Before Ryan Zinke’s surprise March 2 withdrawal, Montana’s incumbent Western District Congressman had no GOP primary challenger. Within days of Zinke dropping out, four Republicans had filed to run for the seat, including three of the state’s best known conservatives: former state legislator Al Olszewski, who had come within a few percentage points of toppling Zinke in 2022; conservative talk radio host Aaron Flint, who quickly secured endorsements from Zinke and President Donald Trump; and Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, the state’s top vote-getter in 2020 and 2024. Ray Curtis, a schoolteacher from Bonner, also filed as a Republican.
Almost overnight, the Republican primary for MT-01 became the 2026 cycle’s most-watched Montana race.
Montana Free Press is profiling the three major GOP candidates seeking to represent the state’s Western Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. This profile features Aaron Flint.
The first day absentee ballots are available for voting is May 4.
With a month to go before voting begins in the 2026 U.S. House primary election, Aaron Flint stood in a candidate-crowded gymnasium in Superior firing off some of his talk radio hits: Epstein, trans athletes, immigration.
“The Montana Democrat Party,” the presumptive Republican frontrunner told the audience, “is tragically the party of Epstein.”
Flint, who hosts the “Montana Talks” radio program, insisted there was money from the dead celebrity pedophile to be “given back,” without suggesting who such money might be given to. The tendons in his neck strained with intensity as he spoke. Flint, 46, is a military veteran with a trim physique and neat haircut that would still pass Army grooming standards. His black T-shirt featured a chalk-white characterization of the American flag in the shape of Montana punctuated by “AF.”
The nation’s widespread recent “No Kings” rallies, he told his audience, were funded by foreigners.
Some of what he said was met with applause by attendees of the April 1 Mineral County Candidate Forum hosted by the Mineral County Chamber of Commerce, which featured more than two dozen candidates for 10 different public offices, including U.S. House and Senate. Flint’s voice and conservative-firebrand rhetoric were familiar in Superior, where Donald Trump won 72% of the vote in 2024. In an earlier interview with Montana Free Press, Flint had described his radio-facilitated intimacy with listeners as “a deep relationship.”
“You’re with them at their breakfast table every morning, in their pickup. You’re in the combine cab with them. And they really get to know you, not only what you think about the issues, but they get to know you as a person,” Flint said.
Listeners with their kids off to school and windows rolled up find in Flint a voice that’s unabashed about saying the quiet parts — opinions they might think twice before sharing at work, or in church — out loud. Like President Donald Trump, Flint amplifies normally private doubts and fears and disputes about transgender people, or vaccines, or immigrants, while providing a safe haven for conservative politicians to demonize Democrats.
Flint has brought that same bullhorn to his campaign.
“Donald Trump is doing a great job, but radical politicians like AOC, Mamdani and Bernie, they’ve taken over Washington. But here’s the deal — they’re coming for Montana next. Sanctuary cities, boys in girls’ sports, public lands being fenced off, locals being priced out, and our way of life being pushed aside,” Flint said in the campaign video that served as his campaign’s curtain raiser.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, clearly aren’t in control of Congress, but they remain mainstay nemeses within conservative radio’s gospel.
Whether such enemy-within rhetoric and intimate radio relationships can be parlayed into enough votes to overcome a crowded Republican primary and best a potentially competitive Democratic adversary to gain election to U.S. House of Representatives is the question that Flint — the grandson of Glasgow newspaper publishers, 25-year veteran of local TV and radio journalism, and first-time candidate — is testing.
“It’s kind of a two-edged thing, right? You become known as a radio host, but you also make enemies that way, too,” Carroll College political science professor Jeremy Johnson told MTFP.
It’s also an open question whether Trump’s coattails are strong enough to sweep untested Republicans into office as inflation nears a two-year high and the United States’ war on Iran stretches into election season.
“We’re certainly seeing that at the elite level of the Republican Party,” Johnson said, recognizing that for some Trump-supporting senators, the president’s recent remarks about ending Iranian civilization went too far. “I still don’t know if that flows down to the typical voters. Even now, on Trump’s Truth Social there are more people who appear to be Trump voters criticizing the Iran war.”
