House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has reason for optimism about the chances of California Republican candidates, starting in his own backyard.
Hoping to capitalize on the special election victory by Republican Mike Garcia in the state’s 25th Congressional District, at the top of Los Angeles County and eastern parts of Ventura County, the California GOP has its eyes on taking back other seats the party lost to Democrats in the 2018 election cycle.
No longer bogged down by a lurking “blue wave” or a Michael Bloomberg super PAC infusing millions of dollars into freshmen Democratic challengers’ campaign chests, Republicans are seeing more opportunities with President Trump at the top of the ticket this time around.
Two particular seats where the Republican candidates are competitive with their fundraising and poll numbers are the ones for former Rep. David Valadao and former Assemblywoman Young Kim.
In California’s 21st Congressional District, Valadao will face off against the Democrat who ousted him from the seat in 2018, Rep. T.J. Cox. As a Democratic challenger in the last election cycle, Cox managed to be competitive in fundraising against the incumbent and beat the Republican by less than 1,000 votes. The 21st District stretches across Kings County and areas of Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties.
Both Cox and Valadao currently have nearly $1.2 million in cash-on-hand available, according to Federal Elections Committee records.
In California’s 39th Congressional District, a seat previously held by Republican Rep. Ed Royce, who retired after the 2018 elections, freshman Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros defeated Kim 51.6% to 48.4% in 2018. Kim was leading Cisneros on election night that cycle, and the race was not called for two weeks.
Kim’s current fundraising numbers have been competitive with Cisneros. Royce previously won the district in 2016 with 60% of the vote and in 2014 with 68% of the vote.
After losing seven seats in the last midterm election, California Republicans have built up their get-out-the-vote operations to avoid another wipeout.
This included establishing a “ballot harvesting” or “ballot collection” operation to compete with Democrats, who have proven better at the campaign, which involves a third party collecting and casting ballots for consenting voters who already filled out their own ballots.
This process became legal in the state in 2016, and the Garcia campaign used it successfully during the special election. According to Garcia, their campaign followed all regulations during their own ballot collection deployments.
“In the wake of stay-at-home orders, we’ve been very focused on staying compliant, and so we [had] not been doing the door-to-door canvassing, but we were in a position to do so, and that was obviously a lesson learned from 2018,” Garcia told the Washington Examiner in an interview Monday, just before he beat Democratic Assemblywoman Christy Smith to serve out the remainder of the term of former Rep.Katie Hill, a Democrat who resigned in November.
“The value of the volunteers is that you do have an army to help you now go door to door. You have an army to make phone calls to get the vote out,” Garcia said. “So the bottom line is, it’s legal, and because it’s legal, we need to be able to operate on that coordinate system on that playing field just as well as the Democrats have been able to do it in previous elections.”
