2024 was a rough election year for the Democratic party. The right-wing culture war was in full swing, many citizens were disillusioned with politics, and Americans could not agree on what really mattered in life. Fast forward to today, folks across political ideologies are feeling betrayed by their government and hungry for change.
Ryan Busse, author and former firearms executive, wants to unite his community around the desire for a better life. In fact, he says that is why he’s running to represent the first congressional district of Montana in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a conversation with Tim Dickinson, Busse underscores his main campaign pillars.
To learn more about Busse’s campaign, click here.
Ryan Busse is running for election to the U.S. House to represent Montana's 1st Congressional District. He is also the author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America. Busse is an environmental advocate who served in many leadership roles for conservation organizations, including as an advisor for the United States Senate Sportsmen’s Caucus and the Biden presidential campaign.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Tim Dickinson
I’m Tim Dickinson, Senior Editor here at The Contrarian, and my guest today is Ryan Busse, who is a candidate for Montana’s 1st Congressional District. Ryan, great just to be with you today.
Ryan Busse
Yeah, it’s good to be here. I am, as I just told you before we hopped on, I’m… it’s a rarity. I’m sitting actually in my home, during a political campaign, and for those who have not been on a political campaign, you don’t get to see your own home, or bed, or family, or dogs very often, so yeah, it’s a good day for me.
Tim Dickinson
Well, tell us, I think, you know, some… there’s sometimes, like, you know, Connecticut’s 2nd District or whatever, you have a district that, like, has a real sense of place. Can you just About the grandeur and the majesty of the place that you’re from.
Ryan Busse
Yeah, you bet, and it’s actually very central to my political story, my whole story here in Montana, but so this is the 1st Congressional District of Montana. There were two congressional districts in Montana, and for a long time there was only one. Now we have two again. And the first congressional district is essentially the western third of the state, and it encompasses the entrances to Yellowstone Park. I am sitting here today about 30 miles from Glacier Park. Many of the famous vacation spots… I’m a fly fisherman, and so famous vacation spots like the Blackfoot River, the Bitterroot River, the Clark Fork River, the Flathead River system, the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Lots of big mountains, thankfully with some snow on top of them, and beautiful places are within this western district. And, we call it the last best place. And we take that pretty seriously. You know, Big Sky Country are the last best place, and so, it’s, as I say, there are worse places to be.
Tim Dickinson
I had the opportunity to travel around… I was chasing Rob Quist when he was running against me. Gianforte, when Gianforte was beating up, reporters, if you’ll remember.
Ryan Busse
Yes. Luckily, you did not succumb to the boxing match there.
Tim Dickinson
I avoided the kerfuffles. But I did want to ask you, like, you grew up in Montana, and this place is, like, deeply personal to you, and your, you know, your life story, your work story was as a gun executive building a gun business, helping build a gun business—which plays differently, obviously, in Montana than it might for other Democrats elsewhere in the country. Can you just talk a bit about your bio and your upbringing and what brought you to this politically?
Ryan Busse
So I’ve lived in and around the Flathead Valley, which is this northwest part of the state, and the Flathead County, which I live in, is larger than most east… or many eastern states, so, you know, we have… it’s it’s a big, big space here. It’s not like running across the whole state, but it’s a 6-hour drive, or a 7-hour drive, one corner of the district to the other, so it’s a pretty big place. I was born and raised as a kid on a wheat farm and, cow-calf ranch in northwestern Kansas, and I moved to Montana 31 years ago as a young man, and as you noted, it was a dream job for me to work in the firearms industry, because many of the best parts of my life as a kid were spent with guns hunting and shooting with my dad and my grandfather and my brother, like a lot of ranch kids. I graduated with 16 kids in a little rural high school.
