A California Republican voted to impeach Trump. Now he’s in a tossup race with a Valley Democrat
If Congressman David Valadao were not so tall, an onlooker could mistake the 6-foot-4 candidate for his challenger.
Both he and Assemblyman Rudy Salas share the look of a homegrown, Central Valley politician: casual button-down clothing, clean shaves, a tendency to smile and to shake hands with everyone and anyone.
Salas, D-Bakersfield, and Valadao, R-Hanford, also had similar career paths, even if their views diverge.
The 45-year-olds have Southern San Joaquin Valley farming roots. Valadao is the son of a Hanford dairyman. Salas worked in the fields with his father growing up in Bakersfield.
Valadao has represented the area around his hometown of Hanford in Congress for the better part of the last decade. Before that, he served in the State Assembly.
Salas took over Valadao’s Assembly seat when the dairyman ran for Congress, and has held it since 2012. Before, he was the first Latino to serve on the Bakersfield City Council.
Now Salas hopes to assume Valadao’s seat while the congressman is in it.
Analysts consistently view the race as a toss-up because redistricting, the redrawing of legislative boundaries based on census data, put the incumbent in a bluer district than the one he serves.
“Redistricting removed some of the best territory in Kings County from Valadao and replaced it with parts of Bakersfield where Salas is better known,” said Dave Wasserman, editor of The Cook Political Report, which tracks elections.
The 22nd Congressional District
Farmers of all trades — fruits, nuts, grains, livestock, dairy — reign in the district that stretches from Hanford through Shafter in the San Joaquin Valley.
The new 22nd Congressional District would have picked President Joe Biden by a 13% margin in the 2020 election. Forty-four percent of registered voters there are Democrats and 26% are Republicans.
After a recent visit to Adventist Health Delano, where he was given a tour of the facilities and updated about local needs, Valadao said in an interview: “The people in the Central Valley are very hard working, I would say a lot of Democrats but a lot of very conservative Democrats. People who immigrated to this country for the opportunities this country presents. My parents are examples of that, but people across the Valley.”
“To assume that just because you’re registered for a certain party — a lot of these people who immigrated here, like my parents, were looking at some of our former leaders like JFK as an example of what a party stands for. But so much has changed. Especially in the last four to five years, maybe even 10 years.”
In the primary, most votes went to GOP candidates. Salas was the sole Democratic contender and took 45.4% of the vote.
Valadao only had 25.6%, and his spot on the Nov. 8 ballot was secured three weeks after Salas’ was. A self-proclaimed “Trump conservative” trailed him.
Relitigating the primary helps foreshadow November, elections analysts said, but it’s not the most telling indicator.
Democrats in California tend to do better in the general election, they noted. This year, when Democrats for statewide races — governor and U.S. Senate, for example — are all but guaranteed wins in November, voters have less of an incentive to mail in their ballots.
Plus the party of the sitting president tends to do worse in years when there is not a presidential election. Biden’s less-than-enthusiastic national approval rating has many consultants thinking there will be a “red wave” that hands control of the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in 2023.
Impeachment Republican
The reason Valadao survived the primary, election analysts held, is because McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, kept Donald Trump out of the race. The former president did not endorse anyone in the 22nd, much unlike he did the challengers of other so-called impeachment Republicans.
Valadao was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the former president over inspiring the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Since voting for, then against, a committee to investigate the riot, Valadao has been reclusive on Jan. 6 and Trump.
Now he is one of two of those GOP members running in the general election for Congress. Others were defeated by Trump-endorsed challengers in primary elections or had opted out of re-election campaigns.
While voters expressed discontent with the current state of affordability, crime and water access under Democratic leadership, no one was hard-swung on Trump. In a left-leaning district, where Valadao will need to gain Democratic votes, that impeachment decision could be an asset for reaching across the aisle, but a hindrance in uniting a Republican base.
“He is still trying to consolidate his base after voting to impeach Donald Trump and as we saw in the primary, there are still quite a few Republicans who haven’t forgiven him for that,” Wasserman said. “Most of them will vote for him against the Democrat, but he needs close to unanimous support among his base if he’s going to hold on to a Democratic-leaning seat.”
Valadao has run in tough elections in a blue district before. He was elected to the Assembly in 2010. He successfully ran for Congress in a newly-drawn district in 2012 and was easily reelected in 2014 and 2016.
