2014 United States Senate election in Montana
The 2014 United States Senate election in Montana took place on November 4, 2014, to elect a member of the United States Senate from Montana, concurrently with other elections to the United States Senate in other states and elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections.
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County results Daines: 50–60% 60–70% 70–80% 80–90% Curtis: 50–60% 60–70% | |||||||||||||||||
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| Elections in Montana |
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Democratic Senator Max Baucus, who had announced he would retire and not seek a seventh term, resigned in February 2014 in order to accept an appointment as United States Ambassador to China under President Barack Obama. Democrat John Walsh, the Lieutenant Governor of Montana, who was already running for Baucus' seat when Baucus was named to the ambassadorship, was appointed to replace Baucus by Governor Steve Bullock.
Walsh won the Democratic primary on June 3 and ran for a first full term in office, but withdrew from the race on August 7, 2014 due to allegations that he had plagiarized a term paper while attending the Army War College. Democrats selected Amanda Curtis, a state representative from Butte, to replace Walsh as the party's nominee at a convention in Helena on August 16. Steve Daines, the incumbent U.S. Representative from Montana's at-large congressional district, easily won the Republican nomination.
Daines defeated Curtis 57.9% to 40.0%, while Libertarian Roger Roots won 2.2%. Daines and Arkansas' Tom Cotton became just the 18th and 19th U.S. House freshmen to win U.S. Senate races over the last 100 years, and just the third and fourth over the last 40 years. He became the first Republican to win this Senate seat since 1907.