And when I got to Montana, man, I just… this place changed me in a way I didn’t see coming. It made me a better person. And really, my political transformation happened. I found a place that became sacred to me and has long been sacred to the Blackfeet tribe, the Blackfeet Native Americans here in Montana. It’s called the Badger-Two Medicine. And, you know, it’s a place where, for a kid like me, my dreams came true. It’s just a wonderful, wild place with grizzly bears. It’s one of the last places where all the native predators that were here when Lewis and Clark traipsed across the continent are still here. Wolves and grizzly bears and mountain lions and… Of course, elk and moose and cutthroat trout. It’s a really wild place. Anyway, the Bush administration decided it’s going to try to industrialize this place, roll D9 cats and gas and oil rigs into it.
And me as a conservative, what I thought was a conservative ranch kid, you know? I didn’t know, and I worked in a conservative industry, and I looked around, I said, oh, hell no, you don’t. And I was recruited to fly to Washington, D.C, and do a press conference at the National Press Club, and I knew when I did that, that stepping out against the sort of right-wing bunch that I was a part of in the firearms industry would probably not be, you know, super comfortable for me. What I didn’t realize is how vehement the opposition would be, and so for 25 years, that kicked it off. I never turned away. The NRA came after my job. I was on the front page of the LA Times and the Denver Post and all of these places, so the right-wing machine came after me because I dared speak up against a Republican in office. Apparently, you’re not supposed to do that in this country, and I really became involved in democratic politics, and especially the conservation and environmental movement, and I never looked back. I’ve held numerous leadership positions, I’ve advised departments of interior and agriculture. I’ve testified to Congress a bunch.
And I think it’s time that we elect somebody that’s not afraid to criticize their own people and hold their own people accountable. I see that in the Democratic Party now. Look, I’m running as a proud Democrat on Democratic principles, but there… There are forces inside the Democratic Party that need a little elbow in the side to nudge the party into the right direction, and I’m not afraid to do that.
Tim Dickinson
Well, you and I have interacted before on the basis of a book you wrote about sort of an expose of the gun industry, which I just highly recommend to people. It’s called Gunfight, My Battle Inside Against the Industry That Radicalized America. So I… you really do have some bona fides here when you’re talking about, you know, taking it to your own not being afraid to tell truth to power, even when that’s part of the group that you’ve been a part of. You ran against Gianforte for governor last time, and that race didn’t obviously work out. You’re speaking to me from your home, not the governor’s mansion, but what did you learn from that race that do you think informs how you can Win in this, what’s now an open seat.
Ryan Busse
Yeah, so I tackled another difficult job. Statistically, the most difficult political thing you can do in the United States, which is to take on an incumbent governor, especially a self-funding one. He did body slam Ben Jacobs a few years ago, as you noted. He didn’t try to body slam me. But the election did not go the way I would have liked, and some of you watching, listening to this may remember that’s, you know, 2024 was not the best Democratic year in the United States. A three-term senator here, Jon Tester, friend of mine, also lost a race. And what I learned First off, I want to give you a little hope. 2020, having run two consecutive cycles, I can tell you that it’s tough to overstate the diametric change in the electorate now, in 2026, versus 2024.
And what I can tell you about 2024 is that this sort of vitriolic culture war laid over the top of all of us, this red facade that made it feel like things had permanently changed, so powerful that, again, a three-term senator couldn’t get out of the way of it. That has largely dissipated. One quick little vignette is that I, back then, and now, I like to do right-wing talk radio, because I want to reach out to crossover and Republican voters, and I would do right-wing talk radio, two years ago, and I would say half of the calls, just unfiltered calls for an hour, I like to do that. Just take whatever they ask. At least half of them were who’s in whose bathroom? Who’s, you know, what trans kid policy are we attacking today? Right, the culture war was front and center. I did that talk show again a couple weeks ago. And, there wasn’t a single question on that.
Every single Republican caller sounded exactly like the Democratic folks I talked to on the trail. They’re worried about the Epstein files, they’re freaked out about healthcare, they’re worried about corruption. This Iran war is driving them nuts. Fuel prices are going through the roof. In other words, the lived experience of everybody is finally common again, and it feels to me… Like, that… that sort of vitriolic, hateful culture war thing blanket that was laid over the top of us a couple years ago is largely gone, and… That’s an urgent thing for many voters, because they feel betrayed and angry and worried about their personal circumstance now, but it’s a very hopeful thing about a better politics on the way.
