Montana Democrats drank the bar dry at the old Florence Hotel in Missoula before midnight on Tuesday. Sam Forstag’s election night watch party had turned into a victory blowout.
The next morning, many of those partygoers woke up tired, hungover and disappointed.
The smokejumper-turned-politician pulled out an almost unbelievable win in a district President Donald Trump won handily just two years prior. But when the delirium subsided, state Democrats couldn’t help but feel that their party had squandered a rare opportunity to deliver an even bigger victory: Montana’s open Senate seat.
“It’s a missed opportunity that quite frankly sets Montana back decades,” former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester told The Washington Sun. “This was not a wave election, this was a tsunami.”
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Forstag will be the first Democrat to represent Montana in the House of Representatives since the legendary Pat Williams, who won his final House race in 1994, the year that Forstag was born. Before Forstag, Tester, who served in the Senate for 18 years before losing reelection in 2024, was the only Democrat to win a congressional race in Montana in decades.
If there was ever a year for Democrats to make a comeback statewide in Montana, this was it. National tides swung so heavily against Republicans that states like Texas, Kansas and South Carolina turned blue. But Montana’s senate race was a foregone conclusion.
The national party abandoned the race over the summer when it became clear that neither Democrat Alani Bankhead nor the more popular independent, Seth Bodnar, would bow out. The two split votes between them — Bodnar securing about three times the votes of Bankhead — allowing Republican Kurt Alme an easy win.
Despite an outpouring of excitement for Forstag, Montana Democrats have descended into recriminations over the Senate race since. In the end, the intraparty fight over who was best suited to challenge Alme spoiled what became a once-in-a-generation opportunity, Tester said.
“Montana could have been in that mix, and they chose not to be,” Tester said.
A person familiar with the Democratic campaigns this cycle agreed with Tester’s assessment and also called the Senate race a “missed opportunity.”
“People have hard feelings around it,” they said.
Those hard feelings are not hard to come by — and many of them are directed at the state’s Democratic party.
“Montana Democrat leadership is a joke, and that is a widely held opinion,” said Ben Super, the executive director of Montana Conservation Voters, who was simultaneously thrilled with Forstag’s victory and saddened by the outcome of the Senate race. “Democrats would rather be right than win.”
The state Democratic party blamed Bodnar for the Senate loss Wednesday. Emily Marburger, the executive director of the party, wrote in a statement that the state “could have been part of the blue wave of states like Texas, South Carolina and Iowa if not for the Independent experiment that played out in our state.”
Marburger took a swing at a strategy that’s gained momentum in other parts of the country: Democrats throwing their weight behind an independent candidate who is likely to caucus with their party in office, but lacks the baggage of the party’s brand. One such candidate, Dan Osborn, who ran as an independent candidate in Nebraska, also lost Tuesday night, to Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts.
“It’s clear this strategy does not work and that when we support Democrats and work together instead of fracturing our party, great things are possible,” Marburger wrote.
But insiders say the Montana Senate race is a sign of poorly-managed state Democratic party infrastructure — one that’s suffered blow after blow as the state has become increasingly conservative.
And now, with Forstag emerging a victor out of the mess, some are looking to him to heal this turmoil.
Forstag managed to both stay out of the nasty fight that engulfed the Senate race and secure victory without the help of the national Democratic infrastructure that normally comes with a competitive Senate candidate.
He also did it by avoiding strong associations with the Democratic label during the general election campaign and promised to sometimes break with Democrats if elected. Some voters even confused him for an independent candidate in conversations with The Sun in September.
Some see him as the party’s new de facto leader who will be responsible for its future image, insiders said.
“Getting people on the Democrat team who are like, ‘I want to win,’ versus some sort of party feud or purity test or all of this weirdness, he’s fully aware of this,” Super said. “I think he knows it.”
One insider hesitated to call Forstag the party’s new leader but said that he’s shown Democrats in Montana a new way to win. “Part of how Sam won is not by elevating himself and by elevating the working people that supported him,” they said. “I think people should take their cues from Sam. He showed a path, I think he showed real leadership.”
As for Forstag himself, he hasn’t commented publicly on the state of the state party or the outcome of the Senate race. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
But some of the biggest Democratic names in his state are putting a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.
“Forstag is going to be dictating the Montana Democratic party if he does his job the next two years,” Tester said. “Sam understands. He will do what needs to be done.”
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