Then in 2018, he lost the seat to former Congressman TJ Cox, a Democrat, by less than a point. Valadao bested Cox by the same slim margin in 2020. Cox now faces federal fraud charges.
Valadao is focused on agricultural issues, especially water. At the end of September, he introduced the WATER for California Act along with all of California’s GOP House delegation.
“I promised my constituents that I would fight to secure a reliable and clean supply of water for our communities,” he said about the bill. “This legislation would do just that by streamlining operations, expanding water storage infrastructure, and increasing accountability.”
Latino lawmaker
If elected, Salas would be the first Latino to represent the San Joaquin Valley in the House.
His familiarity and cultural connection in the area, which has a Hispanic-majority voting-age population, helps.
But speculation about a Republican trend among Hispanic and Latino voters, coupled with low turnout, could be problematic.
“If there is some sort of GOP trend toward Latino voters, you may see it here — if so, that’s a potential problem for Salas,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which rates elections.
Latino voters have historically voted blue in California; many analysts think that trend won’t prevail in the state.
Salas was ranked as a moderate Democrat by CalMatters for the 2019-2020 session, the last available year they analyzed votes.
The Bakersfield native has singled out health care issues as a top priority, which has also been at the top of his list in the Legislature, such as for funding for fighting Valley Fever, which is caused by a fungus found in soil and can lead to respiratory problems. He spoke about working to get millions in funding for Kern County’s Valley Fever Institute that was founded in 2015.
“When I got the funding for that, at the end of the day, for the Valley Fever Institute, it was because I was able to talk to Democrats and Republicans,” Salas said at a taqueria in Armona.
He, too, has been spurned by his party. In 2017, Salas was the only Democrat in the Assembly to vote against California’s gas tax bill to increase fuel taxes to fund fixing roads and bridges in disrepair.
Following the vote, he was removed as the head of the powerful Business and Professions Committee, which covers consumer regulations, occupational licensing and product labeling bills.
“I lost my chairmanship over it,” he said, “but it was the right thing to do.”
This year, Salas has taken heat from missing a few Republican-led votes that aimed to consider pausing the tax amid inflation and rising gas prices. He said he was attending a family funeral in one instance; he said he later registered support for a motion to suspend the tax for a year that failed.
Abortion
Democrats hope that the Supreme Court ruling that gutted Roe v. Wade, the federal abortion-access precedent, will send supporters to the ballot box.
The ruling does not affect California much. Still, it did propel lawmakers to put abortion rights literally on the ballot via Proposition 1, which would enshrine privacy over someone’s reproductive health between them and their doctor in the state constitution.
Valadao and Salas differ greatly on abortion. Valadao has co-sponsored legislation to ban the pregnancy-ending procedure; he supports exceptions if the person’s life is at risk. Salas, who supports access and is sponsoring Prop. 1, made that difference central to his campaign.
“The government,” Salas said, “shouldn’t make a very personal decision which should be between a woman, her doctor and within her faith.”
Already California has created some of the most open abortion laws in the country as other states restrict access. Anyone can obtain an abortion until the point of fetal viability — when a fetus could presumably survive outside of the womb — which is generally accepted to be around 24 weeks. After that, a person can end their pregnancy if they and their doctor feel their health is in danger.
Abortion conversations have many Republicans in the Valley — who tend to be culturally conservative, many with Christian, anti-abortion-access views — wary of the Democratic party.
Water, housing and prices
Abortion was not among top issues named by voters, who were more concerned about affordability, housing prices and water access, in separate interviews, town halls and polls across the Valley.
The voters talk to the candidates about it, and how they’re connected.
“What they talk to me about is, they say, ‘when I send my husband to the grocery store, I used to send him with $40 and he’d come back with change and groceries. Now I send him with $40, he doesn’t come back with change and less groceries,’” Salas said. He praises policies that send taxpayer money back to taxpayers at the state level for inflation relief.
“In communities here and across the Valley, we’re seeing brand new homes selling for close to $400,000, which in an area like this, $400,000 is just out of reach for so many people. Really the only way to solve that problem is to build more homes. When there’s a tight supply with a strong demand, prices go up,” Valadao said, noting that developers have interest in coming there, but face hangups: “A lot of these communities can’t build more because they don’t have access to water.”
This story was originally published October 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A California Republican voted to impeach Trump. Now he’s in a tossup race with a Valley Democrat."
