As the ballot returns start to come in, melancholy settles over the GOP faithful gathered at the U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego. Not despair—it’s hard to despair as you sip $13 beers with friends and comrades under ballroom chandeliers—but the kind of game “well, we fought hard” attitude career operatives adopt when races go awry, as they mostly are this year for Republicans in the area. On stage, a parade of losers: Gubernatorial candidate John Cox is here to concede to Democrat Gavin Newsom, as is Diane Harkey, who has failed to stave off a Democratic challenge to the seat currently held by retiring Republican Darrell Issa. After tonight, only one local GOP congressman will be left standing: Duncan Hunter, who has for a decade represented the inland 50th District, long the most solidly Republican in the state. And he’s not here.
Eschewing both the glitz and the gloom, Hunter has opted to watch the returns come in at a private event in his home suburb of Alpine, 30 minutes outside San Diego. It’s a quiet affair: invite-only, no media, no public speech. The first we outsiders hear from Hunter after he locks up his sixth straight election is a muted statement emailed out Wednesday morning: “The voters of California’s 50th Congressional district have once again made it clear that their issues and priorities are consistent with my issues and priorities as their Representative. . . . I am grateful and honored for the opportunity to continue serving them in Congress.”
This is the 20th consecutive time a man named Duncan Hunter has carried the East County district—as Hunter’s father, Duncan L., did 14 times between 1980 and 2008 and as he has done ever since. But this time may be the last. This summer, Hunter and his wife were indicted by the Department of Justice for allegedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign funds on personal expenses, from lavish family vacations to routine household purchases to bar tabs at Capitol Hill watering holes. The picture that emerges from the indictment is almost cartoonish: Hunter grousing at his campaign treasurer for “trying to create some kind of paper trail” on his purchases; his wife telling him to buy clothes at the pro shop and chalk up the purchase as golf balls “for the wounded warriors.” Hunter claims the charges are the result of a witch hunt and politically motivated. The trial starts next month.
In the wake of the indictment, Hunter’s initial attempts at damage control backfired spectacularly. Appearing on Fox News to discuss the details of the indictment in late August, Hunter seemed to blame his wife for the charges: “She handled my finances throughout my entire military career, and that continued on when I got into Congress. . . . So whatever she did, that’ll be looked at too, I’m sure. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t spend any money illegally.”
With Hunter locked in as the district’s GOP nominee, Democrats smelled blood. They began to pump money into the race in support of their little-known contender: Ammar Campa-Najjar, a former Obama administration labor official of Mexican and Palestinian heritage. A Christian and a staunch progressive, Campa-Najjar positioned himself as the fresh, sincere alternative to a corrupt incumbent, declaring his allegiance to “country over party” and printing signs with the slogan “Raise the Bar with Ammar.” Hunter responded by blasting Campa-Najjar over his family tree—specifically, his grandfather Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar, a member of the Black September group, who was believed by Israel to have helped plan the Palestinian terrorist attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Al-Najjar was killed by Israeli commandos in Beirut the following year, 16 years before Campa-Najjar was born, and Campa-Najjar has denounced his extremist beliefs. So when the Hunter campaign cut an ad in September warning that “Ammar Campa-Najjar is working to infiltrate Congress” and declaring the Democrat a “security risk,” it understandably provoked a whole new round of outrage.
With the intensifying scrutiny of his actions—as an indicted congressman and a candidate willing to go low—it is perhaps no surprise that in the final weeks of the campaign season, the Duncan Hunter campaign went more or less underground. In the days leading up to his victory last Tuesday, the five-term congressman was allegedly hard at work at the nitty-gritty of electoral politics—shaking hands, waving signs, kissing babies—somewhere in the San Diego suburbs and small towns that make up his district. You’ll have to take his word for it, though—the press weren’t invited along for the ride.
“In terms of campaign strategy, Hunter didn’t have a lot of good options,” University of San Diego political science professor Casey Dominguez told The Weekly Standard. “The best way for him to win was probably to ride his party ID and name recognition in the district to victory. Media coverage couldn’t have helped that much, especially because in any story about him, or any interview, he would be asked about the indictment, or the ads, or both.”
In Hunter’s telling, of course, swearing off most press wasn’t about avoiding awkward questions. Rather, it was a simple matter of refusing to give mainstream media outlets, hopelessly biased against the congressman from the get-go, free ammunition with which to take potshots at him.
“There is a level of frustration with the media as a whole that we continue to talk about certain things, certain issues, and it’s either not reported or it’s dismissed, and they just want to focus on what they think is the permanent issue,” Hunter spokesman Michael Harrison says. “We don’t need the media to implement our strategy. If anything, what Trump has shown us is that you can go directly to the people without being edited, or without depending on the media to articulate your message through social media, through being with the people directly.”
According to Harrison, the uproar over the “security risk” ad proved this point. One candidate has terrorists in the family and ties to organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and it’s racist for the other candidate to point those things out?
“Congressman Hunter’s point is this: When you are working in a Congress making decisions on national security issues, whether it be funding, whether it be authorizing new programs, what have you, when you are trying to work with an administration that is conducting an active war on terror, and you have known, existing relationships with known terrorist organizations, you are not fit to be making those types of policy decisions.” But of course Campa-Najjar does not have “known existing relationships with known terrorist organizations.” He has a family tree he was born into, and as the old saying goes, you don’t choose your family.