But Flint thinks he can win, and so does the man he aims to replace. Two days before the candidate filing deadline, incumbent U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection. Zinke simultaneously endorsed Flint as his successor — the first indication that Flint was running. The anointed candidate posted a polished campaign video and issued a press release announcing that longtime Zinke Chief of Staff Heather Swift was now Flint’s campaign manager. A day later, Trump officially endorsed Flint as the newly minted candidate formally filed for office.
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Western Montana U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke said he won’t seek reelection citing health problems
“I have made the decision to leave office at the end of my fourth term and not seek re-election,” Zinke said Monday in a letter to constituents.
The pieces of Flint’s candidacy had been aligning for months. He relocated from his longtime home of Billings to Kalispell with his wife and two children during the summer of 2025. (His campaign’s address in Kalispell is a PostalAnnex shipping service location, and property records show he still owns a home in the west end of Billings, the major population center of Montana’s Eastern Congressional District, and the home of KBUL, the radio station from which “Montana Talks” is broadcast from the 23rd floor of the DoubleTree Hotel from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. weekdays.)
As early as October 2025, Flint’s name had surfaced as a potential candidate for the U.S. House or Senate in phone polling that presented hypothetical matchups with former Democratic U.S. Sen Jon Tester and two-time Democratic Western District House candidate Monica Tranel.
That mobile phone poll, which did not identify its sponsor, also gauged how respondents viewed Republican Al Olszewski, one of Flint’s current primary challengers. “Dr. Al” had rushed to file for Zinke’s open seat on March 2, right after Zinke announced he wasn’t running. Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen filed her candidacy on March 3.
His campaign committee, created in mid March, is still too new to have to disclose the size of Flint’s campaign bank account, but does disclose the campaign’s connection to a $12 million joint fundraising committee affiliated with Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, of Minnesota — a clear indication that Flint is the preferred candidate of House Republican leadership.
In his first month after filing for office, Flint has flooded social media with endorsements from prominent House Republicans including Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan, of Ohio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, of Louisiana. Flint’s campaign surrogates have attacked the endorsements promoted by Olszewski and Jacobsen as fake or insignificant, and few in number compared to Flint’s haul.
All of which might be expected from a radio personality known for punching above the Montana market’s weight with interviews of vice presidents Mike Pence and J.D. Vance, members of the Trump cabinet like Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and congressional leaders like House Speaker Johnson.
But Flint the radio host likes to note that he’s equally comfortable taking minimally screened calls from the sorts of everyday Montanans from whom he’s more interested in earning votes than endorsements. His platform’s meld of conservative cultural irritants and liberal concerns about losing public lands access to wealthy newcomers suggests a familiarity with caller concerns from a broad political spectrum.
“I’ve got far-left guys, I’ve got far-right guys, I’ve got people who can care less about any of them,” Flint told MTFP. “The extent of the call screening is, ‘Hey, what’s your name? Where do you live, and what do you, in one sentence or two, generally want to talk about?’ So yeah, I think anybody who wants to be heard gets heard, which is how it should be.”
Democratic callers are given as much time as they need to make their point, Flint said.
Asked what he stands for as a candidate, Flint paused for a minute. Congress, he said, should be more like a radio program driven by callers.
“What are people talking about a bunch? We want to be talking about what they’re talking about, what they’re thinking about, the issues that matter to them. And frankly, that’s exactly what Congress should be doing. Housing is a huge issue. We need high-paying jobs to keep our kids in Montana. High-wage job opportunities are huge.”
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Flint is not the first Montana Republican to use the intimacy of a broadcast booth and a populist’s familiarity with kitchen-table issues as a launching pad to Congress. Conrad Burns, the first Republican U.S. Sen. from Montana ever to win reelection, was an icon of Montana farm radio before unseating Democratic Sen. John Melcher in 1988. Burns, like Flint, was known for saying his party’s quiet parts out loud. His publicized suggestions that an airline stewardess belonged on the ground with her family, that the Flathead Indian Reservation should be dissolved, and that immigrant laborers displace American workers, were infamous.
