of Carlino’s wrote a column denouncing him as a bad tenant and thus unfit for public service). But Savage pointed out she’s also the person who brought a resolution to better track, regulate and draw revenue from short-term rentals.
“I think those are hard conversations,” she said. “Some people want something to have happened yesterday.”
But there are limits to the city’s “decision space,” as she said, and she’s proud of the work the city has put into the code reform effort, which she hopes can bring not just more infill development but also greater equity.
“I had all the other council members and the mayor and everybody that’s a politician working against me in this race. I think they would prefer to not have any pushback on the council.” —Daniel Carlino
At the same time, she and other candidates dealt with voters who chafed against any sign of change — and that’s a sizable contingent, if the comment section on Missoulian stories about new developments is any indicator.
“I think the mayor said it best,” Savage said. “Change is here. And it’s how we adapt to it that is actually where our decision space is.”
She said she and other candidates who received the mayor’s endorsement did so because of their potential for working together with Davis on a shared vision for the city.
In an interview Wednesday, Carlino thanked his supporters, but said he faced significant political headwinds.
“I had all the other council members and the mayor and everybody that’s a politician working against me in this race,” he said. “I think they would prefer to not have any pushback on the council.”
He said Savage’s campaign smeared him as unable to work well with others and get things done, but said this attack reflects political differences, not Carlino’s work ethic. He noted accomplishments including the city’s Vision Zero traffic safety resolution, which he introduced, and an amendment to city code allowing for larger accessory dwelling units — the exact kind of technical tweak favored in forthcoming city zoning reform effort.
Moody and Quattrocchi were similarly “going up against the political machine,” Carlino said, and struggled to get their message out. “But it’s still worthwhile to have the discourse in these elections.”
Carlino said he’ll now focus on electing other progressive, working class and young people to local office.
“I think Missoula has always been a community that does a lot of activism, does a lot of taking care of each other, and I think there’s a lot of momentum to get more progressive people into office to work on those things,” he said. “I feel like right now a lot of Missoula is really down on what the federal government is doing, and we need to try to push back against that, to take care of each other where the federal government won’t.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to more clearly attribute claims about Jennifer Savage’s motivations for moving to Ward 3 to some of her detractors.
