Sam Forstag, former smokejumper, runs for Congress in Montana

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If you want to bring a group of rowdy firefighters to a political event on Monday night, it turns out that free beer is a pretty good strategy.

It’s a beautiful October evening in Missoula, Montana – the state’s second-largest city, at the mouth of the Bitterroot Valley – and Great Burn Brewing is packed with wildland firefighters of all kinds. Logging boot. Seven day shave. Flannel that has seen some shit. Beneath a large sign that says I LOVE BEER, a very handsome congressional candidate named Sam Forstag is on a microphone explaining fiscal policy and budget cuts to a crowd more accustomed to talking about Anchor Point and air strikes. Still, they’re excited – because he’s one of them.

Forstag, 32, is an ex-smokejumper — the elite, possibly deranged subgroup of firefighters who arrive at wildfires by parachuting from airplanes. He is running to represent Montana’s 1st congressional district. If he wins, he will be the first Democrat Montanan sent to the House of Representatives since 1994 – the same year he was born. It’s a tough fight: In the last election, Trump won the district by 12 points. But with four weeks to go, polls show that Forstag – a blue-collar economic populist who has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC – is in a surprising position. “I’m feeling hopeful,” he tells the crowd. “They’re scared, and they’re spending money like this.”

Forstag is wearing faded Levi’s, work boots and a T-shirt from his local American Forest Service union. Although he’s a secret policy expert who can happily rant for hours about housing subsidies and timber-harvest litigation, tonight he’s serving up pure red meat, serenading the crowd with how high the costs are. “The average Congressman — who is worth $3 to $4 million, depending on how well the stock market is doing that day — they make laws as if these problems aren’t urgent,” Forstag says. “Let’s elect a working man…so we can fight for ourselves.”

The crowd screams in agreement. His friends walk in with more drink tickets.

Forstag told some stories about Montanans he met during the expedition. People like Kathleen in Columbia Falls, who worked her whole life for a Social Security check that barely covered her rent, forcing her to choose between medicine and dinner. “At a time when we have created our first human trillionaires, how do we ensure that every working person can afford basic amenities?” Forstag says. “People here are suffering at a very deep level. And it doesn’t seem like the people in power are as angry as they should be.”

He ended the rally with an anecdote about a Russian smokejumper who was interviewed National Geographic A few years ago. “They said smokejumping means ‘fly like an eagle for three minutes, dig like a shrew for three weeks,'” Forstag says to laughs from the crowd. “I know a lot of you know that feeling. We’ve been digging for a long time.”

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past 10 years about how Democrats can win back the white working-class voters they groomed — the kind who, as Forstag says, “have dirt under their nails.” A less tested approach is to nominate genuine working-class candidates. (As Graham Platner was supposed to be, before revelations about his trust fund and…everything else.)

Forstag comes by his Carhartt honestly. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, the son of a single-mother nurse who worked night shifts to make ends meet and a single-father teacher who lived on food stamps. Forstag worked three jobs at one time while at the University of Montana, including working the Subway counter inside a Walmart. After graduation, he took a job on a fire crew to pay off his student loans and start saving for law school, and rose from rookie to squad boss in just two years. The plan was to put out fires long enough to pay off his debts – but in his fifth season, he was selected by a highly competitive Smokejumper crew, where more than half of the equally superhuman recruits died during the first “Hell Week”. Forstag not washed.

“Get paid to jump out of an airplane?” he says, sipping pale ale at the corner table after his speech. “Sign me up.”

The job of a smokejumper combines two objectively insane jobs – like being a bull rider who works exclusively in war zones. “Any jumper who says he’s never been scared is full of shit,” Forstag says. “Sometimes you’re on the plane and it’s an open field, and everyone is excited and in high spirits. But sometimes it’s a tennis court-sized space and tall woods, and the plane is quite quiet.”

Forstag spent the next four summers parachuting into wildfires across the country from Alaska to California to Colorado. “Thirty-three fires and 116 jumps total,” he says. “You don’t get health insurance. You don’t get retirement. And I was making 15 bucks an hour.” Wildfire season typically runs from summer to late autumn, so during the off-season, Forstag – who majored in political science and was student body president – ​​earned extra money by working part-time as an organizer and consultant at the state Capitol in Helena, lobbying progressive groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the Montana Innocence Project. This led to absurd attacks from the GOP that “[fighting] Allowing children to change genders without parental permission.” But Forstag is accustomed to such culture-war distractions.

