Montanans have expressed in numerous ways how important public lands are to their quality of life. Now that the 2026 general election candidate slate is set, voters have plenty of specific topics to help them make up their minds.
Republican incumbents Senator Steve Daines and Representative Ryan Zinke each declined to seek reelection this year, leaving two of Montana’s four federal congressional elections incumbent-free for the first time in a decade. The midterm election takes place as President Donald Trump pursues unprecedented changes to federal public lands management and policy, and at a time when his approval rating is at an unprecedented low.
Montana’s small population of 1 million and the Senate’s asymmetrical authority make the state’s Senate race distinctive: a Treasure State voter’s ballot has more than 50 times the relative weight of a citizen of California or Texas. The 2024 race between incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester and Republican Tim Sheehy set a national record of more than $300 per voter in campaign spending. Second place went to more-populous Ohio, where candidates spent more in total but only $44 per voter.
“A question to ask is will they lead on the [public lands] issues or just give out media posts. Is the candidate performative, or do they really mean it?”
Ben Super, executive director, Montana Conservation Voters
Ironically, that makes Montana a cheap date in the campaign spending world. To equal the outreach that $243 million spent on the state’s 786,365 registered voters in 2024, Ohio campaigners would have had to lay out $2.5 billion.
The competition for Daines’ Senate seat features a three-way race between his endorsed Republican candidate Kurt Alme, Democratic primary winner Alani Bankhead, and former University of Montana President Seth Bodner who’s running as an independent. Republican radio personality Aaron Flint is running for Zinke’s House office, and will face Democratic primary winner Sam Forstag.
A 2026 poll by Montana Free Press and Rutgers University found one in four Montanans believe there is “too much” federal land ownership in the state. The other three-quarters said Montana had the “right amount” (54 percent) or “not enough” (21 percent).
Broken out by political party, 62 percent of Republicans said the state had the right amount or not enough, while 96 percent of Democrats fell in those categories. Among Independents, 81 percent felt that way.
The federal government owns about one-third of Montana lands, including national parks, national forests, federal wilderness areas, game refuges, and grazing allotments. Those acres are overseen by a constellation of departments and agencies, including the National Park Service, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Agriculture Department’s U.S. Forest Service.
In April, two separate polls by the University of Montana and The Nature Conservancy both found that nine out of 10 respondents opposed the sale or transfer of public lands to private interests or other government entities. The UM poll covered registered Montana voters, while the TNC poll asked its questions to voters in 12 western states.
But political analysts told Mountain Journal that despite those strong voter attitudes, politicians don’t seem concerned about keeping promises to protect public lands. As FM3 Research Partner Miranda Everitt put it, “Voters pay attention to issues like the cost of housing, homelessness and abortion in public conversation. They’re not necessarily informed on candidate positions on issues like public lands. It’s sort of ‘He’s wearing plaid and he’s hunting, so of course he supports public lands.’ I think that’s why we see those divisions.”
Sheehy helped launch the Senate Stewardship Caucus last October with Daines and New Mexico Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich. Zinke teamed with New Mexico Representative Gabe Vasquez to create the Public Lands Caucus in the House. Both groups’ stated goals were to form bipartisan support for conserving public lands.
Ben Super, executive director for Montana Conservation Voters, said such across-the-aisle groups have the potential to move public lands issues toward the cooler middle and away from polarized fringes of congressional debate.
With both Daines and Zinke leaving Congress at the end of this year, whoever wins their seats has the opportunity to refire those caucuses or go a different direction.
“A question to ask is will they lead on the [public lands] issues or just give out media posts,” Super said. “Is the candidate performative, or do they really mean it?”
At Bozeman-based Property and Environment Research Center, Vice President for Law and Policy Jonathan Wood pointed to progress on federal regulatory reform as a promising sign of congressional cooperation.
“It’s reached a degree of consensus that’s pretty rare in environmental space,” Wood said. “We’d love to see the same kind of work — although it will take years — on the Endangered Species Act. It takes time and willingness for everyone to see the problems.”
Here’s a list of major public lands and natural resources issues in play as the 2026 general election approaches.
· Endangered Species Act: Between proposed congressional legislation and Trump administration rule-making, changes are in store for the law governing protection of sensitive animals and plants. Several pending bills in Congress would remove grizzly bears from the Endangered Species List and block future court challenges, similar to how Rocky Mountain gray wolves were delisted in 2011. Meanwhile, the Interior Department is about to rescind the “blanket 4(d) rule” which provided extensive general protections to listed creatures while their more specific recovery plans were under development. A second change would require federal agencies to consider economic and national security impacts when designating critical habitat for endangered species, something the original law specifically prohibited.
· Forest access – outgoing: Who can do what on public lands has several big changes under consideration. USDA has started the process of revoking the Roadless Rule, which has prevented road construction in millions of acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas on national forests, particularly in Montana and Idaho. Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee sent Wyoming Senator John Barrasso’s Wildfire Prevention Act on to the Senate floor with a controversial amendment to eliminate the Roadless Rule by law authored by committee Chairman Senator Mike Lee of Utah. Lee’s measure passed on a party-line vote, with 11 Republicans for and nine Democrats opposed. Montana’s Senator Steve Daines is on the committee and voted in favor of the Roadless Rule rescission, as did Idaho’s Senator Jim Risch. Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman has put forward a similar Roadless Rule rescission bill in the House. On the other hand, Zinke joined Democratic Representative Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico in introducing the Public Lands Integrity Act, which would require federal land sales and transfers be submitted to full congressional review and votes.
· Forest access – incoming: A May 29 Trump executive order canceled two older orders which restricted where off-road vehicles could operate inside national parks and national forests. USDA has also issued orders to identify currently closed routes that could be opened to motor vehicles, including recommended wilderness areas. That could affect about 5 million acres of public land, including 1.2 million acres in Montana and 1.3 million acres in Idaho.
· Federal funding: Congress and President Trump diverged widely in 2025 when the White House ordered deep cuts to federal agency spending and the Capitol kept levels close to Biden-era amounts. But last year’s nearly 350,000 DOGE-driven staff cuts and related resignations and retirements have left lots of empty positions in public lands offices. The Department of Agriculture took some of the deepest cuts, losing about 21 percent of its staff (about 1,400 of whom held “red cards” qualifying them to fight wildfire). Interior saw one-tenth of its staff leave in 2025.
· Agency restructuring: USDA has begun shuffling Forest Service leadership from nine regional offices to an uncertain number of state directorships, while moving the agency headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City. At the same time, the Interior Department has pulled its separate firefighting forces from the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and smaller agencies into a single Wildland Fire Service. Both moves have drawn intense scrutiny from Congress, and the necessary budgets and authorizations remain unsettled going into election season.
· Permitting reform. Overhauling federal process for OK’ing energy projects on public lands has stalled for much of the last year. Although a bipartisan group of senators has kept negotiating, they have until August to reach a deal before the election cycle hits high gear. Energy industry analysts forecast that a change from Republican to Democratic congressional control would doom many of Trump’s “energy dominance” goals. That scenario has raised concerns about a rush to file and approve energy-development projects while Republicans still control both sides of the Capitol.
