<\/p>\n
Sam Forstag is used to launching himself into heated territory.<\/p>\n
As a smokejumper, his job is to jump out of airplanes 3,000 feet in the air and parachute down into the Montana wilderness. Going by air is often the easiest way to access the remote wilderness and combat the wildfires that burn an average of 7.2 million acres<\/a> a year in the state.<\/p>\n But last year, Forstag started to witness a decimation that couldn\u2019t be fought by firefighters alone.<\/p>\n A quarter of US Forest Service workers in Montana<\/a> were abruptly terminated as part of federal job cuts across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThey fired 300 people in the Forest Service in one day. These folks had no cause in their termination paperwork. They had no notice,\u201d Forstag told the Guardian.<\/p>\n 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. He recounted how a woman, who became a probationary employee as she was undergoing cancer treatment, was fired after 15 years of service.<\/p>\n Another worker was in line at the airport to board a flight for his mother\u2019s funeral when he received a text notifying him that he was fired with no cause.<\/p>\n Though the jobs were eventually reinstated after a court ruling<\/a>, Forstag said the job cuts proved to him how dispensable workers are to those in power. \u201cIt\u2019s the same story that it always is. It\u2019s working people getting screwed while rich people get a whole lot richer,\u201d Forstag said.<\/p>\n The experience pushed Forstag to run for Congress, seeking to unseat Republican Ryan Zinke, Trump\u2019s former interior secretary, in Montana\u2019s first congressional district.<\/p>\n National Democrats have cited<\/a> the district as a potential pickup in a bid 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, the Democratic senator Jon Tester lost his re-election<\/a> bid after holding the seat since January 2007, though he won in Montana\u2019s first congressional district.<\/p>\n Zinke resigned<\/a> from the Trump administration in 2018 amid several ethics investigations involving his business dealings, and his net worth<\/a> ballooned from $2m in early 2017 to over $30 million by late 2021 through real estate, business ventures, and investments. He returned <\/a>to Congress in 2022, and running on a platform<\/a> of stonewalling the Biden administration, and easily won reelection in 2024.<\/p>\n When Forstag first entered the race in January, Zinke\u2019s campaign manager claimed<\/a> Forstag \u201crepresents Mamdani\u201d and not Montana. She pointed to a rally<\/a> in Missoula headlined by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in April 2025 where Forstag spoke about protecting workers and public lands.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re facing today isn\u2019t a wildfire, but it\u2019s damn sure an emergency,\u201d Forstag said at the time.<\/p>\n Forstag said Zinke has failed to work for his district, with absences<\/a> from town halls and pushes to open public lands for mining<\/a>, drilling<\/a> and other extractive industries, all while portraying himself as a public lands defender.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is as two-faced as anyone you could possibly imagine,\u201d Forstag said. He added: \u201c[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.\u201d<\/p>\n Zinke\u2019s office did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n In his bid for the Democratic nomination, Forstag will have to beat out other Democratic candidates, including Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive who lost in the state\u2019s 2024 gubernatorial race.<\/p>\n Forstag is centering on a platform for workers and said the Democratic party needs to win over the working class again.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is genuinely a fundamental lack of representation for working people in federal office right now, and that has serious, substantive effects on what kind of policies they actually prioritize and what they pass,\u201d Forstag said.<\/p>\n Forstag is just one of several former federal employees<\/a> and union members who are running congressional campaigns in the 2026 midterms, including United Auto Workers members<\/a> in New York<\/a> and a firefighters\u2019 union leader<\/a> in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n Forstag emphasized that policies such as expanding affordable housing and offering universal childcare, to fixing the broken US healthcare system, could help workers struggling to make ends meet.<\/p>\n \u201cYou should be able to work a good job in this state [and] in this country and afford housing and health coverage,\u201d he said. \u201cThe primary function of government is to step in when the market is not meeting a need and to make people\u2019s lives materially better. And it seems like some people at the national level forgot about that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Smokejumper #union #leader #aims #win #Montana #focusing #workers #Montana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sam Forstag is used to launchi… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23575"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}