And it was Burns who gave Flint his first meaningful political job — triaging phones at the senator’s D.C. office in the late 1990s and responding to constituent letters. Flint later became Burns’s legislative aid for energy policy. This was during a time when Montana had two exceptionally powerful senators in Washington, D.C.: Burns on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Democrat Max Baucus on Senate Finance. Everything from college campus research to highway chip-and-seal funding became a competition between the two.
Later in life, Flint worked as state director for then-U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, now Montana’s two-term Republican governor.
Burns, Flint said, was “Montana first. Montana first. Because if it was good for Montana, he backed it. And I think that’s why, even though, you know, even though Max and Conrad obviously were not ideologically aligned, I think both of them, to their credit, knew you had to put Montana first,” Flint said. “There would be political things that they couldn’t team up on and diverged on, but Montana first, if it’s good for Montana, get behind it.”
“We want to be talking about what they’re talking about, what they’re thinking about, the issues that matter to them. And frankly, that’s exactly what Congress should be doing.”
Aaron Flint
Flint stuck with Burns until joining the Army after the terrorist attacks of 2001.
“I joined the military after the 9/11 terror attacks. Never thought I was good enough for the military. For me, that was a personal turning point,” Flint said.
He left Howard University, the historically Black university in D.C. he’d been attending, enrolled at the University of Montana in the spring of 2002, became a ROTC student, went to basic training and received his infantry cord by Sept. 11, 2002, while participating in the Montana National Guard. He was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the campaign trail, Flint repeatedly references those deployments. He was awarded two Bronze Stars during his time in the Guard and Army Reserves.
The only member of Montana’s current federal delegation who isn’t a veteran is U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, who, like Zinke, is not seeking reelection in 2026.
On the radio, Flint has been bullish on Trump’s war on Iran and military action in Venezuela. After filing for office, he told Breitbart News, “President Trump isn’t getting us into a war with Iran. President Trump is fighting to finally end a war in Iran.”
Such pro-war talk could turn out to be a deterrent for voters wary of another Middle Eastern conflict, said Scott Sales, a former Republican state Senate president who’s familiar with Flint and his primary competitors Olszewski and Jacobsen. Sales has been a guest on Montana Talks, and Olszewski was part of Sales’ caucus in the state Senate for four years. In 2020, Sales and Jacobsen were opponents in a six-candidate primary for secretary of state — a race Jacobsen won.
A 25-year veteran of Montana politics, Sales said he can see a path to victory for each of the three major Republican candidates, but he also sees potential pitfalls. For Flint, Sales says, that vulnerability is the war.
In late March, 6 of 10 Americans disapproved of the Iran war, according to Pew Research Center polling. Respondents said the war wasn’t going well by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. But perspectives also differ by party affiliation, with 69% of Republicans saying they support Trump’s management of the war, and 71% saying attacking Iran was the right decision.
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Can a Republican ride to Congress without Trump’s coattails?
Now comes Al Olszewski, aka “Dr. Al,” to perform his role in the rotation of special guests at Republican dinners, where references to Donald Trump are like table salt — never on the menu, but always included. Unless, that is, there’s another candidate in the race boasting of Trump’s endorsement, as there is in Olszewski’s…
“I think, really, Aaron Flint’s weak underbelly is he’s a warmonger. He’s never seen a war that he doesn’t think is a good idea — at least that’s my impression of him,” Sales said. “You know, he’s a neocon. He’ll object to that, but I think if you listen to his show, he’s pretty gung-ho.”
That rhetoric might land with some Montana veterans and their families, Sales suggested, but could be a turn-off to others.
“There’s a lot of people like me who had a son that served a combat tour in Afghanistan. We are not big fans any longer of these foreign ventures that cost a ton of money and scar our young men and women deeply,” Sales said.
Contacted for comment on Sales’ critique, Flint’s camp issued a statement thanking “Mr. Sales’s son for his service,” but pushing back hard on Sales himself. “Respectfully,” the campaign wrote, “the [former] senator has no idea what he’s talking about.”
This story was updated April 14, 2026, to correct an error. Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer represents Minnesota, not Georgia, in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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