Even before Donald Trump’s confusing gaffe Monday night in Nebraska about Iran bombing Los Angeles and San Diego, the president was looming large over nearly every hotly contested California election campaign.
In one Southern California race, Trump’s long shadow produced a disjointed two-step. Rep. Ken Calvert is attacking fellow Republican Rep. Young Kim for her anti-Trump stances, even as a Calvert-aligned PAC sent Democratic voters in the district mailers playing up her support for and from Trump.
Confused? That’s understandable. Under the new map, Calvert’s 41st Congressional District in Southern California was redrawn as a solidly Democratic seat, so the 33-year incumbent chose to run in the neighboring 40th, which stretches from the eastern edge of Orange County into a large chunk of western Riverside County.
That move set up the cycle’s strangest California race: Calvert versus Kim in a solidly Republican district that Trump carried by 12 points. It has been one of the nastiest campaigns in the country, with both sides fighting over who is more loyal to Trump. During the primary, a pro-Calvert super PAC, Americans 4 Security, spent $2.9 million on anti-Kim ads. Calvert has called Kim a “backstabbing RINO” and a “Trump-traitor,” and the PAC’s ads paint her as a liberal who hates Trump, citing her past vote to censure the president while ignoring her votes against Democrats’ efforts to impeach him.
Yet the same pro-Calvert super PAC sent two deliberately deceptive mailers to Democrats, playing up Kim’s pro-MAGA record. One showed a photo of a smiling Kim with the words “Young Kim, 100% with Trump,” and “a proven fighter who will stand with President Trump to deliver a bold American First Agenda.”
The goal was obvious: Turn off Democratic households and discourage party crossover support for Kim.
Kim answered with an ad focused on Calvert’s old scandals. It cites a 2009 Orange County Register editorial that ranked him among the most corrupt members of Congress, calls him swampy and sleazy, and revives a 1994 Los Angeles Times story about police catching him with a prostitute in his car. The ad ends by calling Calvert a “sleazebag.”
For all their fighting over Trump, both Calvert and Kim carefully avoided the furor over his Iran comments early this week, even as the remarks set off a raging debate on social media and in campaigns across the state. The timing could hardly have been worse for Republicans: The comments landed just as most California voters began receiving their mail-in ballots.
Speaking before a cheering crowd in Grand Island, Nebraska, Monday night, Trump defended his war with Iran with a line that landed hard 1,500 miles west: “Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego.” The White House defended the line, saying the president was clearly warning about what Iran could do with a nuclear weapon, not encouraging it.
Although the explanation clearly fits the context of the president’s remarks, it didn’t satisfy everyone in his own party. By Tuesday morning, the Republican running in Southern California’s most closely watched open House seat was publicly breaking with him.
Jim Desmond, a San Diego County supervisor and Navy veteran who is the GOP nominee in the redrawn 48th District, said he “vehemently” disapproved of what the president said. The district is currently represented by retiring Rep. Darrell Issa.
Desmond’s quick distancing is a measure of how worried Republicans are about Trump’s waning popularity even in precincts he carried in previous elections – a dynamic playing out beyond California’s borders as well.
The newly drawn 48th district is a hook-shaped swath that includes areas in San Diego and Riverside counties, including around Vista, San Marcos, Palm Springs, and Temecula. The current configuration changed a 12-point Republican voter registration advantage to a 4-point Democratic lead. That, of course, was done by design. Late last year, state Democrats redrew the state’s congressional map through Proposition 50, the ballot measure voters approved last November. Gov. Gavin Newsom sold the measure to voters as a way to fight Republican “fire with fire,” abandoning independent redistricting to redraw California’s congressional map in Democrats’ favor (in response to Republicans’ redistricting effort in Texas). The new map was designed to put five of California’s nine Republican-held seats either at a strong Democratic advantage or within Democrats’ reach. The question now is not whether Democrats gain seats here, but how many. And the answer turns on a handful of genuinely competitive races.
Democrats wasted no time turning Trump’s latest inartful phrasing into ammunition. Newsom, who has said he’s weighing a possible 2028 presidential run depending on whether Kamala Harris decides to jump in, led the charge.
“After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” Newsom posted on X.com. “He is deranged and dangerous.” The governor then directed the State Threat Assessment Center to monitor for threats in case foreign actors interpret Trump’s remarks as an invitation to target California, his spokesman Izzy Gardon said on X.com.
Veteran California Democratic campaign consultant Steve Maviglio said Trump’s remarks were a gift to Democrats just as ballots arrived in the mail this week.
“There’s nothing that stimulates the Democratic base like voting against Donald Trump,” he told RealClearPolitics. “In California where we so greatly outnumber the Republicans, it’s like pouring gasoline on the fire when he comes here or says anything about California.”
Moreover, voter sentiment across the Golden State is generally gloomy. A September poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that a majority of voters, 54%, believe the state is headed in the wrong direction. Most voters appear to blame federal lawmakers and Trump more than state officials: 76% of those surveyed said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance. Still, only 41% of voters believe the Democratic Party has “a lot” or “some” good ideas, and only 37% said they were ready to embrace Democratic Socialist-identifying candidates.
Republicans are trying to harness that general dissatisfaction and wariness toward far-left candidates. They argue that many of the GOP lawmakers Democrats have targeted are well-known fighters who fit their districts’ more centrist leanings better than the Democrats running against them.
“Californians are done paying more, waiting longer, and living with less safety so corrupt Sacramento and Washington Democrats can protect their socialist agenda,” Christian Martinez, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement.
The scorecard: Dems stand to gain 3 seats, possibly 6
The arithmetic is simpler than the stakes. Republicans won nine of California’s 52 House seats in 2024. Under the Prop 50 map, only four seats now look safely Republican. That caps Democrats’ realistic prospects as a gain of five.