Wildland firefighters are not the most generous group. Forstag was on a lot of jump planes and fire lines with Trumpers and right wing MAGA bros. “They’ll talk to me about all the crazy stuff they saw on Fox — like ‘You can’t make a baby with your dick’ or something,” he says. “And I’d say to them, ‘You know what? You should go to the state capital. We get a 90-day legislative session every other year, and [the politicians] Spend two-thirds of it singing and dancing about the kind of shit you see on Fox News and then lining your pockets while we look the other way. they talk [trans stuff] As if this is the biggest problem of our life. I don’t know about you, but the biggest problem in my life is how much money I have.’ By the end of the conversation, he was very angry – and not about the thing we started talking about.’

Forstag didn’t know it then, but it was great practice for talking to voters in Montana — where an influx of multi-millionaires has, by some measures, led to the least affordable housing market in the country.

“We’ve been lied to that we’re each other’s enemies,” Forstag says. “But the person working on either side of you – that’s not your enemy. Our enemy is the small group of people who are getting incredibly rich off of these broken systems.”

In 2025, Forstag was elected vice president of her labor union, NFFE Local 60. It had 800 members, most of whom were from the three national forests of western Montana. But weeks later, Elon Musk’s DOGE began dismantling his infamous “efficiency” crackdown, which included firing 360 Forest Service employees from the state in one day — 85 percent of whom were making less than $20 an hour. A friend of Forstag’s who worked for her for 15 years was fired while she was being treated for cancer. Another learned via text message while on his way to his mother’s funeral that he was fired from his job.

Talking about Musk tonight, Forstag still seems angry. “What does Elon Musk know about high-productivity work?”. He says. “There’s a guy who was jumping for 15 years and was a hottie [another highly specialized wildland firefighter] Probably for 12 years before that. This man spent years without health insurance, earned paltry money, and ruined his body. I remember him saying, ‘Man, I knew there was something worth cutting in government – but I didn’t think it would be like this.’ And the reality is that there is fat. But the real thing is not that people are risking their lives and earning Rs 15 per hour by turning an equipment. There is massive corruption. These are people like Elon Musk, who took tax subsidies worth $38 billion. The richest man in the world.”

Over the next few months, Forstag began to consider the idea of ​​running for office. That September, he drove his 1984 Toyota camper van to his favorite secret lake and decided to go there. “I had to accept that if I did that, there probably wouldn’t be any jobs left to go back to,” he says. Federal employees can’t run for office, and his outspokenness about the cuts had already drawn the attention of the Trump administration. (“I had the Secretary of Agriculture’s office calling my boss’s boss’s boss trying to fire me.”) In December, Forstag wrote his resignation letter “with my eyes narrowed.” A few weeks later, he announced his candidacy.

To outsiders, Montana may seem like one of those giant square states that hasn’t been blue in generations, but they’ve actually only recently elected Democrats statewide — including a governor in 2016 and a senator two years later. Montana Democrats aren’t like other Democrats, he said. (Forstag’s two opponents in the primary were an Army veteran-slash-rancher and a Navy veteran-slash-rancher; the third was a former gun CEO.) Accordingly, Forstag has not been shy about putting space between himself and the national party.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: The Democratic Party is messed up,” he says. “Four years in power at the federal level. Two years of unified control. And people’s lives haven’t gotten better. It’s a failure.”

When she entered the race, Forstagg’s potential Republican opponent was Representative Ryan Zinke, the former Interior Secretary under Trump who was the subject of 18 ethics complaints while in office — and perhaps coincidentally, saw his net worth increase by at least $30 million. The fight was personal: When Forstag’s union members lost their jobs, Zinke – their congressman – did not return their calls. But in March, Zinke unexpectedly announced his retirement. Now Forstag is running against Aaron Flint, a longtime conservative radio host. Forstag admitted he was disappointed.

“I would have loved to beat” [Zinke] “Myself,” he says, “but I will equally happily defeat his chosen successor.”

Forstag’s message is charmingly simple. “It’s this incredibly simple notion that you should be able to hold down a job and afford a roof over your head, health care that actually provides care when you need it, child care, and a good retirement. None of that is too much to ask.”

His argument for himself is equally simple. “We get policies from people we choose,” he says. “I know what it’s like to pay your rent on a credit card. I know what it’s like to tear your calf in a wildfire, and three days later limp in excruciating pain to the only orthopedist in town and they laugh at you when you present your insurance. There’s an immediacy to that experience. And I think that’s most people’s experience.”

The stakes are high for him. When he resigned from his smoke-jumping job, he also gave up his health insurance and what little retirement he had earned. If he wins in November, he hopes to serve on a committee like Natural Resources or Agriculture, where he can do the most for working-class Montanans. And if he doesn’t?

“I’ll look for a job,” he says, “because I’m broke.”