MTPR is airing interviews with candidates running for federal office in 2026. MTPR’s Austin Amestoy speaks with Sam Forstag, a Democrat running for Montana’s western U.S. House seat.
Austin Amestoy: Sam, tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a bit of background and tell us what makes you the most qualified candidate for this job.
Sam Forstag: Well, Austin, I've spent the last eight years doing wildland fire across Montana, across the West. I worked over in Condon for a few years, in Lincoln, and spent the last couple of years working at the Missoula smokejumper base and working as vice president of my union's local, which covers the Lolo, Bitterroot, and Custer-Gallatin National Forests. And in the last year, they fired about a quarter of the Forest Service between DOGE cuts and all the rest. And in course of that, I could not get a meeting, much less a phone call with our congressional representative. Well, after a year or so of that, I decided that if they're gonna come and take all my coworkers and union members' jobs, I'm going to come and take theirs.
And I went to the University of Montana here, as I was telling you, I studied philosophy and political science — great degree to end up digging ditches in the woods for about eight years. And over the last eight years, as you know, between fire seasons, I've also been doing organizing and advocacy work with everybody from the ACLU of Montana to a coalition of homeless shelters, working on public education and public libraries. And so what I bring to this race is not just that I'm the first union member to run in over a decade for Congress here in Montana, not just I'm a working person whose life actually reflects most Montanans' struggles in the past five, 10, 15 years when it's become so hard to afford to live in the state, but that I've also gotten to work with legislators in both parties here in Montana to pass bills into law that actually make working people's lives better.
Austin Amestoy: How do you feel that that prior experience that you just listed would make you an effective member of Congress? I know that being in Congress is a little bit different than the idea of being in Congress, if that makes sense. It's a pretty complicated machine.
Sam Forstag: Right now what we need are big, bold policy solutions to fix the housing crisis and our broken systems of health care and childcare in this country. But also we need leaders who know how to work with folks in both parties and talk to people in both parties rather than just gin up anger. And rather than just tell us that we ought to be more angry at the folks in the other party, and that's why you should vote for this one this time, because that doesn't get us anywhere and that doesn't solve problems. So, my hope would be and is that when we win this election and get to Washington, well, we're still gonna have a Republican in the White House, hopefully with control of the Senate and the House, and if we wanna use that momentum that we're building right now, well, need to be able to work with those folks to actually fix housing and healthcare and childcare, because there are a lot of big problems and it does not feel like we got time to sit around and wait a couple more years to start fixing them.
Austin Amestoy: And let's talk about health care actually for a moment. The federal government shut down last year over an impasse between Republicans and Democrats over subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. How would you have approached that vote if you had been in Congress at that time?
Sam Forstag: I'll tell you what, a lot of the people who were out of work were my union members in the midst of a government shutdown. So I would be looking for a bigger fight than whether we give another $350 billion to private health insurance companies. The bigger fight is how do we actually fix a broken health care system where, right now, I'm looking at the health insurance marketplace, having left my job as a federal employee, as a smoke jumper — because that's what you got to do to run for public office — and you're looking at plans that are 900 and some dollars a month for bad health insurance. For health insurance that you don't get a lick of care from until you spend $12,000.
So the bigger fight here is how do we actually give people health care options that work and get them care when they need it. And what that looks like to me is the actual option that works here, which is Medicare. Let's give everybody in this country the option to buy into Medicare and let's actually extend and expand those subsidies into free health care for most Americans.
Austin Amestoy: What is the top priority for constituents in your district that you've heard so far?
Sam Forstag: Austin, right now, it is everything everybody talks every time you go to a bar in a state — it is housing and it's health care. You should be able to work a full-time job here in Montana and afford housing and health coverage that actually gets you health care when you need it. And we are in a crisis when it comes to our system of housing. And we've had a housing crisis before in this country. We had a house in crisis after World War II with a whole generation of Americans coming back from overseas, ready to buy houses and build families.
And you know what we did? The federal government stepped in on a bipartisan basis and invested billions — in 1950s dollars — to build hundreds of thousands of units of homes; to create the low income housing voucher program. And there were a lot of flaws in the ways that we did that, but we got a whole other set of tools we could be investing in right now to make sure that you can actually afford a roof over your head and not end up doing a job like smokejumping — of all things, jumping out of airplanes into public lands to fight wildfires — and still scraping by spending 70% to 80% of your income just to keep a roof over your head. That is not a working system and we deserve better and we can still fix these big problems.
Austin Amestoy: Sam Forstag is running as a Democrat for Montana's first congressional district. Sam, thanks for being here.
Sam Forstag: Thank you for having me, Austin.
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