Sam Forstagg is used to launching himself into hot territory.
As a smokejumper, his job is to jump from airplanes 3,000 feet in the air and parachute into the Montana wilderness. Flying frequently is the easiest way to access remote wilderness and combat the wildfires that burn an average of 7.2 million acres annually in the state.
But last year, Forstag began to witness the devastation that firefighters couldn’t fight alone.
A quarter of US Forest Service workers in Montana were suddenly laid off as part of federal job cuts across the country.
“They fired 300 people in the Forest Service in one day. These people had no reason on their dismissal papers. They had no notice,” Forstag told the Guardian.
At the time, Forstagg was vice president of Forest Service Council Local 60 of the National Federation of Federal Employees and was tasked with fighting for his colleagues’ jobs. He explained how a woman who became a probationary employee while undergoing cancer treatment was dismissed after 15 years of service.
Another worker was queuing at the airport to board a flight for his mother’s funeral when he received a text message saying he had been fired without reason.
Although jobs were eventually restored after the court ruling, Forstagg said the job cuts proved to him just how much workers can dispense to those in power. “It’s always the same story. The rich are the richest while it’s the working people who are stuck,” Forstag said.
The experience pushed Forstagg to run for Congress, seeking to unseat Republican Ryan Zinke, Trump’s former interior secretary, in Montana’s first congressional district.
National Democrats have touted the district as a potential pickup in an effort to help flip the House majority in their favor in the midterms, but it could still be a tight race. Montana is currently dominated by Republicans. In 2024, Democratic Senator Jon Tester lost his re-election bid after holding the seat since January 2007, although he won Montana’s first congressional district.
Zinke resigned from the Trump administration in 2018 amid several ethics investigations into his business dealings, and his net worth has grown from $2 million in early 2017 to $30 million by the end of 2021 through real estate, business ventures and investments. He returned to Congress in 2022 and ran on a platform of stonewalling the Biden administration and easily won re-election in 2024.
When Forstagg first entered the race in January, Zinke’s campaign manager claimed Forstagg “represents Mamdani” and not Montana. She pointed to an April 2025 rally in Missoula headlined by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, where Forstagg spoke about protecting workers and public lands.
“What we’re dealing with today is not a wildfire, but it’s definitely an emergency,” Forstag said at the time.
Forstagg said Zinke failed to work for his district, absenting himself from town halls and pushing to open up public lands to mining, drilling and other extractive industries, all while portraying himself as a defender of public lands.
“He’s as two-faced as you can imagine,” Forstagg said. He added: “[Zinke] He and his rich, corporate friends will vote down the line to subvert all of our public lands agencies to make more profit at our expense.
Zinke’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In his bid for the Democratic nomination, Forstagg will have to defeat other Democratic candidates, including Ryan Busse, a former gun executive who lost the state’s 2024 gubernatorial race.
Forstagg focused on a platform for workers and said the Democratic Party needed to win back the working class.
“Working people are fundamentally underrepresented in federal office right now, and that has serious, significant effects on what policies they actually prioritize and what they pass,” Forstagg said.
Forstagg is one of several former federal employees and union members running congressional campaigns in the 2026 midterms, including members of the United Auto Workers in New York and a firefighters union leader in Pennsylvania.
Forstagg emphasized that policies such as expanding affordable housing and providing universal child care, as well as fixing the broken US healthcare system, would help struggling workers make ends meet.
“You should be able to do a good job in this state [and] Get housing and health coverage in this country “Government’s primary duty is to materially improve people’s lives when the market does not meet the need,” he said. And at the national level some people seem to have forgotten about that.
