When Jasmeet Bains first announced she was running for Congress, some Democratic powerbrokers saw her candidacy as downright providential in their quest to flip a crucial House seat that had been in Republican hands for years.
As a doctor in California’s agriculture-heavy Central valley, living and working in one of the poorest districts in the US, Bains could speak with singular authority about the devastating impact of cuts to healthcare enacted in Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Her scrubs and white doctor’s coat were a powerful visual reminder that the district’s longtime incumbent congressman, Republican David Valadao, had cast one of the bill’s deciding votes last summer. Every time she pulled a shift at a community clinic in her home town – something she continued to do on weekends even as a member of the state legislature – she saw first hand how the loss of government coverage threatened to devastate hundreds of thousands of district residents and their children.
Add to that a compelling personal narrative – she is the daughter of Sikh refugees and the first Asian American to serve in the California assembly – and an independent streak that has occasionally infuriated her own party leadership, and Bains appeared to be the complete package for a seat the Democrats cannot afford to lose in November’s midterms.
“She’s fighting for our lives, our kids’ healthcare, and home care our seniors need to thrive,” the powerful Service Employees International Union said in an endorsement on the day Bains entered the race last summer.
The seat has only grown in importance now that California has redrawn its congressional district boundaries in response to a wave of Republican gerrymandering in Texas, making it easier for Democrats to pick up as many as five extra House seats in the state. Instead of laying out a glide path to victory, however, the Democrats have become mired in a singularly nasty fight over their identity as a party, with Bains thrust squarely into the middle of it.
What Bains’s excited backers overlooked – or chose to ignore – was that a promising Democrat was already campaigning for the seat, and building his own cadre of enthusiastic backers. Randy Villegas, a 31-year-old community college professor and second-generation Mexican immigrant, had been crisscrossing the district laying out his theory of the race in an area that is 75% Latino and has a median voter age of just 30. Bains, he argued, did not represent any kind of solution because he saw her as a big part of the problem.
As a community organizer who had written a doctoral thesis on the low voter turnout rate among young Latinos like him, Villegas saw a groundswell of disillusionment with both major parties and believed it was time for a candidate who could address the struggles of young people and working families without caving to the oil, agriculture and pharmaceutical interests that drive the local economy.
The problem with Bains and other candidates before her, Villegas has argued, is that by hewing to the political center and raking in corporate campaign donations they blunt their own best talking points, on healthcare and many other subjects, and thus alienate the people most in need of effective representation.
That, he says, is why a district where Democrats enjoy a significant advantage in registration and routinely outvote Republicans in statewide and presidential elections had voted Valadao out just once in the last 14 years – and then only for a single term.
“We need to work to expand the electorate,” Villegas said in an interview. “For too long, Democrats have run Republican-lite campaigns … We can’t just offer that we’re not Trump. We have to stand for something.”
The two Democrats are now locked in a ferocious battle ahead of a 2 June primary that will determine which of them faces Valadao in the general election in November. In many ways, the battle over California’s 22nd congressional district reflects a broader nationwide struggle between the Democratic party’s moderate and progressive wings.
Bains and her supporters argue that she is a good fit for a part of the state where even Democrats (Valleycrats, as they are known) tend to be fairly conservative, and they point to her re-election to the state legislature in 2024, when she outperformed other Democrats on the ballot by more than seven points.
Villegas, in common with a new generation of candidates inspired by Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator, has refused to take corporate campaign donations. That has proved particularly groundbreaking in a part of the country where politicians of both parties have tended to sided with their big donors on key issues including water policy, pesticide regulation and air pollution that have public health implications and other direct effects on voters’ lives.
At the same time, the race resists easy categorization. Villegas has surprised many political professionals by outperforming Bains on fundraising and winning the endorsement of party chairs in all four counties within the district’s boundaries. The chairs credit him with running an energetic campaign and inspiring voters as they deal with daunting cost of living increases and a sluggish job market as well as the slashing of government-provided healthcare.
Bains, by contrast, has been less visible on the campaign trail, sticking close to the same few talking points about being a champion for healthcare and an independent voice unafraid to ruffle feathers. She has often appeared uncomfortable when fielding critical questions about her voting record and turned down a recent opportunity to debate her rivals. For local party leaders, that has not been nearly enough.
“I don’t call myself a progressive,” said Joshua Evans, the Democratic party chair in Tulare county, “but the lesson in this district is that you won’t receive support unless you show up … Randy has been working his ass off. He knows every vote is going to matter, and every door knock makes a difference. People are sick and tired of the status quo.”
Bains vigorously contests the idea that she has not worked hard enough, pointing to her track record of bringing resources to the district during the Covid pandemic, providing medical support to firefighters on the frontlines of wildfires, and championing a fentanyl taskforce to address a major drug epidemic. “People like the work I’m doing,” she said.
Still, the race appeared to be slipping away from her earlier this month when the national party surprised everyone by weighing in on her behalf and putting her on a list of “red to blue” candidates eligible for funding and other support to help push them over the line.
Local party officials say they had been assured the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would not intervene ahead of the primary. The DCCC’s decision to do so anyway – a spokeswoman praised Bains as “exactly the kind of leader that can beat Valadao” – blindsided them and sparked a furious backlash that has only deepened the battle lines within the party.
