Can a working-class pitch notch a Western Montana win for Democrats?

It was in the red-hot coals of President Donald Trump’s second coming that Democrat Sam Forstag, 30 years old at the time, found the spark to light what appears to be Montana’s hottest U.S. House race in three decades.

On Valentine’s Day 2025, the Trump administration terminated roughly 3,500 probationary U.S. Forest Service employees as part of a government-wide workforce reduction. Those employees were later restored to their previous employment status with back pay after federal courts found the terminations unlawful, but the agency’s firefighting capabilities suffered, as did basic campground services. The Forest Service lost thousands of additional employees through resignation and retirement programs before wildfire season began. 

For Forstag, a seasonal smokejumper for four seasons and wildland firefighter for eight  who last worked as a smokejumper in 2025, the workforce cuts turned national politics into a local issue and, ultimately, a reason to run, as voters in Montana’s Western U.S. House District have been reminded in a barrage of campaign ads since spring.

“What got me into this race was this misnamed Department of Government Efficiency, where at least in our state, in my agency, the Forest Service, they just about exclusively came after the lowest paid workers we’ve got,” Forstag said in an interview with Montana Free Press Oct. 1. “The first round of firings from DOGE, it was 360 Montanans in the Forest Service, 80% of them making $19.70 an hour or less.”

Washington’s decisions, Forstag said, were landing hardest on low-paid Montanans and the communities that rely on them.

The next decision to prime the Forstag campaign’s pump was made by Western District incumbent Ryan Zinke, a former Republican secretary of the Department of the Interior whose margins of victory had grown in his two elections to represent the district, which was created after the 2020 census. Zinke announced March 2 that he would not seek reelection. That decision created a potential opening for Forstag, given that no Montana member of Congress has lost a U.S. House race since 1992. It also reset the contest by replacing the familiar incumbent with a first-time candidate — Republican Aaron Flint — whose profile was built outside of elected office.

The Democrat had some momentum, having been tagged by The Bench, a group of progressive Democratic campaign veterans seeking atypical candidates in battleground districts. In April 2025, Forstag delivered a blue-collar message at a “Fighting Oligarchy” event in Missoula hosted by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York. 

“Right now, the people who give their lives to public lands and public service are under attack,” Forstag told the Missoula crowd. “We’re under attack by a bunch of people who’ve never had dirt underneath their fingernails. People who have never swung a tool. People who know as much about the meaning of public service as they do about who’s in their Signal group chat.”

The message, which Forstag continues to deliver with a drummer’s insistence, resonated especially with Ocasio-Cortez, who returned to Missoula in the final days of the spring primary to stump for Forstag.   

Flint, Zinke’s endorsed successor, is an Iraq war veteran best known for his 20-year career as Montana’s highest-rated conservative talk radio host. (Flint stepped down from his hosting duties when he became a candidate in March). Flint won his four-way June primary with 50% of the vote.

Polls over the past month have shown Flint and Forstag in a statistical tie, with Libertarian Nick Sheedy lagging far behind and a small percentage of undecided voters poised to swing the difference.

With the race effectively even, Forstag is still trying to turn economic anxiety into a case for working-class representation.

In the Western District’s 16 counties, which stretch from Bozeman to Eureka, “people are already living on the edge,” Forstag told MTFP earlier this month, suggesting that Montana is primed for change by the unpopular war with Iran and high fuel prices, much as when Democrat Jon Tester defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns in 2006. 

Forstag’s campaign has placed his endorsements by 17 labor unions front and center, highlighting an alignment Democrats haven’t emphasized for several elections. Fortstag is vice president of the National Federation of Federal Employees-International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 60, and talks about “the people who lay the pipes, who build the houses” as he advocates community college and expanded apprenticeship opportunities. 

“It is far too rare for a working person to make it to Congress,” Forstag said.

That everyman message is also where Flint has concentrated his attacks, challenging Forstag’s identity as a firefighter and union organizer. Flint’s campaign argues that Forstag is less Smokey Bear than a liberal lobbyist at the Montana Legislature, which meets during the first four months of odd-numbered years. Records show Forstag lobbied for several local governments in 2023, including on a Bozeman proposal to put a 3% local sales tax before city voters. Ads targeting Forstag portray the sales tax as broader, possibly statewide, and imply that he owned the proposal. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Chris Pope, D-Bozeman, was tabled in committee.

Flint has also focused on Forstag’s lobbying for the ACLU in 2021, particularly his work opposing legislative restrictions on transgender students participating in college sports, which are subject to federal law. The sports bill was later declared unconstitutional by the Montana Supreme Court.

Forstag casts those attacks as a distraction from the two candidates’ competing economic agendas.

“Aaron is recycling the same old political tactics that we’ve seen every election, from the last election, the one before that as well. He’s just selling fear and anger instead of any sort of real solutions,” Forstag said. “And Aaron wants everybody looking at the locker room in his advertisement, so we don’t look at the fact that he’s got no plan to actually make our lives better, because that’s not what he’s running to do. I mean, Aaron’s running to keep us angry and afraid and divided, and he is running to make his corporate donors a little bit richer. And if you don’t believe me, just look at the financial disclosures. I mean, look at who’s paying for these ads in his campaign. He’s got $590,000 already spent on him by one of the main AI super PACs.”

