WESTERN MONTANA — The bartender at Beaverhead Brewing Company was arguing with one of his customers.
“You want to put me out of a job?” he said, pulling a pint and looking over his shoulder.
“You work for the federal government? Then yeah,” said the man sitting at the bar in Dillon, Montana, on the night before Labor Day.
The bartender’s day job is for the federal government; he is a range technician for the Bureau of Land Management. The patron is a local landowner. Neither man sees themselves as political, they told The Washington Sun. The upcoming election for outgoing Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke’s congressional seat wasn’t on their radar, either.
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But that night they were disagreeing passionately about one of the issues defining the race to represent Western Montana: What value do federal workers bring for the people of Montana? Who should be responsible for caring for the state’s abundant public lands?
Sam Forstag, a 32-year-old Democrat, is running for Congress in Montana on the notion that he can turn that fervor into votes.
Before this campaign, Forstag was a member of an elite crew of Forest Service wildland firefighters in Montana called smokejumpers. He parachuted out of planes into the wilderness to try to stop wildfires well before they reached communities. For Western Montanans haunted annually by the spectre of devastating fire, it’s a job everyone understands.
When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk made an aggressive push to put federal workers out of their jobs in early 2025, Forstag, who had just won a union leadership position at the Forest Service, became a face of resistance against Musk’s DOGE. Then he decided he wanted to try and find his way to Washington, D.C., himself.
“Right at the end of the fire season, I looked around. It felt so obvious,” he said of deciding to run for office. “Wouldn’t you rather in three years look back and say, ‘I did everything I could?’”
Forstag’s decision to run, the unlikely coalition now forming around his campaign, and increasing voter frustration in the state are all products of the last year-and-a-half of choices made in Washington. Trump’s administration has reshaped public lands, withheld disaster aid and taken a sledgehammer to the federal workforce. In a district that overwhelmingly voted for the president, and where the Democrat is inextricably opposed to Trump, Forstag’s candidacy is a clear test of those actions.
“The current administration is screwing up so badly that it’s really creating an opening,” said Brian Putnam, a Republican who served in the Montana Legislature until 2023.
How big an opening depends on what frustrated Montanans like the two men at Beaverhead Brewing decide to do in November.
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Forstag was in Maryland for union steward training when the Trump administration sent millions of federal workers an email encouraging them to voluntarily quit their government jobs. Within a month, the administration abruptly fired all its employees classified as “probationary,” including hundreds of Forest Service workers in Montana.
Forstag and others scrambled. They gave their union members — and even those outside the union — guidance of what to do if they were fired. “He never excluded anybody,” said former Montana Forest Service soil scientist Melissa Pingree, who worked with Forstag on the union.
It was around that time when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) came to Montana as part of their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. They asked the Forest Service union local if someone could speak about the impact of DOGE. Forstag volunteered and delivered a speech that changed the course of his career.
“We have hundreds of members who are out of work right now, and it is harder than it should be just to get information about that to ourselves, let alone to get it out to the public,” he told The Sun. “So, I decided to give that speech and get it out to the public.”
Thousands of people attended the rally. Videos of Forstag’s speech went viral. So viral that he was told that the higher-ups at the United States Department of Agriculture wanted him investigated and fired.
In the end, he was never fired. “If they are worried about the media blowback of a smokejumper giving a public speech about cuts to our public lands to public employees, the blowback’s going to be a lot worse if they fire that smokejumper,” he said.
But in the time between Forstag’s first encounter with DOGE in January 2025 and today, hundreds of long-time Forest Service employees in Montana have quit or taken early retirement.
Those still left inside the agency are stretched thin, handling multiple jobs and under increasing scrutiny to justify their work, said one current federal worker in Western Montana. Several federal workers told The Sun that they are increasingly concerned about the fact that the Trump administration is now conducting a full-scale reorganization of the Forest Service.
Forstag is betting that the blowback can help secure him an unlikely victory.
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The fundamentals of Montana politics are working heavily against Forstag. Jon Tester, the last Democrat to win statewide, lost his Senate reelection campaign in 2024 by just over seven points. That year, Zinke, who served as Interior secretary under Trump’s first administration before resigning amid multiple ethics inquiries, won the House seat Forstag is running for by nearly eight points.
Forstag’s Republican opponent, Aaron Flint, is a Trump-endorsed longtime conservative radio show host who is widely seen as the clear frontrunner. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “likely Republican.” The region’s liberal enclaves around Bozeman and Missoula are becoming increasingly conservative, and aren’t populous enough to carry the district.
As a result, Forstag’s liberal bona fides have become a major target. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just stand next to him on a stage last April; they endorsed him in the primary, and Ocasio-Cortez returned to the state to campaign for him, a fact that Republicans are hammering home every chance that they get. In the firefighting offseason, Forstag spent several years lobbying in the Montana State House on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and the Montana Library Association.
“Sam Forstag lobbied the Montana Legislature to let men play women’s sports and enter the locker rooms of my girls,” says the voice of the woman in Flint’s most recent campaign ad, referencing Forstag’s lobbying efforts with the ACLU.
In a statement to The Sun, NRCC Spokesman Christian Martinez said “Forstag shamelessly attempted to erase years of his record advocating for radical left groups,” and that “Montanans don’t want any part of Forstag’s socialist schemes in the halls of Congress.”
