Montana Dem Candidate Sam Forstag Is Scaring Wingnuts, And It's Beautiful
Blue-collar progressive populist, no Nazi tattoos.
Montana hasn’t sent a Democrat to the US House of Representatives in this century, not since nine-term Rep. Pat Williams left office in 1997. Sure, the state elected Jon Tester to the Senate a bunch of times until two years ago, by which time the state was so pickled in red MAGAjuice that it replaced him with lying carpetbagger millionaire Tim Sheehy, the equivalent of the proverbial brick with the letter R following his name.
But this year, Montana might very well send a Democrat to Washington again. Not just your conventional centrist red-state Dem who promises to be less awful than Republicans, but a populist progressive Democrat named Sam Forstag. He’s a “smoke jumper” — a wildland firefighter who jumps out of airplanes to fight fires far away from roads — and state leader of the labor union that represents federal employees. Yr Editrix also notes that Forstag is the nephew of Wonkette reader Leslie, too, so we figure that must be one proud Aunt Tifa.
Oh, did we mention the polls are tied?
In a move that sounds awfully familiar in Montana, former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke decided in March not to seek a third term in Congress. But he only dropped out at the last minute, leaving the Republican primary field mostly open for his handpicked successor, Aaron Flint, a rightwing talk radio host who spouts conspiracy theories and warns Montana listeners that scary socialists like “AOC, Mamdani, and Bernie” have conquered DC and are “coming for Montana next.” You know, because the commies are taking over everywhere.
But instead of waltzing right into office with Donald Trump’s endorsement, Flint is up against Forstag, who appears to be the progressive blue-collar champion people thought that guy in Maine was, only without anything like the awful baggage. (If there’s awful baggage, we will just scream.)
Forstag’s “All of Us” campaign ad from January is a 95-second masterpiece of compact messaging, hitting all the right populist notes about how the economy is rigged against workers, with the “richest people in the country trying to burn it all down so they can buy it all up.”
That audio appears over a quick cut of Elon Musk waving around his bejewelled chainsaw at CPAC in February 2025, a gift from Argentina’s elected strongman Javier Milei. Seconds later, Musk’s purely decorative CPAC chainsaw is visually contrasted with a gritty shot of Forstag (we think?) wielding a real Forest Service chainsaw while fighting a real wildfire, with very real flames close to him in the foreground.
There’s your class war in Montana, Charlie Brown.
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After Elon Musk’s arbitrary budget cuts last year eliminated around 2,300 federal workers from agencies that manage the West’s wildlands, Forstag repeatedly tried to request meetings with Zinke to discuss the firings, but the millionaire congressman ignored him. In April of 2025, when Bernie and AOC really did come to Montana as part of their “Fighting Oligarchy” rally tour, Forstag accepted an invitation to join them onstage at the University of Montana in Missoula so he could speak for those who’d been fired. The anticipated crowd of about 3,000 instead turned out to be something more than 9,000, and they were primed to hear Forstag’s appeal:
“What we’re facing today isn’t a wildfire, but it’s damn sure an emergency. […] What we’re facing today is greed burning out of control. Somewhere I read that hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. And when I see the thousands of us who are here today to say that we’ve had enough, I’m starting to feel the kind of hope it’s going to take to fight this thing.”
People started telling him he should run for office. So what the hell, he did, and now he’s getting coverage not only in the political press, but also, thanks to his smoke-jumper cool, in places like Outside magazine, a perfect platform for him to spread the gospel of protecting public lands from greedhead developers, but also to fight back against the Current Darkness, explaining, “We don’t have to settle for a government that lurches from crisis to crisis, and we don’t have to settle for elected officials who warp public goods into sources of profit for themselves. We can make our land management more efficient and effective by investing up front and ensuring those investments go to working people, not corporate profits.”
Talk nerdy to us, please.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thinks Forstag has a pretty good chance, and this week added him to its “Red to Blue” campaign aimed at flipping winnable seats, prompting an especially pissy statement from the National Republican Campaign Committee that smeared Forstag with all the scary words they could Luntz up on short notice:
“National Democrats are propping up lobbyist Sam Forstag because he's the perfect socialist stooge: obedient, shameless, and desperate to do whatever the radical left demands. Montanans know a bought-and-paid-for fraud when they see one, and Forstag will sell out Montana's values every single time.”
Those are some very impressive empty generalizations, to be sure.
Forstag clearly has wingnuts worried; earlier this month, Fox News ran a hit piece aimed at connecting him with all the Culture Wars issues he isn’t actually running on, because that is how they do. Supposedly, Forstag can’t be a real blue-collar firefighter at all, because he “previously worked as a registered lobbyist” for “far-left groups” like, umm, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Montana Library Association, and the City of Missoula. You know how those librarians love to wear their Che Guevara shirts and plot the dictatorship of the proletariat. (They do.)
As part of his lobbying work, he engaged in dangerous radical un-American activities like testifying against some of the more unhinged wingnut bills in the Montana Lege, like legislation “involving drag performances in schools and libraries, transgender-related medical treatments for minors, boys competing in girls’ sports, voter ID, and local cooperation with federal immigration authorities,” oh my!
Fox News unearthed Forstag’s comments on the drag ban bill, which we guess are too radical for Montana. He called the bill “the latest of a series that I expect you’ll see that are intended to stir up fear and distrust of our fellow citizens” and called it overly broad because it could lead trans or nonbinary people to be banned from public libraries altogether, which of course is a good and holy thing.
To his credit, Forstag didn’t shy away from defending his prior work, saying it simply reflects his belief that the government has no business getting in people’s private lives.
“Between fire seasons, I fought for working people in a state capital that too often ignores us,” Forstag told Fox News Digital. “Instead of accepting a system where the extremes and the rich have the loudest voice, I worked my tail off to defend Montanans’ constitutional rights and freedoms and fight for policies that actually improve our lives.”
He even went full libertarian in his defense of his opposition to bills banning gender-affirming medical care, explaining, “I believe the government’s got no place getting involved in peoples’ private, personal decisions. […] Politicians have no place coming for our guns, and no place inserting themselves into medical decisions that should be up to patients, parents, and doctors.”
Yes, he said that freedom is good for guns and for trans people. Is that even legal? Fox tried to make clear that such talk is blasphemy by following it with a terrifying animated gif of a transgender flag superimposed over a still image of the Supreme Court.
Also too, the Koch-funded rightwing group Americans for Prosperity, back in May, had a nice panicky post attacking Forstag and Ocasio-Cortez for saying climate change is real, whining that Forstag is bent on destroying Montana with “Green New Scam” ideology when what Montanans really want is strip mines, coal-burning powerplants, and clearcutting, for prosperity.
They’re frightened. Good. OPEN THREAD.
[Outside / Esquire / Fox News / TPM / Flathead Beacon]
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On today’s Xena Warrior Scooter ride through Forest Hill Park, I saw a velociraptor (Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), the largest woodpecker in North America) and royalty (monarch butterfly.)
https://substack.com/profile/155618292-ziggywiggy/note/c-304327675?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
<Forstag is the nephew of Wonkette reader Leslie, too, so we figure that must be one proud Aunt Tifa.>
No byline but I don’t need a weatherman to know which way the Dok blows.