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At campaign stops across California’s Central Valley, Randy Villegas asks a simple question: Do you or someone you know drive to Tijuana to get medicine or fix your teeth? Almost inevitably, hands go up.
For Villegas—a 31-year-old community college professor running for Congress in a largely Mexican American district—the outrage has a personal dimension. In the wealthiest nation in the world, many of his neighbors are forced to seek healthcare from the country his own parents left behind.
I first heard Villegas ask about the trips to Tijuana during a forum in Stratford, an unincorporated community about 40 miles south of Fresno. The border is more than six hours away, but, in an area where the poverty rate exceeds 30 percent, people still make the journey. The solution, said Villegas, who has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, is Medicare for All and a recognition that healthcare is a human right.
“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
This is not the typical message in the 22nd Congressional District, which includes parts of the city of Bakersfield, as well as vast rural tracts that are well known for sending moderates from both parties to Sacramento and Washington. That describes Villegas’ Democratic primary opponent, State Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains, a family doctor attuned to the realities of representing an area where the local economy is often dominated by agricultural giants and oil companies. It also describes Rep. David Valadao, the Republican incumbent in what political analysts say is one of the most competitive House races in the country.
Voting is already well underway in advance of the June 2 primary. The intraparty contest gets at some of the biggest questions now dividing Democrats in races across the US. Is Sanders-style progressivism or pragmatic centrism a more promising strategy for winning back working-class and Latino voters who have abandoned Democrats in recent years? Should Democrats speak out against Israel’s actions in the Middle East, even if it means inviting opposition—and massive negative ad buys—from groups aligned with AIPAC? Should party leaders in Washington continue to elevate moderates over populist candidates on the left?
Volunteers chat after a morning of canvassing in Bakersfield.Adam Perez
Just before I arrived in Bakersfield earlier this month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the party’s official campaign arm for House races—formally backed Bains over Villegas. Later that week, the super-PAC Democratic Majority for Israel started buying commercials on local stations attacking Villegas. Neither development was good news for Villegas, though they play directly into the slogan he uses in ads and campaign stops to emphasize his independence from the party establishment: “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.”
“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.”
No one I spoke with felt confident predicting who would win the primary. They assume the race is close, but there’s hardly any public polling. Whoever prevails will have the best chance of unseating Valadao since 2018, when the congressman lost by less than 900 votes before staging a comeback two years later.
Support for Donald Trump surged in the district in 2024—one of many places around the country where Republicans made inroads with Latino voters. But Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump veteran of the California GOP and a leading national expert on Latino politics, is betting that Democrats will win again in November, regardless of who emerges from the primary. The backlash to the president is simply too great. “I’ve been asked about this district…a hundred times in the past decade,” Madrid told me. “The only other time I said that Valadao was going to lose was 2018.”
If Madrid is right that a Democrat will win—and there’s no guarantee he is—the bigger question will become: What kind of Democrat? Villegas sees the race as a fight for the “soul” of the party, while Bains rejects that premise entirely. “You’ll never hear me say that,” she told me over the phone. Nor, she noted multiple times, would voters hear her “whine” about who is endorsing her opponents, which is how she describes Villegas’ complaints about the party’s campaign committee. “You’re going to see Dr. Bains doing a press conference on the things that matter to voters,” she added. “It is a point of privilege to have so much time in your life that you’re going to put things together to whine about endorsements. That is sick.”
California’s Central Valley makes up less than 1 percent of the nation’s farmland but produces a quarter of its food.Adam Perez
The Central Valley has long been a place where migrants accustomed to country life come to find a more prosperous version of home. Over the years, there have been shepherds from Basque country, Okies escaping the Dust Bowl, and African Americans fleeing the South. All three candidates in this year’s contest are children of immigrants. Valadao’s parents were part of a wave of Portuguese migration to the valley from the Azores. Bains’ parents are Sikhs from Punjab in India. Villegas’ family comes from the Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacán.
Latinos make up most of the Central Valley’s population, including about 75 percent of residents and 65 percent of voting-age citizens in the 22nd District. It’s one of the youngest congressional districts in the country, as well one of the poorest. Despite making up less than 1 percent of the nation’s farmland, the Central Valley produces a quarter of its food. But the money often doesn’t stay where it’s made.