Tim Dickinson
Healthcare is obviously an issue that you’ve raised front and center. Can you talk about how that’s huge in Montana, particularly?
Ryan Busse
And this kind of goes to the nudge in Democrats to be better here. I think we have to do that. One of the reasons we got at Donald Trump is because we had a Democratic Party that did too much talking and not enough delivering. I’m running hard out right in the forefront. I’m running hard for universal healthcare. We gotta get the insurance industry out of our healthcare system. And I hear this, and that may sound like some… risky, bold thing to do in politics. I know lots of Democrats sort of secretly whisper this in the bars after a couple martinis, as if they know that’s the right thing to do, but they can’t quite go out on the trail and say it. That ain’t me.
I think we’re 50 years behind the curve in this country. We’re the only industrialized country. I was just in an event last night in the little town of Drummond, and a Republican came in there and told me if it wasn’t for Medicaid, he would have had medical bankruptcy, would have lost his farm. We’re the only country, industrialized country, where people have to worry about that. And I hear from a lot of Republican voters and crossover voters, of which I must win 7, 8, 9% to win this thing.
They’re done with whatever this healthcare system is we have. They know it’s broken. They are scared to death. They’re worried about their kid getting hit in a car accident, they’re worried about themselves getting cancer, and they don’t know Quite what to call the thing that comes next, but they’re ready for something better. And it’s… when it’s wrapped together with this incredible damaging, disastrous wealth disparity that we have in this country, people are ready for something better, and so I think we’re gonna look back at this cycle as the time when people finally had the guts to say that we need universal healthcare and fight for it, and I am, and I’m not afraid to do it.
Tim Dickinson
You mentioned the disparity between the wealthy and the haves and the have-nots. I mean, in Montana, that gets really exaggerated, right?
Ryan Busse
Huge.
Tim Dickinson
It’s a playground for billionaires, and yet you have working-class people who don’t have the economic opportunities to compete with that kind of money. How does that play for you, and what are your solutions there?
Ryan Busse
Oh, man, it’s, huge front and center. Like, one quick example here, I live just north of Flathead Lake, and just south of me, on the border of the lake, there is a new Yellowstone Club being built. Yellowstone Club… It’s 17… 1700 acres of formerly open land, where I used to whitetail hunt with my boys. They’re gonna build about 420 to $40 million homes there, where people will spend 2-3 weeks a year. They have their own restaurants, their own private jet strip, their own private marina. And just south of there, a couple miles, is Lake County. Lake County is the home to the CSKT, the Flathead Reservation, Native American Reservation here. Already in that county, just a few miles apart, over 2,000 people have lost Medicaid coverage.
A lot of those Native kids. people just a few miles apart. You have $40 million homes where people will spend a couple weeks a year, and Native kids who are getting kicked off of healthcare, people will die because of that. Largely because of this decision we made, we as a country made, to pass this big, beautiful bill. Three words that I hate to string together. But, There could not be a more dire moral question for our country than that sort of diametric opposition, right? $40 million homes and kids getting kicked off healthcare. And we either fix this. Or there’s pitchforks coming. That’s the sort of urgency I feel from people on the ground.
Tim Dickinson
The public lands question is obviously, it sounds like, what got you started in politics and is right back in the center of things right now. You’ve got, you know, there were efforts to open BLM land to auction, or to totally overhaul the Forest Service and end the roadless rule, that kind of thing. Well, can you talk about, that issue and how you’d hope to address that in Congress?
Ryan Busse
Well, public lands in Montana are largely what Montana is about. As my friend Governor Steve Bullock was fond of saying, they ain’t coming here for our Walmarts, you know? So, this is who we are, and I think we need to look the situation square in the eye. The Trump administration as they are in so many other areas of our government right now, they’re doing everything they can to open the door to remove all impediments for the wealthiest and the largest corporations in this country, and that’s what’s happening on public lands.