After days of nagging, I was finally given permission to tag along as Hunter delivered pizzas to a local call center and sat for a local TV interview (with KUSI, the only station, Harrison said, that had been fair to their campaign). When the pizzas had been delivered (more pizzas than callers) and the TV spot was complete (all softballs), I asked Hunter whether his critics had misrepresented his ad or if he actually believed Campa-Najjar was potentially a dangerous agent of radical Islam.
“I’m not calling him a radical Muslim,” Hunter said. “But when you look at sharia law, that’s a real thing that separates Islam from just about every other religion. Buddhists don’t have their own form of government. Christians don’t have their own form of government. But Islamists do.”
And would Campa-Najjar be receptive to the establishment of sharia law in America?
“I think he would be more receptive to it, just based on his family ties and where he comes from.”
And the fact that he’s a Christian from childhood, raised primarily by his Mexican-American Catholic mother, doesn’t factor in?
“No, I don’t think so.”
The baldness of this answer so took me aback that I completely forgot to ask any follow-up questions about the criminal charges facing Hunter. Which, in a way, was probably the point. Afterwards, the TV interviewer sidled up. “You know my station’s not gonna let me ask those questions,” he said. “But I’d be dumb not to get it on tape.”
Most national coverage of Hunter’s campaign tended to characterize the incumbent’s lurch into Muslim-baiting as a Hail Mary play, a last-ditch effort to lock down a district in revolt over Hunter’s criminal indictment. McKay Coppins summed up this mood in the Atlantic this week: “Publicly disgraced, out of money, and facing both jail time and a suddenly surging challenger—what was an indicted congressman to do? Eventually, Hunter seemed to arrive at his answer: Try to eke out a win by waging one of the most brazenly anti-Muslim smear campaigns in recent history.”
While that’s an accurate description of Hunter’s strategy, for many of the rank-and-file Republicans who lifted Hunter to victory on Tuesday, the race was far more prosaic. In fact, Republicans I spoke to in Santee and El Cajon rarely mentioned Campa-Najjar or Hunter’s attacks on him at all. Some said they were happy with Hunter’s support for the Trump economic agenda. Back during the 2016 campaign, Hunter was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic boarders of the Trump Train. Many admitted that the indictment was troubling, but why did Hunter’s bad behavior mean they should elect a Democrat? If Hunter is convicted and resigns, they’ll elect a new Republican to take his place. And anyway, haven’t we had about enough of this mainstream media “guilty until proven innocent” nonsense?
“He’s been doing a good job,” one Santee resident told TWS. “Accusations is all they are. I mean, should we not have accepted [Brett] Kavanaugh for the accusations? It’s the same thing. . . . I lean towards the candidate that’s doing a good job, or has been doing a good job, or is innocent until proven guilty.”
“Well, there’s a couple of factors,” said another, for whom Campa-Najjar’s biography did factor in. “One is I did some research on him, found out who his dad and grandparents were, and that ain’t gonna float with me. Duncan Hunter did some things he probably shouldn’t have done, and in my opinion if he does get elected they’ll probably end up replacing him anyway if he’s guilty, but at least they’ll replace him with another Republican.”
Supporters of Campa-Najjar, by contrast, were far more likely to remember—and resent—the ads. “I did see that ad on the local channel—I think it was two months ago or something,” one voter said. “And I was shocked, honestly, to see—it seemed like an absurd ad to be aired on live television. It seemed like the kind of ad that you might see in a YouTube video or something, but it was right there on live TV.”
There’s no question Hunter limped to the finish line—his approximate 8-point victory over Campa-Najjar was nothing compared with his 28-point romp over Democrat Patrick Malloy in 2016. Indeed, the closest of his previous five races was a 17-point victory in 2008, his first race for the seat. But local GOP strategists say that at no point was his eventual victory ever in serious doubt.
“It’s just too strong of a Republican district for Democrats,” said Matt Schumsky, a San Diego political operative who worked on Hunter’s first congressional campaign in 2008. “We’ve had some pretty strong Democrats that have challenged him, you know, people that they’ve put up with military records and all kinds of really good-on-paper people. No matter how moderate Democrat they are, that district still will vote Republican.”
Which raises one last uncomfortable question: If Hunter didn’t need the fearmongering to win, why spend so much time fearmongering? The answer presents itself. The indictment showed Hunter that most Republicans would stick with him, come what may. And if your base is already locked and loaded, isn’t the safe play to go after the fringe too?
“I don’t find any fault with Duncan’s consultants or Duncan for running those ads,” Schumsky said. “At this point, it’s all just so horrible on all sides that you can’t blame somebody for going all out in a fight.”
***
Correction, November 9, 2018, 11:44 a.m.: Due to an editing error, the piece misstated one of the author’s questions to Hunter as “And the fact that he’s a Christian, from a family of Christian Arabs, doesn’t factor in?” The substance of the author’s question to Hunter was “And the fact that he’s a Christian from childhood, raised primarily by his Mexican-American Catholic mother, doesn’t factor in?” The piece has been updated to reflect this change.
