Politics particularly interested Forney, both as a journalist and as a participant. He was a man of strong but shifting loyalties, beginning and ending his career as a Democrat, with a twenty-year interruption as a devout Republican. He was first allied to the fortunes of Democrat James Buchanan, who became secretary of state in 1845 and arranged Forney's appointment as deputy surveyor of the port of Philadelphia. In the same year, he sold his Lancaster newspaper and became editor of the Pennsylvanian, a Democratic newspaper in Philadelphia.