In Cascade County, 3 more candidates file under new party affiliation

Election-year news often highlights voters’ shifting party allegiances. But in Cascade County, it’s the candidates who are swapping parties more often than usual.

With about a week to go for local candidates to file for office, two former Libertarians and a former Democrat have filed to run as Republicans in 2026. The moves add to an increasingly crowded primary field for the GOP in races across Cascade County. So far, four House districts, one Senate district and a county commissioner race all have contested Republican primaries. There are no contested Democrat primaries so far in the county.

Two formerly active Libertarian Party members, Kevin Leatherbarrow and Tony Rosales, have filed to run for two legislative seats as Republicans. Incumbent Cascade County Attorney Josh Racki announced last year that he was changing alliances from Democrat to Republican, and he’s running for reelection under the GOP banner this year.

This slate of party-switchers comes as Great Falls, once a strong Democratic region, has shifted farther to the right over the years.

Leatherbarrow has previously campaigned for legislative positions and for the state superintendent of schools in 2020, when he received his best vote total, 4%.

On Monday, Leatherbarrow told Montana Free Press that “conservatism” has always been his outlook. It was more a matter of the party platform moving to meet his position.

“I was involved with the Tea Party before the Libertarian Party,” he said. “They just needed to clean some house for a little while. And I just think it’s time to get back into my roots and get back into the arena with true conservatives and start making a difference.”

Leatherbarrow, who runs a student tutoring service in Great Falls, said one example was school choice legislation. He said there was little traction with Republicans when he was in Helena advocating in 2016. But times have changed, and the 2023 legislative session saw two influential Republican-led school-choice bills become law. Leatherbarrow also supports education savings accounts, another Republican-led initiative that passed the Legislature in 2023 but is being challenged in court.

Rosales is a health care consultant who previously ran in nonpartisan races for the Great Falls Public Schools Board of Trustees. In 2022, he ran as a Libertarian candidate in House District 22.

He told MTFP Monday that there’s a smaller gap in the Libertarian-Republican switch than in a Democrat-Republican one. He said he’s focused on fiscal issues, property rights and limited government — messaging that would be familiar to Republican voters.

This year, Rosales said he felt that the best way to get a seat in the Legislature was to ditch the third-party label.

“Ultimately aligned with the Libertarian Party, but when it came to making progress and extending liberty to more people or to extend our own liberties, it made the most sense within the current structure of a two-party system,” he said.

Both candidates acknowledged the enduring schism in Montana’s Republican Party. Bad blood between more hard-line Republicans and a group of nine fellow party members (called the “Nasty Nine” by some of their Republican colleagues) dominated the 2025 session. The nine Republicans, some of whom represent northcentral Montana districts, supported more centrist legislation, including the property tax reform and Medicaid renewal.

George Nikolakakos, a Great Falls legislator who has historically been aligned with the more moderate faction of his party, is running for a state Senate seat and faces a primary challenger in PSC Commissioner Randy Pinocci. In a recent Facebook comment, he criticized Rosales and Leatherbarrow for running as Republicans.

“These guys aren’t Republicans,” he commented. “They are perennial candidate Libertarian crackpots who are tired of losing elections so they’re hypocritically playing games.”

The Cascade County Republican Party is waiting to see how the primary races shake out. Eric Hinebauch, chair of the GOP central committee and a county commissioner, told MTFP that some local party groups will start backing candidates before a primary. That hasn’t been standard practice in Cascade County.

“We’ve always, traditionally in Cascade County, stayed out of primaries,” Hinebauch said. “After the primary is over, we have a formal process to vet candidates and potentially make contributions to the campaign.”

Leatherbarrow and Rosales face contested primaries. In House District 22, Leatherbarrow is up against Jason Lorang, a local sports coach who runs a child care center with his wife. In House District 20, Rosales will face incumbent lawmaker Melissa Nikolakakos, who is seeking a second term (she is married to George Nikolakakos).

Late last summer, Cascade County Attorney Racki announced on Facebook that he felt the Democratic party had “changed its stance on law enforcement.” He said that he would become a Republican, a party that he said “puts the safety and freedom of law-abiding citizens first by standing with law enforcement.”

Racki has filed for reelection as a Republican. So far, he is running unopposed. Racki was first appointed to the position in 2017 and won elections as a Democrat in 2018 and 2022.

Racki wasn’t the first to make this move in Cascade County government. Sheriff Jesse Slaughter won his first election in 2018, running as a Democrat. In 2021, Slaughter said he was frustrated with the party and that he was making the switch to become a Republican. He won reelection in 2022 as a GOP candidate in an unopposed race. 

Slaughter is up for election in 2026 and has filed as a Republican. So far, he’s also running unopposed.

Tina Henry, the district court clerk, has won two uncontested elections. The first in 2020 was as a Democratic candidate. In 2024, she won reelection running as a Republican.

Over the past decade, the Libertarian candidate with the best election performance among Cascade County voters was George Anthony Schultz, who secured 15% of the vote in a 2020 loss to a Republican, then-state Rep. Wendy McKamey in House District 19. There was no Democratic candidate in that race.

Schultz, as it turned out, ran two years before as a Republican candidate for county commissioner.

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