The Most Important Race of '26 Against the Nation's Most Corrupt Congressman

In 2026, Americans have a chance to right our national ship, and if it happens, it won’t be because of the few places we CAN win, but instead because we dedicated ourselves to the races we MUST win. In fact, there will be no real course correction if there is only a narrow shift in seats held by Democrats in deep-blue coastal districts or inner-city Democratic strongholds, while Republicans continue to hold almost all the seats in flyover-country rural swing districts like the one in Montana where I live.

The real key to getting America back on track is Democrats winning in parts of our country like this, where we still love to talk to our neighbors and where election victories must be hard-won. That’s Montana, and here in MT01, it also means defeating obviously corrupt Ryan Zinke, who only cares about adding to his own personal wealth or doing favors for big corporations.

You probably don’t live in MT, but you don’t have to guess what is at stake because no matter where you are in this country, you are experiencing the wrong-track alternative to losing these places and the majority. A rapidly increasing majority of Americans believe it ain’t good.¹

Republicans are punch-drunk with power, gleefully shoveling incredible advantages to the wealthiest Americans while literally celebrating policies that make things worse for anyone who doesn’t earn a cushy living from passive income, crypto scams, or the carried interest loophole.

Ryan Zinke is an old hand at this game, and the GOP is unapologetic about what they are doing, but part of this is on the National Democrats, too; it’s not like they have exactly met the moment. In fact, at times, they have almost given up on rural citizens like us. This disastrous strategy, which has resulted in the oft-referenced electoral map with blue edges and all that red across the middle, is encapsulated in Chuck Schumer’s 2016 strategy: “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”²

As an American and as someone who grew up on a ranch a long way from a paved road, graduated from a rural school with 16 kids, and who lives in a state full of blue-collar folks like those in Western PA, I can tell you that the results of that forget-us-strategy have proven to be an unmitigated disaster, not just for rural places but for the entire nation. It handed the country to corrupt yes-men like Zinke, who revel in the cruelty of making things like healthcare and groceries more expensive for almost all of us so that his party can cut billions from the taxes for people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Turning away from rural people like those of us in Montana is a bit like refusing to add salt when you cook; it removes the critical cohesive component from the Democratic Party. Now that it seems there is at least a partial national recognition that this was a bad idea, maybe we can start listening to people that live in places such as this, like 68-year-old Kurt from Whitefish, who told me last year, “This was a great place and still is, but the people who made it great can’t afford to live here anymore and our kids can’t come back.”

@ryandbusse

Ryan Busse on Instagram: "Meet Kurt, a 68-year-old Montanan who…

Kurt’s emotional plea about property taxes and the cost of living went viral because, unless you are wealthy, you instantly feel his plight. Sara and I certainly do. We have two great boys who love this state in a way that only Montanans can really understand. They don’t dream of wealth or luxury, but they do dream of making a life here. We badly want it for them, but right now, none of us has a believable answer for how they’ll be able to afford it. That kind of uncertainty is gut-wrenching and frightening for families. What’s worse is that the GOP has clearly demonstrated that it has absolutely no intention of fixing any of it.

That’s why I assert real corrective action must start with an outsized, purposeful focus on electing bold Democrats from key rural areas across the country who really fight for the people who make our nation work.

I know it’s going to start here in Montana because this is a place where we still care about each other, where we stop to help change tires, no matter who the person is. We still take a lot of pride in sitting at a bar together with people who never mention or care about how much money anyone has. Despite concerted Republican efforts to sell this place to billionaires, the truth is, real Montanans find it pretty damn distasteful to flaunt wealth, advertise power, or tout status. Think of how great our country would be if we had a bit more of that!

It’s more important than ever to elect people from places like this that actually depend on things critical to ordinary people, you know, like rural healthcare, affordable housing, grocery prices, and public lands.

That most certainly is not Ryan Zinke. When he first ran for the MT legislature, he promised to protect the environment, drove a Prius, and never faked the whole Yellowstone cowboy bit. Now he celebrates a president who slams E.V.s, wears a big Stetson for the cameras, and is in favor of gutting the roadless rule and opening almost hundreds of millions of public land acres to aggressive industrialization.³ It’s all part of a move we know well, all hat and no cattle.

No one, including me, is suggesting anything but genuine respect for military service. But somehow, Zinke, who, according to the Navy Times,⁴ committed travel fraud while in the military and who has spent almost his entire adult life in the employ of the federal government somehow increased his wealth from almost nothing before he ran for office to nearly $40 million in 2024. It’s an incredible sum that is clearly noted in his official 2024 FEC filing,⁵ and it includes millions in real estate holdings in California, where he spends most of his time.

How might one start in humble rural Montana with no wealth, make a government salary for decades, supposedly as a servant of the people, and then become extremely wealthy? Well, that’s a good question with a straightforward answer.

While Zinke was in the cabinet, he did everything possible to help the largest extractive corporations and himself. Among other schemes, he used government planes for personal travel and set up real estate deals with oil executives who benefited from Department of the Interior decisions. Zinke was so cozy with corporate execs and so lax on ethics rules that he accomplished the near-impossible; he racked up 18 federal ethics investigations and was fired from the Trump administration for his poor judgment and impressive list of corruption scandals.

He may have lost that job, but it paid off well because it set up his singular stint in life outside Government, as a lobbyist for, you guessed it… some of the world’s largest mining and petroleum companies.⁶⁷ It’s hard to say what the full extent of his personal financial benefit was, but the graph of his personal wealth disclosures tells quite a story.

All of this should be more than enough to vote him out of office, but it gets much worse. Zinke not only repeatedly personally enriched himself, but he’s also repeatedly praised the president even as he raised tariffs that kill our markets and increase prices for every single working Montanan. Zinke ardently and publicly supported the DOGEing of federal agencies like the VA that help other veterans who don’t have $ 40 million.⁸ He enthusiastically voted for the recent Republican budget bill that will strip SNAP benefits from millions of the most vulnerable Americans, and he has loudly defended the Republican plan to radically increase health insurance costs for tens of thousands of Montanans, which will impact people all across our state next month.⁹

It’s all on the line here. The Democratic brand, the fight to lessen the cost of living, the necessity to end corruption, and the battle for the people who make this country go. This seat and this election may well be our national 2026 inflection. MT01 is a Trump+5 district according to Cook Political. Trump won it in 2024 by 11% but Jon Tester won by about 3000 votes. There are plenty of people here who will vote for change, and all of the national trends, like an average 2025 Dem election shift of 13%, point to a fierce, potential majority-making race here. You should take a lot of solace in that, because nothing would be better for this nation than the people of Montana reasserting their remarkable purple influence on this country.

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