Missoula voters winnowed the field for contested mayoral and city council seats on Tuesday, sending the two candidates with the most votes in each race to the general election in the fall.
Voters didn’t deliver any major upsets, sending all incumbents running — including the city’s mayor, Andrea Davis — forward on their paths to re-election. We weren’t expecting a ton of surprises, in part because the top-two format of the primary makes it unlikely that an incumbent wouldn’t advance to the general election even if on name recognition alone. But we still think it’s worth digging into the results.
To start, Davis, who was elected in 2023 to finish the final term of the late John Engen, cruised easily to the top of the field, netting more than 12,000 votes — 66 percent of the total. She’ll be joined in November by Shawn Knopp, who captured almost 5,000 votes, while Brandi Atanasoff came in third with a vote share of more than 5 percent (a sizable improvement over the 1 percent she received in the primary when she ran in 2023).
Remember, these are non-partisan elections. But that doesn’t mean we can’t read the tea leaves a little bit.
Knopp, like Davis and Atanasoff, has also run for mayor before. A project manager at Montana Glass, he told KPAX last month that he’s mainly running to stem the flow of rising property taxes, to streamline city government — in other words, closing departments or reallocating their resources — and to make it easier to build in the city. That tax anxiety is a real feeling in Montana in general and in Missoula in particular, where the city and county have both approved successive property tax increases in recent budget years, this one included. But local government officials, like Davis, would say they’re in the unenviable position of having to run a fast-changing city with real social needs on a shoestring budget and few ways to raise money other than the dreaded tax hike.
(We’d also point out that, despite increased home values and increased rates from the city and county, many Montana homeowners will see the taxable value of their property go down this year because of how the legislature shifted tax burdens onto second-home and vacation rental owners.)
Davis, former executive director of housing non-profit Homeward, ran in 2023 on her experience providing social services and developing affordable housing. And those issues, housing in particular, have dominated her mayorship. On the one hand, she’s done some things that were undoubtedly unpopular among some of the progressives that voted for her in 2023, in particular closing the Johnson Street Shelter — an unavoidable funding reality, as she would tell it — putting more people on the street despite the city’s success in finding permanent housing for many former shelter residents. During her tenure, the city council voted to ban urban camping. She’s also said the city should be asking less of private builders in order to jump-start the redevelopment of city-owned land.
At the same time, the housing sprint the city undertook after closing the shelter clearly put people in homes. And the city has been announcing new housing projects — both affordable and market rate — at a steady clip under her mayorship. She’s made trimming the city’s budget deficit a priority, and her spending plan for 2026 was tight enough to get the support of the council’s self-professed libertarian. Whether you think that’s good or bad, she’s clearly been able to build coalitions.
Fittingly, she’s got quite a bit more political polish and campaign cash than Knopp heading into the general. As of mid-August, the last time the mayoral candidates reported their campaign spending, she had more than $13,000 in the bank. Knopp, in the same period, had just over $1,000 in his coffers, all from a personal loan.
In case you’re curious (we were), here are some names from Davis’ donor list: Betsy Bach, a former University of Montana professor and Jeanette Rankin Peace Center board chair emerita; Jim Bachand, the CEO of the Missoula Organization of Realtors; Demetra Lambros, an attorney, Greek culture advocate and member of the prominent local family of developers by that name; Democratic politician Denise Juneau; county attorney Matt Jennings; someone named Joe Easton, the director of property development for Coca-Cola’s regional operations in the Rockies and others. (Search candidate campaign finance records here). Now, contribution limits for municipal elections in Montana are really low — $450 per election, and thank goodness for that, some would say — so these are not exactly huge pushes from powerful interests to get Davis elected.
And perhaps Knopp’s pro-construction, anti-tax line will earn him some more favor as the general election unfolds. There were also only about 18,600 votes in the contest, out of the 47,000 ballots mailed to registered city voters, so there’s clearly a lot of room for new votes in the general election.
Down ballot, the highest profile race is arguably in Ward 3, with incumbent Jennifer Savage moving wards to challenge fellow incumbent Daniel Carlino amid an already crowded field. Savage took first place in the primary, with 1,711 votes, or about 48 percent. Carlino came in second, with just shy of 1,500 votes. Three other candidates — David Knudson, Nathan Coyan and Jon Vivas — will not advance.
That Savage — who actually had to vacate her current council seat in Ward 1 so she could run in Ward 3 — took home the most votes in a new district could spell trouble for Carlino. It’s already been a nasty primary, which isn’t shocking — Carlino, a democratic socialist, isn’t afraid to criticize the council’s liberal majority on its homelessness policy or embrace of tax-increment financing and doesn’t hesitate to paint the sometimes arcane issues of city governance as products of grand, even sinister, historical forces. And maybe he should. But he unsurprisingly has some critics, and Davis and much of the rest of the council has lined up to support Savage.
We can see some of the dynamics of the race in the kerfuffle over texts ostensibly sent by a Carlino campaign consultant without the candidate’s permission that said Carlino was being targeted by corporate PACs, conservatives and the Israel lobby. The texts also didn’t feature a paid-for-by line, required under law. He told the Missoulian he didn’t send the messages and didn’t endorse their content. Nonetheless, a whole array of council members and candidates, Savage and Davis among them, issued a letter to the Missoulian calling out Carlino for “spreading untruths,” which the authors said was “reflective of character and governing style.”
Savage has said she filed a complaint with the state Commissioner of Political Practices over the texts. The complaint, viewable here, alleges the texts violated campaign finance law because they did not disclaim who paid for them and they are not reported in Carlino’s campaign finance paperwork. Carlino told the Missoulian that the complaint lacks merit. He has until Sept. 19 to respond to the commissioner’s office.
In Ward 2, where incumbent Sierra Farmer is not seeking re-election, candidate Justin Ponton took the most votes, with 769 or about 31 percent, followed by Rebecca Dawson, who received 456 votes. Those two will face each other in the general election.
In Ward 6, we’re set for a rematch: Sean Patrick McCoy and incumbent Sandra Vasecka (the libertarian mentioned earlier) both advanced from the primary. McCoy, who in 2023 lost out to Vasecka in a convoluted council process designed to resolve a tie vote in the ward, received 1,321 votes this time around — that’s more than 50 percent. Vasecka came in a distant second, with 770 votes. A lot can change between now and November, but it’s interesting, at the very least, to see the progressive McCoy — once someone who was arrested for protesting logging companies, now a local farmer and the president of the Missoula Consolidated Planning Board — post such numbers against Vasecka.
Other wards didn’t feature competitive primaries because of a lack of candidates, but those races will also heat up as we get closer to November. You can view all candidates in all races here.