One quick example that’s both frightening as hell and hopeful The Bitterroot River is one of the last places where native West Slope cutthroat still swims, 75.6 miles. It’s in the southern part of this district, down around Hamilton in the Bitterroot Valley. At the very head end of that valley is a proposed 4,530-acre mine, literally at the worst place you could put a mine in this country. Were anything to happen, and there almost always does… is something that happens in these industrial mining projects, the entire length of the river would be poisoned. And the Trump administration has demanded a fast-track process.
Fast-track meaning that the laws that you and I, and that all people in this country, and especially the people in Montana, fought for, environmental review. Clean Water Review, Endangered species review, these bedrock environmental laws. The fast-track process says, nope, wipe that away. The Trump administration says we have to fast-track this, slam a mine in there before we can even review it. That’s the frightening part. The heartening part is that if you want to see the opposition down there. It ain’t like a bunch of tree-huggin’ greenies from Missoula. These are ranchers. Fly fishing guides? Cafe owners, like, very conservative people.
5, 6, 700 of them showing up at these events to fight this thing. And because they feel betrayed by their… by their government. Many of them, I mean, I’m guessing that’s a 70% Trump-voting county, Ravali county, and these people are fit to be tied about the way their government is betraying them. that’s another… again, it’s an urgent thing, because we have to hold that mine off until we can win this election in November. These people understand that, but the heartening thing is that there is a common lived experience, and people are pissed, and they want to do something about it. I gotta be the kind of Democrat that shows up, doesn’t look like I was cooked up in a Fox News lab, right? And be somebody that they can trust enough to vote for and join the fight with them.
Tim Dickinson
What do you mean, cooked up in a Fox News lab? What is that?
Ryan Busse
If you go talk to Republicans, many swing voters in situations like the one I just described, they may… if I could sort of summarize their feedback, they may say, yeah, Trump deal is off the rails, I hate these gas prices, this mine’s crazy, but aren’t you Democrats all insert some conspiratorial theory here? About the way Democrats have allowed themselves, allowed ourselves to be branded, you know? On the Republican side likes to say, the socialists are on the march, right? like, I mean, excuse me, I’ve worked in, you know, I helped build a business, but we have allowed these sort of branding things to lay over the top of us without just being normal, everyday people, and I think it’s important in districts like this that we not give these people something to grab onto.
So this big dude who drives a truck, who’s sold lots of guns, who’s proud to hunt and fish with my kids, who has 3 bird dogs, and who also is fighting for universal healthcare. Who also believes the wealth disparity is horrible, who also believes that the wealthiest among us are not paying enough taxes, right? But… but culturally. The way I code and the way I am does not frighten these people. There’s somebody that they can identify with. So that’s what I mean by not looking or acting like I was cooked up in a Fox News lab, not falling into the pejorative sort of definitions that frighten these folks off. And you can… Folks can say, well, that’s no big deal, and all that matters is the policy. That’s not really true. Culturally, in places like this, we need to be rebuilding trust with voters, and I think it’s important that we look, talk, and act like the district.
Tim Dickinson
Well, listen, I’m conscious of your time, and I appreciate your insight today. Are there any final thoughts you want to leave our viewers with?
Ryan Busse
No, the one thing I want to say is with this voting rights decision of just a couple days ago, it’s very likely that a bunch of seats that many people watching this counted as blue, probably aren’t going to be. And the majority in the House could well come down to 3 or 4 or 5 seats, and this one’s probably one of them. I’m sure that the Democratic Party, the DCCC, will probably elevate it to one of the top 10 or 15 here. As soon as our primary’s over. And we’re running every day as if the future of our democracy and the future of this state that I love so much runs through this, through this election. We’re running with that level of seriousness and urgency. So if you’re looking for some place to support And we’d love your help, because, we just got this little thing called Saving Democracy going on out here, so, like, if you can help with it, like, pitch in. It’s pretty important.
Tim Dickinson
Alright, well, thank you so much for your time, appreciate you.
Ryan Busse
Thank you very much.
Tim Dickinson
Take it easy.
