Smokejumper and union leader aims to win in Montana by focusing on workers | Montana
Sam Forstag is used to throwing himself into the heated zone.
As a smokejumper, his job is to jump out of airplanes at 3,000 feet and parachute into the Montana wilderness. Going by air is often the easiest way to reach remote wilderness and fight wildfires that burn people. an average of 7.2 million acres one year in the state.
But last year, Forstag began witnessing a massacre that firefighters could not fight alone.
A quarter of U.S. Forest Service employees in Montana were suddenly laid off as part of nationwide federal layoffs.
“They fired 300 people from the Forest Service in one day. There was no justification in their termination paperwork. They were not given any notice,” Forstag told the Guardian.
At the time, Forstag was vice president of the Forest Service Council Local 60, an arm of the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was tasked with fighting for his coworkers’ jobs. He explained how a woman who entered a probationary period due to cancer treatment was dismissed after 15 years of service.
Another worker was in line at the airport to board a flight for his mother’s funeral when he received a text message informing him that he had been fired for no reason.
Although the works were eventually returned after a court decisionForstag said the layoffs proved to him how dispensable workers are to those in power. “It’s always the same story. Working people are getting ripped off while the rich get even richer,” Forstag said.
That experience prompted Forstag to run for Congress in Montana’s first congressional district to unseat Republican Ryan Zinke, Trump’s former secretary of the interior.
There are National Democrats cited We could view the district as a potential rally to help swing the House majority in their favor in the midterm elections, but it could still be a tight race. Montana is currently dominated by Republicans. In 2024, Democratic senator Jon Tester loses his seat. re-election He made the bid after winning in Montana’s first congressional district but having held the seat since January 2007.
Zinc resigned from the Trump administration in 2018 during various ethics investigations related to his business dealings and net worth It grew from $2 million in early 2017 to over $30 million in late 2021 through real estate, business ventures and investments. HE came back He will join Congress in 2022 and platform He stonewalled the Biden administration and was easily re-elected in 2024.
Forstag was Zinke’s campaign manager when he first entered the race in January. requested Forstag “represents Mamdani,” not Montana. pointed at someone rally April 2025 speech in Missoula, headlined by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, where Forstag spoke about protecting workers and public lands.
“What we are facing today is not a wildfire, but it is certainly an emergency,” Forstag said at the time.
Forstag said Zinke has failed to work for his district. discontinuity are being removed from city halls and pressure is being put on to open public lands to the public mining, drilling and other extractive industries, while promoting itself as a defender of public lands.
“He’s as hypocritical as anyone you can imagine,” Forstag said. He added: “[Zinke] He votes to gut all of our public land agencies so he and his rich, corporate friends can make a bigger profit at our expense.”
Zinke’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In his bid for the Democratic nomination, Forstag will need to outperform other Democratic candidates, including former firearms administrator Ryan Busse, who lost the state’s 2024 race for governor.
Forstag focuses on a platform for workers and said the Democratic party must win back the working class.
“There’s a really fundamental lack of representation for people working in federal offices right now, and that has serious, significant impacts on what kinds of policies they actually prioritize and what they approve,” Forstag said.
Forstag is just one of several former federal employees and union members running congressional campaigns in the 2026 midterm elections, including the United Auto Workers members inside new York and a firefighter union leader in Pennsylvania.
Forstag emphasized that policies such as expanding affordable housing and offering universal child care and repairing the broken U.S. healthcare system could help workers struggling to make ends meet.
“You should be able to work a good job in this state [and] “We can afford housing and health insurance in this country,” he said, and continued: “The basic function of the government is to step in when the market does not meet a need and make people’s lives better financially. And it seems some people at the national level have forgotten that.”
