Though Montana has backed the GOP in every presidential election since 1996, the sparsely-populated Mountain state maintained a Democratic tendency at the state and U.S. Senate levels well through the 2010s. In 2020, Republican Greg Gianforte defeated Democrat Mike Cooney by 12.8%, flipping two of Montana's last three Democrat-held statewide offices (governor and lieutenant governor) into the GOP camp; currently, the only one occupied by a Democrat is Jon Tester's U.S. Senate seat, which most analysts predict to narrowly flip Republican in a concurrent race. Governor Gianforte is widely expected to comfortably win re-election in 2024.[2]