On Oct. 13, in a debate for Montana’s open western House seat, Bradley Warren, an anchor for NonStop Local’s Montana TV stations, asked the candidates whether they consider gender identity a protected classification under the 14th Amendment. Republican Aaron Flint, a former longtime conservative talk radio host, said everyone deserves dignity and respect but drew the line at girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms and sports and at taxpayer-funded surgery for minors, according to the debate video.
Democrat Sam Forstag, who used to parachute in to fight wildfires as a smokejumper, took a different route. “Government has no business sticking its nose into our personal lives, whether that’s a gun safe, whether that’s a doctor’s office,” he said, before adding, “Let’s leave sports to the leagues that actually run them,” and “let’s keep politics the heck out of it.”
The Bulwark, an anti-Trump news site, posted a 68-second clip of the answer that morning. According to proprietary monitoring data from my firm, Pink and Blue Strategies, it had drawn about 820,000 views on X by the next afternoon.
I think it’s one of the best answers to an anti-trans attack I’ve heard from a Democrat in a hard race. It’s worth understanding why it works.
The race
Montana’s 1st Congressional District covers the western part of the state, including Missoula, Bozeman, Butte and Kalispell, and Donald Trump carried it 54% to 43% in 2024. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Republican, isn’t running again, and the Cook Political Report rates the open seat as leaning Republican, according to the Daily Montanan.
Polls in August and September put Flint and Forstag within four points of each other, according to the Flathead Beacon, and Trump was scheduled to rally for Flint in Kalispell on Oct. 14. If Forstag wins, he will be the first Democrat to hold a U.S. House seat in Montana in nearly three decades.
Flint has hammered Forstag on transgender issues, pointing to Forstag’s work lobbying the state legislature in 2021 and 2023, including for the ACLU of Montana. In the debate, he called Forstag “a high-paid LGBTQ lobbyist from Portland who lobbied for all the crazy stuff” and said the race was about “common sense versus crazy,” including a “crazy trans agenda,” the Daily Montanan reported.
One of Flint’s ads features a girl who says her mom “is my coach” and that “Sam Forstag expects us to compete against boys.” NonStop Local’s fact-checkers rated that line false because, they wrote, “the state’s legal standard in 2026 is that transgender women and girls are women and girls.”
What Forstag said
Forstag opened by saying that “lies and anger, they don’t solve these problems,” and then turned to the state constitution. “Everybody in Montana deserves to live the life with dignity that is protected in our state constitution,” he said, invoking Article II, whose dignity clause begins, “The dignity of the human being is inviolable.”
Then he talked about his mother, who was an ICU nurse, coached his middle school basketball team and still coaches his sister’s. “She taught me about keeping things fair,” he said, before turning to the line about gun safes and doctors’ offices.
He ended by tying Flint’s attacks to money. “What I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets,” he said.
When Flint came back by saying Forstag wanted “special rights” for trans women, Forstag said parents and patients should make their own decisions and that “the sports leagues know how to best run those leagues.” He called Flint’s attack “fear-mongering” meant to distract from the fact that Flint “does not have any solutions to make working people’s lives better.”
Why it works
The first thing worth noticing is what Forstag didn’t do. He didn’t argue about trans girls’ bodies, and he didn’t accept Flint’s premise that they’re “boys”; he argued about who should decide.
James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, made a similar move in September, when he answered a question about trans athletes by talking about giving “the power to make these decisions to local communities.” I wrote then that we need to allow our allies some rhetorical flexibility, and Forstag shows what that flexibility can look like in a Trump district.
The second thing is the language. Putting “a gun safe” and “a doctor’s office” in the same sentence ties medical decisions, trans people’s included, to the privacy argument many Montanans already make about guns.
The dignity line makes the same kind of local appeal. It comes from Montana’s own constitution, not from a national talking point, and Flint had just told viewers that everyone deserves dignity, too.
The third thing is the pivot. Forstag made his case on Montana’s terms and then spent the end of his minute on the “pick our pockets” line, which casts Flint’s attack as a distraction from what’s happening to working people’s money.
Leaving sports to the leagues doesn’t promise that trans athletes will get to play, and the NCAA, for one, limited women’s competition to athletes assigned female at birth last year, a day after an executive order from President Trump. But Forstag’s position is that politicians like Flint shouldn’t be the ones deciding, and in a district Trump won by more than 11 points, I think that’s a real answer.
Nov. 3
Zooey Zephyr, a trans state legislator who lives in Forstag’s district, put it this way on Bluesky: “If congressional candidates in western Montana—one of the most competitive House races in the entire country—can stand up for trans folks in every aspect of our lives, democrats everywhere should take note.” The race is still close, and if Forstag wins on Nov. 3, he’ll have won a Trump district with this answer on the record.
Every Democrat running in a hard district this fall will get some version of Bradley Warren’s question. If you know one, send them the Bulwark’s 68-second clip.
