MISSOULA, Mont — The last week in Montana politics has been a roller coaster, and Democrat Sam Forstag says it’s a ride he is committed to.
“There are a whole lotta folks clamoring to replace Ryan Zinke and they all seem to be coming from the far right and a big part of what I’ve been talking about in this campaign is that we don’t win – in a meaningful way – by just making people hate the other side,” Forstag said,“I have endorsements I’m everybody from Senator Bernie Sanders on one side to 25 current and former sate [lawmakers] including three Republicans.”
The union leader and smoke jumper, who went to UM and was ASUM President, says he got into the race for a number of reasons, but the biggest one was watching colleagues at the Forest Service get laid off it’s part of DOGE cuts.
“They fired about a quarter of the Forest Service in the last year and we couldn’t get a meeting with are congressional representative and we deserves somebody representing us in Montana who knows what it’s like to work your tail off,” Forstag said.
Before Zinke announced his retirement, the DCCC, the Democratic Central Congressional Committee, announced that they believed the district was vulnerable for Republicans and added it to their list of targets.
“Things are getting brighter everyday and Ryan Zinke saw what was coming, and what was coming was all of us, it was a whole bunch of working people who still care about the constitution who are fed up,” Forstag said.
Zinke cited health reasons and surgeries needed for retirement.
“Tester won the Western district just last year while losing the state, but what’s different right now is a lot of people were sold a bill of goods about how the folks in power we’re going to look out for all of us and they were going to make life affordable and things are not getting any better,” Forstag said, “In fact it’s becoming even harder to put a roof over your head.”
Forstag says housing prices, the cost of childcare and the cost of healthcare are also major reasons for jumping in. He says as he makes stops across the state, the number one problem he hears, is that people can’t buy homes anymore.
“We want to tackle or housing prices for what it is – it is a full blown crisis especially here in Western Montana, all we have to do is look to our own history it was not so long ago that we had housing crisis, we had a crisis after World War II a whole generation of people moving back stateside, the federal government stepped in on a bipartisan basis and invested billions in 1950,” Forstag said, “[this] to build hundreds of thousands of homes, to create the low income housing voucher program, there were flaws in the way we did this but we have a whole set of tools we could be investing in, like community land trust and deed restricted housing and partnering with developers to insure we’re actually building rental units.”
There are currently a handful of Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the primary race.
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