Polson Republican Tracy Sharp, who represents House District 12 in the Montana Legislature, faces a challenge from Bigfork Democrat Cindy Bruckner.

The district includes Finley Point, Woods Bay, Bigfork and Swan Lake, and the west shore of Flathead Lake from Rocky Point north to Rollins and Lake Mary Ronan.

Tracy Sharp

Sharp, 68, was first elected to office in 2024. He grew up in Hot Springs, enlisted in the Air Force at 17 and served as a B-1 bomber pilot.

His military career included NATO assignments and two tours of the Middle East, where he earned a Bronze Star during the war in Iraq. Sharp also earned an engineering degree from Purdue University and a master’s in military science.

After leaving the military, he was part of the initial cadre that established the U.S. Africa Command. He wrote the first four “Command Posture Statements” and joined his commander in presenting those strategic assessments to the House and Senate Armed Services Committee.

He also has a long history with the county and state Republican party, having been elected twice as county chair and twice as the Montana GOP Region Five Chair. He recently chaired the committee that developed the Montana GOP party platform.  Sharp, a former youth baseball coach, is married and has four children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He lives near Polson.

Among his accomplishments during the 2025 legislative session, Sharp counts authoring and helping to pass House Bill 643 to reimburse counties for holding people in local detention centers on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services (DPHHS). He also helped secure an override of the governor’s veto of that bill. 

Sharp introduced a bill that would have funded Public Law 280 from state coffers “so that Lake County would not have to forever bear the financial burden of tribal law enforcement and adjudication of tribal felonies.” 

After that bill faded, he spoke in favor of legislation in the House that eventually secured $6 million for Lake County and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to address law enforcement and felony jurisdiction on the Flathead Reservation. 

“Learning how to navigate the politics inside the Capitol building in Helena requires experience, and I gained a tremendous amount in my first session,” wrote Sharp in response to a Leader questionnaire. “It is the best preparation for serving constituents, and there is no substitute for this background.”

If returned to office, Sharp stated his top three priorities would be to reform and eventually abolish “Montana’s ruinous and confiscatory property tax system”; protect citizens from the potentially harmful impacts of data center construction and subsequent energy demands; and support law enforcement and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their efforts to protect citizens from the consequences “of rampant illegal immigration.”

As for legislative spending priorities, Sharp believes Montana spends too much on education and needs to revamp the system so that more money goes toward vocational education, while university funding gets “sharply curtailed.”

He also advocates spending more on law enforcement and on treatment for those in mental health crisis “so that they can be returned to society as productive members.”

Asked how he would change public-school funding, Sharp suggested that introducing competition into the system by having money “follow the child" is a good start. He’d like to see fewer superintendents given greater authority, find ways to ease the administrative burden in schools, and explore teaching options.

Recognizing that larger, more centralized school districts may cause “uncertainty in the smaller school districts in my area,” Sharp vowed to keep an open mind. However, he stated, “We cannot continue to fund schools at the current level if academic achievement is going to remain stagnant.”

Sharp agreed that affordable housing remains an issue for Montanans, and stated that the Legislature’s role is to “open up the regulatory aperture to make it easier for the construction of more housing.” He also suggested that “unleashing” more high-paying jobs in mining and timber would help young people have the resources to buy or build homes instead of moving elsewhere.  

According to Sharp, the recent increases in property taxes “are being driven by the greedy hand of government,” and he stated that efforts last session to ease that burden were “a tax ‘shift’ designed to look like a ‘reduction.’”

He advocated a “moral” tax system that’s based on “the money the taxed actually possess – not on what others have determined they believe the taxed must pay.”

While he’d rather see property taxes completely eliminated, Sharp suggested a system in which a property owner is taxed on the value they paid for a house at purchase, and that they pay at that same valuation for as long as they retain the property.

He also insisted that citizens need to expect less from government if they want taxes to decrease, and communities should be empowered to do more for themselves.

Finally, Sharp weighed in on concerns about health care access in rural communities, suggesting that the Affordable Care Act “was a sham from the beginning” that should be scrapped. He recommended launching “a truly bipartisan effort to study, model and resolve how we wish to proceed in the arena of health care in the 21st Century.”

Cindy Bruckner

The Democratic candidate did not respond to the Leader's questions by press time.

According to her website, cindyformontana.com, the California native began visiting Montana in 1988 when her mother purchased property on the Swan River.

After working as a creative director in New York and Los Angeles, she moved to Bigfork in 2017 to care for her mother, who suffers from dementia. She earned a master’s in psychology in 2025 and continues to work remotely for out-of-state clients.