“These are some out of touch people … and they are reading things wrong,” another county chair, Cathy Jorgensen of Kings county, said of the DCCC. “I think they are frightened. They want to be safe. But in wanting to be safe they hurt the party, and they hurt us.”
Villegas put it more bluntly still. “Clearly she can’t win outright on her own,” he said of Bains, “which is why they’re coming in at the last minute to try and save her”.
To many Democrats in California and beyond, the battle is indicative of a widening gap between a cautious party leadership used to a particular way of conducting campaigns and grassroots voters looking not just to elect Democrats but to enact dramatic change.
That proved true in New York City last year, when Zohran Mamdani rode a wave of popular support to win the mayoral election in the face of stiff resistance from his own party, and it is playing out in the Senate race in Maine where Graham Platner, a working-class candidate promising a similar platform of change, has swept aside the establishment candidate, state governor Janet Mills, before the primary even took place.
Now Villegas has his own share of national attention, with endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York congresswoman, Sanders, and Dolores Huerta, the farm workers’ union icon.
“People are really hungry for something different,” Jorgensen said. “This district is extremely poor and there are so many things that we need here and don’t get, because we have people in power who just don’t care … We are the Appalachia of the west. People are really ready to have someone who is truthful and not tied to big money in any way.”
The most immediate impact of the DCCC’s intervention on Bains’s behalf – not an endorsement, its staff insist – has been to make the race significantly nastier. An independent group supporting Bains, the Democratic Majority for Israel, recently dropped $500,000 on television advertising alleging that Villegas had voted to cover up a sex scandal at a school district where he served on the board of trustees.
Reporting by a local television station concluded that Villegas had not, as alleged, voted to silence victims of the decades-old scandal. He had approved a legal settlement whose financial terms were kept confidential, but nothing in the document prevented victims of the scandal from speaking out. Villegas said he found it “pathetic and disgusting to exploit the suffering of survivors for political gain”.
He also noted that, since the pro-Israel money came in, Bains has changed her position on the Middle East. In a meeting with a group of young district Democrats earlier this year, she was recorded saying “yes” when asked if she believed Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Now, though, she says: “I approach the word genocide with care, and I don’t believe it applies to Israel.”
“She’s willing to change her answers depending who’s in the room,” Villegas charged. “I think the Central valley deserves better than that.”
Bains, for her part, said she was offended by Villegas’s ads that have pointed to 53 corporate donors that she and Valadao have in common, according to public filings. “Just last Sunday I was in the clinic and I had to watch an attack ad calling me corrupt while I was bandaging a farmer’s knee,” she said. “People here don’t like the ugliness.”
And she insisted: “My vote can never be bought.”
In the past, Bains has described similar ads criticizing her corporate donations as a form of political violence and an unwarranted “attack on a woman of color”.
Such reactions strike some in the district as thin-skinned and have contributed to disillusion among some who initially welcomed Bains’s campaign. A few members of SEIU and the United Domestic Workers union are now going against their leadership’s endorsement of Bains and walking precincts for Villegas. Two prominent local SEIU members, including one serving in a senior leadership position, said they were blindsided by the decision to back Bains and did not think it had aged well.
“We messed this endorsement up,” said Ajaib Gill, a politically connected public defender and SEIU member. “Dr Bains can raise a lot of money, but she doesn’t excite anyone. I’m very disappointed in my own union.”
Polling suggests the race between the two Democrats remains close. Bains is counting on support in her assembly district, which covers about two-thirds of the congressional map, and especially in Delano, her home town. She also hopes to peel off a decisive number of independents.
Villegas is running strong in the areas outside Bains’s district and hopes that a groundswell of voters under 35 turns out for him the way they turned out last year to approve Prop 50 which passed in the district by 18 points – and was, notably, opposed by Bains.
Whoever comes out ahead on 2 June may have some repair work to do to reunite a fractured party before November. Neither candidate, though, gave much indication of wanting to mend fences.
“I definitely did not expect to be fighting the Democratic party establishment as much as the Republicans,” Villegas said. “My campaign is making many folks in power uncomfortable, but I’m OK with that.”
Bains said she didn’t accept that the party was split and said of Villegas: “I don’t know who this person is.” She noted that both Villegas and Valadao are registered to addresses outside district boundaries – a symptom, in part, of the shifting boundary lines – and believed that this gave her a crucial edge.
“I don’t think it’s going to be close at all,” she said. “This is my community. I never left.”
Democrats beyond the district warn, however, that some kind of reckoning is coming for a party that often struggles to decide what it wants to be, and for a national leadership that angers local activists whenever it puts its thumb on the scale and, as they see it, presumes to tell voters what’s best for them.
“Everybody’s furious,” said one longtime campaign professional in California who did not want to be named so he could speak without reservation. “The party system, the political system, the economy – none of it is working and people are hungry for change.
“I have no skin in the game for either of these Democratic candidates … but I can tell you the people on the ground are livid. The endorsement process is archaic and ridiculous. Frankly, we need to burn the system down and start over.”