Winning a total of six of the nine seats previously held by Republicans would require a Kiley defeat. Kevin Kiley, one of the nine, left the Republican Party this year and is running as an independent. If Democrats also unseat him, they will have eliminated six of the nine members who sat on the Republican side of the aisle after 2024.
The Cook Political Report counts only three California races as truly competitive this year: CA-22, CA-13 and CA-48. In 2024, by contrast, California had more closely fought House races than any other state.
Three seats Democrats are counting on
The new map did most of its work before a single ad aired. In California’s northernmost 1st District, Republican James Gallagher won a June special election to replace the late Rep. Doug LaMalfa with about 62% of the vote, but that contest ran under the old lines. The new district trades working class farming cities Redding and Yuba City for upscale Santa Rosa and Sonoma in wine country; Kamala Harris would have carried it by 12 points. Cook rates Gallagher’s November rematch with state Sen. Mike McGuire as “Solid Democrat.”
In the Sacramento suburbs, Kiley’s old 3rd District went from a seat Trump narrowly won to one the Harris-Walz ticket carried by 10 points, and Democratic Rep. Ami Bera moved over to run there.
And in Southern California, Calvert’s redrawn 41st District rounds out the trio. His jump to the 40th costs the GOP a sitting member but not a seat, so the Calvert-Kim fight doesn’t count toward Democrats’ tally. Add those three expected pickups and Democrats sit at three, needing at least one of the remaining battlegrounds to pan out in their favor.
The fourth seat, and the one Trump just made harder
The 48th District is where Monday’s loose presidential talk about Iran might hurt Republicans the most. The open seat stretches from inland San Diego County through Temecula, Hemet, and into Palm Springs. Issa declined to run after the redraw turned his stronghold into a district Harris won by several points, with a roughly 4-point Democratic registration edge. Cook rates it “Lean Democrat.”
Democrat Marni von Wilpert, a San Diego City Council member, has the advantage on paper but not a comfortable one. Jim Desmond has appeared on the ballot in the district’s San Diego portions as a supervisor who is in constant touch with constituents, while von Wilpert has had to introduce herself, and she lives outside the district.
Dems face tough contest in the Central Valley
Rep. David Valadao’s newly drawn district is the only California race Cook rates a true toss-up. On paper it shouldn’t be close: Democrats hold roughly a 16-point registration advantage across parts of Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Kings, and Madera counties, including half of Bakersfield. But Valadao, a dairy farmer and one of the few remaining House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6, has repeatedly outrun his district. Although he lost the seat in 2018, he won it back in 2020 when Joe Biden carried it comfortably.
His challenger, Randy Villegas, is a populist progressive endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who beat an establishment-backed moderate in the primary. The race has become a test of whether a candidate well to the left of the old “Valleycrat” mold can win a battleground seat, and whether Villegas, who recently had Sanders visit his district, is too far left for the largely agricultural, though heavily Latino district.
A wild card
Democrats’ gains only count if they don’t give one back. In the 13th District, Democrat Rep. Adam Gray won in 2024 by just 187 votes, the closest House race in the country. Prop 50 helped him by adding heavily Democratic Stockton to the district, and Cook rates the seat “Lean Democrat.” But Stockton is also home turf for GOP challenger Kevin Lincoln, the city’s former mayor, and polling in these low-turnout Central Valley districts has been all over the map but highly reactive to national issues and the president’s negative ratings.
Gray, one of the House’s more moderate Democrats, carries an endorsement from the California Farm Bureau and was one of only six House Democrats to back the deal ending last year’s shutdown.
Then there is Kiley. Rather than face Republican Rep. Tom McClintock in a safe seat, he chose the bluer 6th District in the Sacramento area and is running as an independent against Democrat Richard Pan, a physician and former state senator. Cook rates the seat “Solid Democrat,” and votes for five Democratic candidates combined for nearly 56% in the June primary. Still, a poll from a group backing Kiley showed the race tied, and Harris campaigned for Pan last week, a sign Democrats aren’t taking the 6th seat for granted.
That visit also handed Kiley an opening. Some news organizations, including Sacramento’s KCRA 3, were blocked from covering Harris’ public appearance with Pan on Friday, and a Pan spokesman told KCRA the exclusion also extended to The New York Times.
Kiley pounced. In a campaign blog post titled “The Kamala Debacle,” he wrote that the Harris and Pan camps were openly feuding by day’s end, and he accused Pan’s campaign of a strategy of hiding the candidate. The flap is a small one, but it gave Kiley a press-freedom story line in a week when Democrats were otherwise focused on Trump.
Bottom line: Four is likely, five is a coin flip, six is a stretch
If the Cook ratings hold, Democrats should flip four seats based on the new maps: the three seats the map effectively handed them plus a von Wilpert win in CA-48. Turning five depends on unseating Valadao, a Republican who has survived tougher environments than this one. Six requires beating Kiley too, while holding Gray’s seat in the Central Valley.
With strong well-known Republican candidates facing off in the new districts, Democrats can’t simply count on running the table, Republicans contend.
“California’s House races will decide whether working families keep fighters like David Valadao, James Gallagher, Kevin Lincoln, and Jim Desmond or get more of the same from Democrats who raised costs, left the border wide open, and made communities less safe,” argued Martinez, an NRCC spokesman.
That’s why Democrats are so focused on winning CA-48, and why they were working overtime to capitalize on Trump’s controversial remarks about Iran bombing San Diego and Los Angeles. Whether Desmond’s swift break insulates him – or simply reminds voters which party he belongs to – may decide whether Prop 50 truly slashes the slim GOP congressional representation the state previously had, or further decimates it.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