The fight over outside spending by AI super PACs extends to artificial intelligence and data centers generally. On the NonStop Local-Montana Free Press debate stage in Missoula on Oct. 13, Flint argued that Forstag would not have received the AFL-CIO’s endorsement unless he supported data center development, a position that has become radioactive in national and state politics. 

“I’ll fight for federal legislation to make sure that they cannot build these data centers until and unless they can prove that they’re going to provide all of their own power, that they’re not going to leave our land, air, and water dirtier than they found it, that they’re going to earn the support of the community where they want to build, and that they’re going to use good local union labor while they do that,” Forstag responded.

Forstag doesn’t mention data centers or artificial intelligence on the issues page of his website. His campaign staff said Forstag is for “tightly” regulating data center development

The Democrat’s broader energy platform calls for public investment aimed at expanding supply and lowering costs.

He backs a large, union-supported federal investment in energy transmission and infrastructure, which he considers key to lowering consumer energy bills while supporting union jobs.

“Step one: invest in transmission. Step two: we should be investing in [research and development] and helping make sure that those, you know, the next-generation energy projects, wind and solar, have the actual resources that they need to get off the ground,” Forstag told MTFP.

Forstag pairs those calls for renewable-energy investments with continued oil and gas development, provided the public receives a fair return from drilling on federal lands.

Montana ranks 12th nationally in oil production and holds 0.9% of proven U.S. crude reserves. Because the Trump administration has cut royalty rates, payments and minimum-bid requirements, the public is receiving less money for oil and gas beneath public lands, Forstag said, adding that those changes should be reversed.

“The problem right now is that we are doing it and we’re not getting any of the benefit. I mean, they just slashed royalties for oil and gas leasing on public lands last year, and our federal delegation voted down the line to support it,” Forstag said. “They cut those in half.”

Beyond energy and public-lands policy, Forstag’s campaign centers on expanding access to healthcare.

Forstag shares Democratic Senate candidate Alani Bankhead’s support for universal healthcare, a proposal that congressional Democrats do not currently have enough support within their caucus to pass. A House bill establishing universal healthcare has more than 100 Democratic co-sponsors. 

Forstag also opposes restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights.

Forstag’s universal-coverage goal is paired with a more immediate priority: reversing the Medicaid cuts written into House Resolution 1 of 2025, better known as President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Montana this month began requiring Medicaid recipients to regularly report their work activity, but the state Department of Public Health and Human Services has indicated that it needs more staff to process the paperwork.

“We are a third of the way as a state through hiring 59 new state employees at DPHHS just to administer a set of paperwork requirements that are going to boot 30 to 40,000 people off their healthcare,” Forstag said. “Who’s going to get booted off their healthcare? It’s going to be families who don’t have time to fill out more cumbersome paperwork, and it’s going to be the sort of people I worked with between fire seasons when I was at the Coalition to Solve Homelessness.

“And what does that end up doing? It leaves us all paying more for less, either in our premiums or in our county and state tax bills.”

Forstag would pay for universal healthcare in part by undoing $1 trillion in tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that, he said, went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. He said that money could help make Medicare coverage available to everyone.

“Let’s give every American the choice to join Medicare, and let’s expand that coverage so it actually is comprehensive,” Forstag said. “Let’s raise the reimbursement rate so we don’t have 16 rural hospitals at risk of closure because they’re taking a loss when they serve a Medicare patient, and often a Medicaid patient. I think that that kind of choice would speak for itself. And if private insurance corporations got a product that can compete with Medicare, great. Let them compete. That’ll be healthy competition.”

Forstag links those healthcare proposals to a broader argument that the federal tax system favors wealthy Americans while leaving essential programs underfunded.

He argues for a minimum effective income tax rate for people earning more than $1 million, which he said should not be lower than the rate paid by someone earning $70,000. He also said capital gains should be taxed like wages, regardless of whether income comes from work or investments. Forstag presents those changes as part of his plan for paying down a ballooning national debt.

“We are currently in $40 trillion of debt,” Forstag said. “That’s us borrowing on our country’s future, on my generation’s future, among others.”

Turning from economic policy to immigration, Forstag called the immigration system “fundamentally broken” and urged comprehensive reform. He said he supports expanding the government’s capacity to process applications from people seeking to enter the country legally and making immigration courts independent of executive-branch political influence. He also said immigration law should keep violent criminals who are in the country illegally off the streets.

On another prominent Montana issue, Forstag described himself as an advocate for gun rights, saying Montanans rely on firearms to hunt and stay safe, and that the state Constitution strongly protects those rights. He also supports expanding voluntary safe-storage options for people facing a mental-health crisis, but said the federal government should not intrude into people’s lives.

“I don’t think they got any business knowing where my guns are or what I’m doing with them,” Forstag said.

Beyond those policy positions, Forstag said his central challenge is persuading voters that the government can still improve their lives.

“You don’t do that by just being angry and telling people how terrible the other side is,” Forstag said. “You do it by showing people why there’s a reason to be hopeful and why the government can still be something that actually makes your life better.”

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