A pair of voter opinion polls released this week show Montanans have strong affection for both public lands and federal workers. But a deeper look indicates that might not matter in the rough-and-tumble world of politics.
Both the University of Montana’s Crown of the Continent/Greater Yellowstone Initiative poll and a separate survey sponsored by The Nature Conservancy found nine out of 10 respondents opposed the sale or transfer of public lands, which has become a flashpoint in several recent congressional budget debates. An equal margin of UM poll respondents said those issues were crucial in deciding whether to support an elected official.
Yet, at a more specific level, those public opinions and the decisions of politicians diverge. The UM survey has consistently found that about two-thirds of Montanans hunt or fish, in addition to other non-consumptive outdoor activities. They also show great appreciation for federal workers who manage and maintain the campgrounds, trails, fishing access sites, wildlife biology and other services on public lands. Both the UM and TNC polls report bipartisan concern over funding cuts reducing the number of park rangers, scientists and other federal managers.
Those same Montanans also strongly backed President Donald Trump in three straight elections, despite Trump’s consistent budget cuts and policy restrictions on those same workers and services. The state’s all-Republican congressional delegation has resisted national efforts to sell public lands, but has also abetted Trump’s agency cutbacks.
“I think that shows how deeply entrenched party alignments are,” said Rob Saldin, political science professor at the University of Montana. “Even when there’s a clear preference on the part of the public to go in one direction, politicians don’t necessarily pay a price for doing something different. You can get away with that when party attachments are as deep as they are.”
For example, the UM poll posed several questions about Wilderness Study Areas — federal lands temporarily protected while under consideration for full federal wilderness designation. Asked whether to keep or increase protections for seven specific WSAs, 54 percent of Republicans joined the 73-percent overall majority favoring that position. The same strong majorities held up among city, small-town and rural residents. The survey has been asking about WSAs for more than a decade, and it’s charted a nearly 10-point increase in support over the past six years.
Those include three WSAs currently targeted for downgrading in a bill by Senator Steve Daines, Montana’s retiring two-term Republican. Daines has offered bills to remove protections from potential wilderness areas several times since 2019, and maintains his current Montana Sportsman Conservation Act reflects the will of his electorate.
Daines’ spokeswoman Gabby Wiggins told Mountain Journal in an email that the senator’s bill will “promote our outdoor way of life by returning restrictive WSA’s to general public land management, which will improve wildlife habitat restoration, reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, and unlock better access to our public lands.” Wiggins added that Daines has always stood against the sale of public lands.
“That’s a trend that started nationwide a while ago,” said Montana State University political science professor Eric Austin. He offered the example of the 2024 contest between Democratic Senator Jon Tester and Republican Tim Sheehy, who defeated the three-term incumbent.
The UM poll has run every other year since 2014. It uses two survey firms: New Bridge Strategy specializes in Republican outreach, while FM3 Research concentrates on Democrats. Together, they surveyed 515 Montana registered voters between March 19 and 25. The results had a margin of error of 4.3 percent.
The TNC poll used the same two firms, asking similar questions to 2,461 registered voters in 12 western states between January 17 and February 1. Because each state had about 200 participants in the poll, its state-level margin of error is 6.8 percent.
Over the years, the UM poll has repeatedly asked about providing federal wilderness status to parts of the Blackfoot River watershed, a Tester legislative effort dating back to 2010. Even though it still had support from 83 percent of this year’s poll respondents — Democrats, Republicans and Independents — Tester was never able to overcome resistance from Daines and the other Republican members of the Montana congressional delegation.
“Tester was more responsive to his constituency, and to the entire electorate, on public lands issues,” Austin told Mountain Journal. “But it was partisan changes in the electorate that drove that set of results.”
Although the UM poll also sorted responses by age, urban/rural residence and geographic region, it found little variation across the state besides political party. In other words, there wasn’t a noticeable east/west, or city/country divide in respondents’ opinions. For example, the poll found that support for keeping the Roadless Rule’s prohibitions on new roads in undeveloped national forest land averaged 81 percent among residents in Missoula, Butte/Bozeman, Great Falls and Billings. Nevertheless, Montanans cast at least 56 percent of their votes for Trump in each of the past three presidential elections. Each time, Trump ran on a platform of deregulating public-land management and appointed the officials who have pushed for removal of the Roadless Rule.
MSU’s Austin told Mountain Journal that public-lands protection might be the one issue strong enough to bend Montana Republicans away from their GOP colleagues.
“That’s where candidates could get so far out of alignment with popular concerns about protecting public land and access that there could be blowback,” Austin said. “I think that showed in [Representative Ryan] Zinke’s behavior in the last year or so, and Daines somewhat as well. Compared to Utah, our delegation is more supportive of public lands.”
Zinke publicly denounced Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee’s effort to include public-land sales in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill as a “poison pill” and led the effort to have it struck from the spending law.
Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy said both the UM and TNC polls showed Montana to be something of an outlier for how strongly respondents supported public lands. That attitude flowed across party lines, with 80 percent of Republican voters, 82 percent of Independents, and 90 percent of Democratic voters saying they would maintain public access to national forests and monuments by banning their sale or transfer.
“‘Banning’ is one of the strongest words we use, and we find really intense support for the idea of banning sale or transfer of public lands,” Weigel said during an April 22 press conference about the UM survey. Those results track with a March Montana Free Press survey that found three-quarters of Montanans supported keeping or expanding federal lands in the state.
But in interviews with Mountain Journal, both she and FM3’s Miranda Everitt acknowledged the disconnect between those voter attitudes and political accountability.
“Voters pay attention to issues like the cost of housing, homelessness and abortion in public conversation,” Everitt said. “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.”
Weigel added that while Montanans have a reputation as libertarians suspicious of federal government intrusion, they also have close personal connections with many of those federal workers.
“Once you start personalizing that, thinking about the implications of not having as many people managing all that, it becomes more vivid, more personal, than some amorphous blob of bureaucrats,” Weigel said.
That could explain the growing concern in the polls for firings and reductions of federal workers (63 percent found that extremely or very serious), funding cuts to public lands management (62 percent) and loss of access to public lands (71 percent).
On the opposite side of the question, less than 15 percent of Montanans thought cuts to federal funding and staff would help reduce wildfire risk, maintain public lands, conserve wildlife, ensure public safety, or enhance access to public lands.
UM’s Saldin suggested that while those attitudes remain strong across the West, political polarization remains too entrenched to forge bipartisan allegiance in Congress. Regardless of their general opinion on conservation, Saldin said he doubted a Republican voter could be convinced to switch parties and vote for independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar. Nor would any Democratic voter in Montana’s Western Congressional District pull the lever for Republican candidate Aaron Flint.
“For most people that’s not one of the options,” Saldin said. “It gives you a great deal of latitude as a politician to do what you want.”