The Democratic Party “needs to stop picking candidates and pushing candidates out. It needs to focus on bringing voters in.”
In theory, these economic inequities—combined with Trump’s attacks on immigrants—should have galvanized Democratic power in the region. Instead, the party’s support among Latino voters collapsed between 2016 and 2024. Consider Arvin, a city near the site of a New Deal project that once housed Depression-era migrants and features prominently in The Grapes of Wrath. In 2016, voters in Arvin, which is now 95 percent Latino, backed Hillary Clinton by a 67-point margin. In 2020, Trump closed that gap by 15 points. In 2024, he improved by another 32 points—finishing with more than three times as many votes in the city as he did during his first run. A similar story played out across the valley.
I saw that firsthand during the final days of the 2024 campaign. Voters there told me over and over that they were frustrated by the economy, especially the rising cost of living. They decided to go with Trump, whom they often credited with delivering something closer to prosperity during his time in the White House.
One of the most insightful people I spoke with at the time was a Democratic consultant named Pedro Ramirez. He told me that he was encountering a strange phenomenon: young Latino Democrats who wanted to know if local Democratic candidates were backing Trump—and who were hoping the answer was yes. It happened so many times that Ramirez had to double check to make sure the voters on his lists really were Democrats.
A canvasser with the Community Water Center Action Fund in BakersfieldAdam Perez
Earlier this month, I met with Ramirez again at his office in Fresno. In a reflection of what polls show nationwide, he’s now seeing Latino voters revolt against Trump and his broken promises to control the cost of living. He added that the president’s persecution of immigrants has been particularly salient among the young Latino men who moved right in large numbers in 2024; he attributes that partly to social media making the reality of Trump’s crackdown more stark than the TV news programs favored by older generations.
Esmeralda Soria, one of Bains’ fellow Central Valley–based Democratic Assembly members, has seen a similar anti-Trump shift among her own constituents. Like Ramirez, she attributes it to economic turmoil and horrifying immigration raids like the ones launched in the valley by former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino shortly after the 2024 election. Operation Return to Sender, as Bovino called it, was a wake-up call for locals who’d voted for Trump under the assumption that his administration would mostly target violent criminals, Soria said. “Oh my God,” she continued, summarizing the response, “what did we do?”
Soria has endorsed Bains, while Ramirez has stayed neutral. Ramirez says he is happy to see a competitive contest that he hopes will produce the strongest possible challenger to Valadao. He wishes the national party hadn’t chosen sides, though the move did not surprise him. Madrid was also critical. “They need to stay the hell out of it,” he said about the party’s campaign committee getting involved in the race. “Any party needs to stop picking candidates and pushing candidates out. It needs to focus on bringing voters in.”
In the Central Valley, Democratic support among Latino voters collapsed between 2016 and 2024.Adam Perez
By early May, Villegas had his stump speech down to a tight two minutes. Son of Mexican immigrants. Political science professor and small business owner. Make gas and food more affordable. Running against opponents who accept money from big corporations and a congressman who voted to cut Medicaid. Endorsed by Sanders and labor leader Dolores Huerta. “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.”
Despite forswearing donations from corporate PACs, he’s managed to outraise Bains, a two-term Assembly member with half a million constituents and a record of supporting wealthy Central Valley industries. He’s been showing up at events all over the district, while Bains has been less visible on the campaign trail and has declined to debate Villegas.
After the forum in Stratford, I joined Villegas for the city of Hanford’s weekly night market. I had expected something relatively small but arrived to a massive event with a carousel, live music, and thousands of attendees. The first person I spoke with had just voted early for Villegas. His reasoning was straightforward: He didn’t have much time to decide, so he went with the guy who was most obviously like him. “I’m going to be honest, he just appealed to me because he’s Latino.”
As the event wrapped up, two young men recognized the candidate. They said they had just turned 18, and Villegas wasted no time in showing them how to register to vote. The more talkative of the two, Emmanuel Peña, was wearing a Stussy T-shirt and gym shorts. He knew Villegas was running for something but he wasn’t sure what.
A switch seemed to flip on in the professor. There are two national legislative bodies, he explained: the House and the Senate. He’s running for the House.
“The House of California, though?” Peña asked. “Not like the country?”
