House District 84 candidates keep Democratic primary remarkably cordial

Jamie Van Valkenburg once had to wait on Tia Nelson because Nelson was busy with an emergency C-section on kittens, a small but telling moment in a House District 84 race that has stayed unusually polite even as the stakes are high for Helena-area voters.

That seat, wholly within Lewis and Clark County under Montana’s 2023 redistricting map, is currently held by Republican Julie Darling. With the primary set for June 2 and filing already closed after a Feb. 17 to March 4 window, the Democrat who emerges will head into a general election in a county where politics has tilted Republican in key statewide races, even as turnout remains high. Lewis and Clark County posted 76.57% turnout in the 2024 general election, and countywide results put Donald Trump ahead of Kamala Harris and Troy Downing ahead of John Driscoll.

The two Democrats offer different biographies, even if their tone is similar. Nelson is a horse breeder and veterinarian, and Van Valkenburg lives in Helena after moving here in 2020 to finish school at Carroll College, where she studied psychology and business. Van Valkenburg says her first real introduction to Montana politics came during the 2023 Legislature, when she worked as House Judiciary Committee clerk before later doing behind-the-scenes work for the Democratic Party. Nelson, meanwhile, was the first person to file in person at the Helena Secretary of State office for House District 84, an early signal of how seriously she is taking the race.

The contrast is less about personal conflict than about how each candidate frames the job ahead. Van Valkenburg talks about affordability in the blunt terms of someone living it herself, saying she is unlikely to buy a house soon and is still driving a car she needs to keep running because replacing it is out of reach. Nelson’s language is more broad but just as pointed, with an emphasis on shared responsibility and the idea that people of different political stripes have to work together or the system will fail.

That message lands in a district where Democrats know they will need every vote they can get. Lewis and Clark County elections officials say the county maintains registration files for about 50,000 voters, and the Lewis and Clark County Democratic Central Committee says its job is to inform, motivate and organize grassroots Democrats around workers’ dignity, fair taxes, public lands, public education and reproductive rights.

For Helena voters, the choice in House District 84 is not between civility and conflict. It is between two Democrats with different life experiences trying to prove they can make a practical case against a sitting Republican in a county that will decide whether the seat stays red or becomes one of the more closely watched battlegrounds in central Montana.