The electorate will likely get very familiar with those lines of attack. One Trump-linked PAC has committed nearly $2 million in advertising spend for October, while a Democrat-linked PAC has committed $1.4 million for the month, according to AdImpact data.
Forstag dismissed the narrative, calling it “disappointing, but not surprising,” in a statement. “We have a whole lot of people who are tired of politicians like Aaron trying to pick us apart.”
The unanswered question for Democrats in the state is whether Montanans’ obvious frustration with inflation, combined with the loss of longtime federal workers, can stem the state’s rightward shift.
The two polls that show Forstag having a shot are limited in scope: One independent poll taken over Labor Day weekend showed Flint with a one point lead over Forstag, while another Democratic-sponsored poll showed Forstag two percentage points ahead. Both results were well within the margin of error.
On the ground, there are signs that voters are frustrated all around. Visitors at the Dillon Jaycees Pro Rodeo on the Sunday before Labor Day brought up gas prices, inflation and the war in Iran without prompting.
Several attendees told The Washington Sun that they’re so frustrated with costs that they don’t plan to vote at all in November. Or if they do, they don’t know yet who they will vote for.
“Pundits, all of them,” said Beaverhead county resident Josh Bryson, sitting at one of the tables at the fairgrounds behind the rodeo. “I’m feeling pretty disenfranchised.”
And then there are the people who were directly impacted by Trump’s early moves slashing the federal work force. Among them is a woman who was fired in February of 2025 in the middle of chemotherapy treatment for an aggressive cancer. She was a longtime federal worker who had just transferred to a new office in the Forest Service, which technically made her “probationary.”
She was reinstated quickly to her job, but she said the experience changed the way she and her colleagues saw the Forest Service.
“The people who voted for what’s happening, I think that they realize now that they shot themselves in the foot,” she said, requesting anonymity as a current government employee.
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Forstag speaks about smokejumping with an almost cultish reverence. Most jumpers do.
“You’re getting to parachute into the most beautiful corners of the country on the remote stretches of public lands that you can never see otherwise,” he said. “You dig that one trench, cut that line. That fire stops. That’s a rapidly diminishing feeling in modern America, that kind of reward for your labor.”
Smokejumping isn’t a career that firefighters give up lightly. It’s hard to get selected and harder to last. Most recruits wash out during training. When Forstag decided to run for office, he had been with the jumpers for four years. He had health insurance, his income was growing and he loved the work. He wasn’t considering quitting the Forest Service — “absolutely not.”
Trump has changed the way Forstag talks about jumping.
Last summer, Forstag jumped the Crosho fire near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and landed face-to-face with the aftermath of DOGE.
“I put in an order for pumps and hoses, very basic firefighting stuff. And they tell me, well we used to have a gear cache in Steamboat, but they shut that down. So now we have to overnight airmail the pump and hose setup from Denver,” he said, growing angry as he recounted the story.
He said the team had to pivot to a less efficient plan. “Who benefits from this? It’s not the taxpayer. We pay more money. It’s not public safety. Public safety is suffering,” he said.
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The families lining the streets at the Labor Day parade in Dillon, Montana, should not have been Forstag’s kind of crowd. Cattle outnumber humans by more than an 11-to-1 ratio in Beaverhead County. The people who live here went for Trump by more than 40 percentage points in the 2024 election.
But only Smokey the Bear and the spangled Ramblin’ Rose Drill Team got clearly louder cheers than Forstag’s battered 1984 Toyota van, inching its way down North Montana Street on the crisp, windy Monday morning. The campaign ran out of swag halfway down the parade route.
Flint didn’t elicit more obvious enthusiasm from the people along Dillon’s streets.
“Everybody is tired of this. They’re getting nothing done,” said longtime Dillon resident Gayle Gransbery, describing politicians in Washington, D.C.
Harris Wheat, another Beaverhead County resident, said he was frustrated with the state of all politics. Then he said he will vote for Forstag in November.
“He’s a working guy. He’s not a politician,” he said. He paused for a long time, and added: “He gets it.”
Walking down the street next to the van plastered in “Sam for Montana” signs was a guy in a faded black smokejumpers T-shirt and a baseball cap that read “God Bless the Rodeo.”
His name is Conor Hogan, another jumper — now an unlikely campaign staffer.
Hogan was never interested in politics before, he said. And he wants nothing to do with it ever again; he’s already applied to go back to jumping next season, regardless of what happens in the election. But for Forstag, a longtime friend and fellow jumper, he quit his summer in the woods.
“Obviously, I’m a kind of biased source, but he’s a much better dude than I am,” he said.
Later that day at the Labor Day picnic in Butte, Montana, Forstag was among allies: In the crowd were unionized government workers, union retirees and union families. Many people got up to sign clipboards when Forstag asked for volunteers to organize for his campaign.
But there were also some faces new to the political scene. Hovering behind the picnic tables was a young man who works for the federal government. He, too, said he doesn’t care for politics, but this time he’s looking forward to voting. Forstag understands how hard the Trump administration has made the job, he said.
Do Forstag’s former smokejumper colleagues feel the same? Enough to vote for him? Hogan laughed.
“It’s an absurd question,” he said.
“If you work your whole life in public lands, right now it’s a pretty constant topic of conversation, the fact that they are under attack,” he continued. “I do think there are people who, because of that issue, will vote for Sam who might not otherwise. I really do.”
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