Sam Forstag

I think that it is a perfect little encapsulation of what we're looking at as a country of people.

you know, one side that is just trying to inflame hate and division.

And well, one side that I think we need to change to make a version, a vision of what this country can be, which is bringing people together and actually starting to solve big problems again.

Yeah, I would say you cannot miss it, right?

If you're now paying nearly five bucks a gallon at the pump and you're in a place like Montana where, well, you measure the distance in hours instead of miles between one town or city in the next, everybody is feeling it.

And we are in a state here in Montana where we, by some metrics, have the least affordable housing market in the country.

wages relative to the cost of housing.

The cost of buying a house is doubled or tripled or worse in Missoula or Bozeman or Flathead Valley.

And I worked between fire seasons for a group of homeless shelters, the Montana Coalition to Solve Homelessness for three years.

We got cities where homelessness has doubled or tripled.

across Western Montana, and that's because housing is unaffordable, so people are feeling it.

I'll tell you, one of the tough conversations I've had in the last five months of this campaign is a lot of people asking me a different version of that question.

It's like, well, a quarter of your coworkers voted for

Trump or Brian Zinke, do they see that they were wrong?

Do they see that they messed up?

And that is kind of missing the point because a lot of these folks were hurting before Donald Trump got elected a second time.

And that is how we got into this mess.

I mean, I was making $19 an hour jumping out of airplanes for the US Forest Service at the end of 2024.

in a community where you cannot find a home for less than a half million dollars if you're lucky.

And I'm seven years in and there's guys who are 20 plus years in making that same wage in the same community, the same housing market.