Once a two-House-district state, Montana hopes to be again

katqanna

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Once a two-House-district state, Montana hopes to be again

The political consulting firm Election Data Services recently reported the possibility of Montana gaining a congressional seat after the 2020 U.S. Census. The forecast assumes that Montana’s population will continue growing at its current pace, in which case the state would have enough people for two House districts with about 2,400 people to spare...

Montana’s political parties have argued for three decades that by having only one House seat the state is underrepresented and that the size of the district — more than a 10-hour car ride east to west — is unworkable...

Montana’s interests both socially and economically east to west are too different to be represented by just one person, said Jeff Essmann, a state legislator from Billings and past chairman of the Montana Republican Party. Two representatives would be significant regardless of how the seats were politically aligned.

“The gains for the state, No. 1, would be having more representation on more committees in Congress and that’s really important to the State of Montana because our economies are very diverse,” Essmann said. “Just sitting on the Agriculture Committee and Natural Resources, or whatever, the Armed Services Committee, just doesn’t cover the bases anymore...”

The second important gain would be having more congressional staff. Representatives in the House, regardless of the size of their districts, receive a fixed number of staff and funding for a handful of offices. There aren’t enough resources to put an office in each of Montana’s seven largest cities, let alone the next tier of rural hubs like Glasgow, Sidney and Miles City.
 
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