Sam Forstag is used to launching himself into heated territory.

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 year in the state.

But last year, Forstag started to witness a decimation that couldn’t be fought by firefighters alone.

A quarter of US Forest Service workers in Montana were abruptly terminated as part of federal job cuts across the country.

“They fired 300 people in the Forest Service in one day. These folks had no cause in their termination paperwork. They had no notice,” Forstag told the Guardian.

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.

Another worker was in line at the airport to board a flight for his mother’s funeral when he received a text notifying him that he was fired with no cause.

Though the jobs were eventually reinstated after a court ruling, Forstag said the job cuts proved to him how dispensable workers are to those in power. “It’s the same story that it always is. It’s working people getting screwed while rich people get a whole lot richer,” Forstag said.

The experience pushed Forstag to run for Congress, seeking to unseat Republican Ryan Zinke, Trump’s former interior secretary, in Montana’s first congressional district.

National Democrats have cited 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 bid after holding the seat since January 2007, though he won in Montana’s first congressional district.

Zinke resigned from the Trump administration in 2018 amid several ethics investigations involving his business dealings, and his net worth ballooned from $2m in early 2017 to over $30 million by late 2021 through real estate, business ventures, and investments. He returned to Congress in 2022, and running on a platform of stonewalling the Biden administration, and easily won reelection in 2024.

When Forstag first entered the race in January, Zinke’s campaign manager claimed Forstag “represents Mamdani” and not Montana. She pointed to a rally in Missoula headlined by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in April 2025 where Forstag spoke about protecting workers and public lands.

“What we’re facing today isn’t a wildfire, but it’s damn sure an emergency,” Forstag said at the time.

Forstag said Zinke has failed to work for his district, with absences from town halls and pushes to open public lands for mining, drilling and other extractive industries, all while portraying himself as a public lands defender.

“He is as two-faced as anyone you could possibly imagine,” Forstag said. He added: “[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.”

Zinke’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

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’s 2024 gubernatorial race.

Forstag is centering on a platform for workers and said the Democratic party needs to win over the working class again.

“There 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,” Forstag said.

Forstag is just one of several former federal employees and union members who are running congressional campaigns in the 2026 midterms, including United Auto Workers members in New York and a firefighters’ union leader in Pennsylvania.

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.

“You should be able to work a good job in this state [and] in this country and afford housing and health coverage,” he said. “The primary function of government is to step in when the market is not meeting a need and to make people’s lives materially better. And it seems like some people at the national level forgot about that.”