No, the whole country.
“Oh, shit,” Peña replied. “David Valadao is that big?”
Peña wanted to know if Villegas identified as a social Democrat and appeared skeptical when the candidate didn’t immediately embrace the label.
“Basically, it’s us against them.”
Instead, Villegas called himself a populist. “Basically, it’s us against them,” he said. “I’m endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders—I love Bernie, he’s like my political hero—but I’ve talked to people at the door who were Republicans who were like, ‘Yeah, gas is crazy. Why are we spending a billion dollars a day in Iran?’”
“It’s the top vs. the bottom,” a won-over Peña interjected. “There’s no war but the class war.”
Peña said Sanders had been robbed in 2016 by the Democratic establishment. He was only 8 years old at the time, but it was clearly central to his understanding of the party. Four years later, Sanders defeated Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary in the Central Valley and in other heavily Latino parts of the country. Now, in his first election as an adult, Peña has the chance to support a fellow Mexican American who’s been inspired by the Vermont senator.
California’s 22nd Congressional District, which includes the city of Arvin, comprises vast rural tracts that are well known for electing moderates from both parties.Adam Perez
In the booth of a brightly lit Mexican restaurant a few minutes away, Villegas described a journey not all that different from Peña’s. After immigrating from Mexico, his father worked as a car mechanic. In 2006, he decided to open his own business after noticing that nobody nearby specialized in BMWs. Villegas remembered the family driving around to put business cards under the wipers of every Bimmer they could find to promote the shop, which Villegas now co-owns. Another family hustle was selling animals—and, at one point, fake Yu-Gi-Oh! cards—at the Bakersfield swap meet.
Judging by our conversations, as well his posts on Instagram, Villegas spent much of his youth devoted to three things: a high school sweetheart who is now his wife, playing the snare competitively on drumlines, and politics—ranging from a college selfie with Carl Bernstein to later praise for the historian Michael Kazin’s analysis of populism. While in college in Bakersfield during the 2016 campaign, he met Sanders when the senator came to town. “I was like, holy shit, this man is someone I believe in and someone I can get behind.”
In 2017, Villegas became the first person in his family to graduate from college, then left Bakersfield to get a PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He said he spent his first year overcoming imposter syndrome. He still laughs about wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt to an admitted students day as Ivy Leaguers arrived in business casual.
He now serves on a local school board while also teaching at the College of the Sequoias, a community college with three campuses in the Central Valley. He tries to meet his students where they are—including an extra credit assignment in which they use memes to illustrate a concept learned in class. One student recently went with a photo of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Smith represented “Super Pacs and interest groups”; Rock was labeled “Having a fair election.”
In the Central Valley, the local economy is often dominated by agricultural giants and oil companies.Adam Perez
As a child, Jasmeet Bains lived just up Highway 99 from Bakersfield in Delano, a city known nationally for a historic grape strike launched by Filipino farmworkers in 1965. Her mom came to the United States from India on a journalism visa, while her father joined a brother already in the country. They lived in Ohio until her dad visited a friend in Delano when Bains was a toddler. He was shocked, Bains later recalled, to discover a place in America without snow, and they moved immediately.
Like Villegas’ father, Bains’ dad worked for a time as a car mechanic; he eventually acquired his own Chevrolet dealership. After college in Chicago, Bains sold cars for him for a time, then enrolled in medical school. She graduated in 2013, returned to the valley for her residency, and began working as a doctor of family medicine.
She was elected to the Assembly in 2022, when she was 37, to represent a district that overlaps with much of the one she is running for now. In Sacramento, she has established a reputation as one of the state’s most moderate and business-friendly Democrats. In some cases, she has broken with her party to defend the oil and agriculture companies that are central to the Central Valley’s economy. Whether her voting record has always benefited the workers at those companies is more debatable.
In 2024, Bains declined to vote on legislation that that requires California to reevaluate the use of paraquat, a pesticide that has been linked to increased risk of Parkinson’s disease and is prohibited in more than 70 countries. Not voting is a common practice in Sacramento when lawmakers want to avoid taking controversial positions, and Bains has employed that tactic repeatedly—including on bills limiting security deposits charged by landlords and so-called “junk fees” that companies add to the price of goods and services.
California Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains talks with colleagues during a session in 2023.Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/ZUMA
Still, her legislative record has earned her plenty of supporters, and she’s endorsed by the California Federation of Labor Unions, a key player in state politics. Tania Salinas, president of the AFL-CIO’s labor council in and around Bakersfield, said Bains has excelled at getting funding for the district and protecting the jobs of the union members she represents—many of whom work in the fossil fuel industry. Salinas said she worries that Villegas’ refusal to take corporate money would hinder his ability to attract investment to the district. “How does that translate when you’re talking about industry?” Salinas added. “If you cannot talk to industry…how is that going to translate to jobs?”
The party leadership clearly sees Bains as the more electable of the two. Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has said the committee gets involved only in “primaries when we feel that one candidate stands out as the strongest possible nominee to ensure that we win in the general election.” DelBene argued that Bains will benefit from contrasting her work as a doctor with Valadao’s vote to cut Medicaid spending as part of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund, which has sent mailers designed to push Democratic primary voters toward Villegas, appears to agree that Bains would be harder to defeat.
“It is a point of privilege to have so much time in your life that you’re going to put things together to whine about endorsements. That is sick.”
Right or wrong, most of these political insiders seem to be motivated by pragmatic calculations rather than any personal objections to Villegas. Bains is a different story. Beyond blasting Villegas for “whining” about the campaign committee’s endorsement, she wanted to make sure I knew that he lives outside the district. She’s not wrong about that, but Villegas is hardly a carpetbagger. He grew up in Bakersfield, co-owns an auto shop there, and now lives 15 miles or so from the boundary line.
I was also eager to get Bains’ perspective on one of the stranger controversies of the campaign. During a Zoom event hosted in February by the Fresno County Young Democrats, both candidates were asked whether they believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Both gave the same one-word answer: “Yes.” But weeks later, after a video of their responses leaked, Bains walked back her claim. “I approach the word genocide with care, and I don’t believe it applies to Israel,” she said in a statement posted on her campaign website.
The legal debates around which atrocities amount to genocide are complex, but it’s an issue Bains has grappled with before. As her statement noted, she spearheaded California legislation officially designating the 1984 massacres of Sikhs in India as genocide. So I asked whether she could clarify why she had initially called Gaza a genocide and where she stood now.
Juan Hernandez Garcia, a field representative for Bains’ campaign, prepares a yard sign in Bakersfield. Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times/Getty
“The problem is litmus tests,” Bains began. “Litmus tests for complex issues are the problem.” But it was clear that Bains did not actually want to say anything specific about Israel or Gaza—neither of which she mentioned by name over the course of a more than three-minute answer. “For a physician like me, who holds her Hippocratic oath higher than her oath for office, any innocent life lost is a devastation,” she said. “There has been loss of life on both sides. There has been loss of life in many areas.”
For his part, Villegas issued no such retraction. “Increasingly, people are aware that we are sending billions and billions of dollars to this genocidal regime that has universal healthcare…while we do not,” he told me.
When I spoke with Bains, it had just been revealed that Democratic Majority for Israel would be launching a major ad campaign on her behalf. The group has now shelled out half-a-million dollars on spots that don’t seem to mention Israel at all. Instead, they are attacking Villegas over votes he cast as a member of the Visalia school board to approve settlement agreements with alleged victims of sexual assault. Legal experts have criticized the ads, which are based on opposition research produced by the Bains campaign, as misleading.
Another group, 314 Action, has spent more than $900,000 to help Bains. Combined, these two super-PACs have spent roughly as much as Villegas’ entire campaign. Overall, outside spending for Bains far exceeds the amount being deployed in support of Villegas.
Perhaps the most revealing divide came in response to an issue closer to home. I asked Bains what she hoped to do in Congress to promote healthcare access and affordability. She immediately looked back to a more optimistic era for Democrats. “The most amazing thing was when the ACA was passed,” she said, referring to President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. It was an obvious contrast to Villegas’ push for Medicare for All.
The two candidates are both millennials, just nine years apart in age. Yet they represent starkly different generations of Democratic politics. One is shaped by Obama’s success; the other by the long tail of Sanders’ defeats. Bains may consider it absurd to see the race as a fight for the soul of the party. But there is no avoiding it.
