California’s top Democrats aren’t convinced a progressive can win

In California, the fight for the future of the Democratic Party is raging, with an economic populist facing off against an establishment party recruit in a district expected to be on the front lines for Democrats seeking to win the House in 2026.

Randy Villegas, a school board trustee in Visalia, California, announced his candidacy for Congress in March, telling Politico at the time that “I’m running on an economic populist message” — a message that he believed would be able to flip the 22nd District in California, which is one of the most competitive in the country.

Rep. David Valadao currently represents the district, winning in 2024 by about 7 points. However, the area was represented by former Rep. TJ Cox, D-Calif., from 2018 to 2020, when it was the 21st District. Valadao, who represented the area from the 2012 elections until the 2018 midterms, won back the seat in 2020.

The story got a little more complicated in July, however, when state Assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains, who has represented the 35th Assembly District since 2022, announced that she too would be entering the race. The San Joaquin Valley Sun reported that, unhappy with Villegas, California’s Democratic establishment convinced Bains to run instead.

Though the DCCC says it is neutral in primaries, progressives supporting Villegas have accused the party of putting its thumb on the scale by recruiting Bains, who has cut a path on the right flank of the Democratic caucus in the state assembly. She has frequently bucked her party in the state legislature, including votes on several high-profile bills. One bill, for example, was focused on cracking down on price-gouging by oil companies; another allocated funding to a wildfire prevention program; she voted against both measures. Nonetheless, she enjoys the backing of a slew of statewide-elected Democrats, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, State Treasurer Fiona Ma and State Controller Malia Cohen

Aside from being in one of the most competitive districts in the country, the race has been closely watched because of Democrats’ failure to make gains there in 2024. Though the district lines have shifted since the 2020 election, Valadao won by a larger margin in 2024 than he did in 2020, with the results in the largely Hispanic district reflecting gains the GOP has made on the national level.

Villegas, in an interview, said that he thinks Democrats on the national level need to realize that an economic populist message is the way that the party can win back voters who switched sides in recent elections, and win over others who have sat them out.

“We know that we need an economy that actually works for the working class, and not just for billionaires and those at the top. We live in one of the most impoverished districts in the nation. We live in a district where our farm workers get up every single day at the crack of dawn to go help feed the rest of the world. Meanwhile, they struggle to feed their own families,” Villegas, who has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, told Salon. “I don’t believe that we can be a party that claims to champion working-class people if we’re receiving the same money from corporate PACs that Republicans are.”

Villegas was referencing one of his campaign’s criticisms of Bains, who has, in her assembly campaigns, received donations from many of the same companies or their associated PACs that also fund Valadao’s campaigns, such as Pfizer, Chevron, AT&T and ExxonMobil, according to campaign finance filings.

“Any average Democrat should or could say that, you know, ‘I would have voted no on Trump’s big BS bill.’ But I don’t think it’s enough to say that we would have voted no on that bill, because let’s talk about where we are currently,” Villegas said. “Two out of every three bankruptcies in this country are tied to medical debt. Every year, over 66,000 people die because they don’t have health insurance — not because we couldn’t treat them, not because we couldn’t save them, but because of a system that denied them care.”

Villegas added that the party’s message needs to go further than just saying “we’re not Trump or that we would have voted no on this bill, but we should be fighting for more than that.”

Bains responded to the criticism in an interview with Salon, explaining the overlap between her and Valadao’s corporate donor list as a result of the fact that “we represent the same area.”

Bains, at the time, also defended her vote against California’s anti-price-gouging law on gasoline by pointing to the state’s refusal to suspend its gas tax during a price spike.

“Stand alone if you must, but always stand for the truth. As the lone Democrat to oppose the new gas tax, I will never throw my constituents under the bus. I will continue to fight for lower gas prices and a stronger Kern County,” Bains said in a post on X.

Speaking to Salon, Bains said that she wants to focus on Valadao and his support for the Republican agenda, including the historic cuts to social programs like Medicaid and SNAP benefits that he voted for in the Republicans’ recent budget reconciliation bill, which President Donald Trump dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

“This is about Democrats uniting against what’s happening to a district like the 22nd. This race is about bringing awareness to the fact that David Valadao gave us his word that he would not vote for that, and he betrayed us, and he voted to decimate healthcare in an area like this that has some of the highest Medicaid patients,” Bains said.

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Both Villegas and Bains’s websites are slim on specific details of the policies they plan to run on, though Villegas’s campaign indicated that it would be rolling out a platform in the coming weeks. Villegas did tell Salon that his platform would include support for major reform to the health care system in the Uited States, like a single-payer system, as well as reforms that could be implimented while workign towards that system.

When asked whether she would support a single-payer system or public option in the United States, Bains said, “Universal health care is the dream that I hope one day becomes a reality, and I hope one day to definitely work on that.”

While Bains’ campaign is too new to have public federal campaign finance disclosures available, Valadao has amassed a significant war chest for the primary, with $1.4 million in cash on hand, according to the most recent filings. Villegas, who does not accept corporate donations, ended the most recent filing period with $125,000.

The primary elections in California are scheduled for June 2, 2026. As it stands, it’s not clear whether California’s 22nd District will be affected by potential redistricting in the state.