Trump holds rare rally in California, with eye on keeping House majority

Former President Trump is holding a rare rally in California this weekend as the state is expected to play a central role in the fight for control of the House.

Trump’s Saturday appearance in the Democrat-held 25th Congressional District comes as Republicans are looking to maintain their hold on six competitive seats in the Golden State.

Polling shows a slim advantage for Democrats in most areas, but strategists say Trump’s stop indicates the GOP’s desire to fiercely defend and even flip seats where President Biden won and where Vice President Harris was a senator and attorney general.

“The campaign now comes down to a dogfight and the pilot in the box,” said Bill Wong, a political strategist based in Sacramento and author of “Better to Win.” “If one candidate is taking bubble baths and the other is on the phone calling voters, the candidate that is directly talking to voters will prevail.”

How California’s competitive House races tilt on Election Day could ultimately serve as a gauge for the broader national political environment. Analysts predict the control of the lower chamber of Congress will come down to 26 competitive races and a few others that lean slightly in the direction of either party, with California occupying a sizable chunk of the total tossups. 

Republicans and Democrats are spending money and campaigning in a half-dozen contests where early voting is currently taking place, including the 13th, 22nd, 27th, 41st, 45th, and 47th districts. The site of Trump’s upcoming rally in the blue 25th district is likely to reach voters in neighboring districts through shared media markets.

“At this point, voters have been bombarded with ads directly from the candidates and independent expenditure committees, so each district has been sufficiently saturated with the messaging each side thinks is the most persuasive for swing voters,” Wong said. 

The 41st district, for example, where incumbent Rep. Ken Calvert, a Republican from Corona, is running against Democratic challenger Will Rollins, a former federal prosecutor, is in a dead-heat tie, according to an aggregate average of polls by FiveThirtyEight.

In the race for Rep. Katie Porter’s (D) open seat, which occupies suburban Orange County, GOP Rep. Scott Baugh is slightly ahead of Dave Min, a Democrat. Republicans are hoping to flip the historically competitive 47th district after Porter announced she was vacating the seat to run in the Democratic primary for Senate, a race she ultimately lost.

As Republicans battle at the district level, Trump is doing his best to paint the overall liberal composite of California as declining under the Biden-Harris administration, highlighting domestic issues like high gas prices as a problem and ripping the vice president’s economic agenda.

He’s also banking on Harris’s mixed popularity in her home state, where she has struggled with key demographics when she served as attorney general, as a way to make inroads with more voters unimpressed by Democrats up and down the ballot this year. 

“Under Kamala Harris and her dangerous Democrat allies like Tim Walz, the notorious ‘California Dream’ has turned into a nightmare for everyday Americans,” Trump said in a campaign release teasing the event this weekend.

While Harris’s nomination after serving as the state’s junior senator and top prosecutor adds intrigue, the spotlight on California is not entirely new. Republicans won control of the House in 2022 due in part to a few close contests in the 5th and 13th districts, which flipped from blue to red, and conservatives are hoping to replicate some of that success this year.

Strategists say California’s racial diversity is one of the biggest factors making the handful of contests close calls, with Latino and Asian American voters expected to significantly shape the outcome on Nov. 5. 

Some Republican operatives note that Latinos have been gradually moving away from the Democratic Party, especially those in the middle and lower socio-economic classes, and even more so under Biden. Economic indicators like inflation and the impact of immigration on jobs is expected to be a key test for Democrats and an opportunity for GOP candidates in battleground districts to make the case that their policy approach is better than the party in power.   

Election watchers are also anticipating AAIP voters to make significant dents in the 45th and 47th districts in particular. Analysts are waiting to see if Asian American voters continue voting Democratic, which some say could give both Min, a Korean American state senator running in the 47th district, and Derek Tran, a Vietnamese American Army veteran and business owner running in the 45th, an edge in their respective districts.

“They all have really significant percentages of voters of color,” said Christian Grose, a political science and public policy professor at University of Southern California, about those two districts. “It’s a little different than, say, the swing districts in Iowa and upstate New York and places that also are important for determining control of Congress.”

“Democrats win if voters of color turn out at high rates and Democrats are able to persuade enough voters of color to support them,” Grose said. “Republicans win if they can just pull off a sliver of Latino votes, a sliver of Asian voters more than typically have happened in recent elections in California.”

In the 22nd district, Republican Rep. David Valadao, who is facing a rematch against Democrat Rudy Salas, is fighting in a Democratic-leaning district. But he’s had success across party lines in the past and some observers see his distance from Trump — Valadao is one of the two last Republicans to have voted to impeach the former president — as being an asset. 

“He’s really good at getting Democrats to cross over and vote for him,” said Thomas Holyoke, a political science professor at California State University Fresno.

“These are relatively poor districts and therefore economic issues, especially inflation, is really on peoples’ minds. To the extent that people tend to blame the Biden administration and by extension Kamala Harris and Democrats generally for this problem, there’s going to be benefit there for the Republicans,” he said. 

His race is also grouped with another Republican who has danced around the Trump issue: Rep. John Duarte, who’s running against Democrat Adam Gray, a former state assembly member, in the 13th Congressional District. 

Trump’s evening rally, Holyoke predicts, isn’t likely to make a huge impact for either of the GOP contenders. “I’m not sure that’s going to sway these districts a whole lot,” he said.

Both candidates “have been kind of going their own way and not tying themselves too closely to Donald Trump. Duarte and Valadao have kept some distance. Valadao is the last surviving Republican who voted to impeach Donald Trump. It’s always been a little iffy between those two,” he said.

Recent polling conducted by the University of Southern California and California State University found that Democrats are currently ahead in four out of the six tightest contests spanning Orange County, the northern part of Los Angeles County and the San Joaquin Valley.

Grose, who worked on the poll at USC, said that “high-growth districts” showing movement among voters —with many more people physically relocating — is also likely to impact some districts that could change up the results in unpredictable ways.

“Lots of people moving in. Democrats from L.A. are moving out to the suburbs in places that have historically been Republican and now they’re really competitive,” he said. 

Grose said he’s seen “massive growth” in Riverside County, home to the Calvert-vs.-Rollins race that’s especially tight. “Looking at our polling data that we pulled off the voter file, there’s way more voters living in that district than other districts, just from patterns of population shift,” he said.

“There’s so many new voters living in these suburban districts,” Grose added. “The candidates don’t even necessarily always know who some of the new voters are.”