Smokejumper and union leader aims to win in Montana by focusing on workers
Sam Forstag, who parachutes from planes to fight wildfires, believes pro-worker polices can flip district from Trump ally ...
last year, Forstag started to witness a decimation that couldn’t be fought by firefighters alone. A quarter of US Forest Service workers in Montana were abruptly terminated as part of federal job cuts across the country.
At the time, Forstag was the vice-president of the Forest Service Council Local 60, an arm of the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was tasked with fighting for the jobs of his co-workers. ... Though the jobs were eventually reinstated after a court ruling, Forstag said the job cuts proved to him how dispensable workers are to those in power.
“It’s the same story that it always is. It’s working people getting screwed while rich people get a whole lot richer,” Forstag said.
The experience pushed Forstag to run for Congress, seeking to unseat Republican Ryan Zinke, Trump’s former interior secretary, in Montana’s first congressional district.
...
Forstag said Zinke has failed to work for his district, with absences from town halls and pushes to open public lands for mining, drilling and other extractive industries, all while portraying himself as a public lands defender. “He is as two-faced as anyone you could possibly imagine,” Forstag said. He added: “[Zinke] votes down the line to gut all our public lands agencies, so that he and his rich, corporate friends can turn a bigger profit at all of our expense.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/20/sam-forstag-montana-workers
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Love this guy's straight talking style. According to the article, National Dems rate this seat as a potential mid-term pickup this year. Wouldn't that be something!
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