Congressional Glance
At around five o’clock on a winter evening in 2013, then college student Sam Forstag was driving through a snowstorm toward his third job of the day, making sandwiches at the Subway inside a Walmart.
“I was always late,” Forstag recalled with a laugh more than a decade later.
Halfway there, the gray sedan in front of him lost traction. It spun across the icy road and slid nose-first into a ditch. Forstag’s first instinct was to pull over. Growing up in a tight-knit community in North Portland, Oregon, and later in Montana, he had learned that when someone’s car ended up in a ditch, you stopped. You grabbed a shovel or you called a neighbor. You helped push the car back on to the road. That was simply what people did.
But he kept driving.
“I remember thinking, ‘I should stop – but I don’t have time,’” he said. He couldn’t afford to lose the job that helped pay his rent, car payment and groceries. He thought about it for the rest of that sandwich-making shift.
That memory has become part of Forstag’s political identity as a firefighter turned Democratic candidate hoping to flip Montana’s first congressional district in November’s midterm election. Once a scholarship kid at a Catholic high school, 32-year-old Forstag has built his campaign around a deeply personal argument: that the economic pressures consuming many Americans do more than empty their wallets. They leave people with less time and capacity to care for one another. That message has helped Forstag galvanize young and working-class voters in a district that has long favored Republicans.
In a recent fundraising email, the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, former congressman Mike Rogers, appeared to mislead supporters about his past by suggesting that he had played an active role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida who was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011.
South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham has won the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, according to a race call by the Associated Press.
Authorities arrested the operator of a boat that capsized in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty on Aug. 8, killing a mother and a 5-month-old baby, authorities said.
