Voters across the southern San Joaquin Valley will choose a member of Congress on June 2 in one of the most contested seats in the country — and the Democratic Party has not yet decided who its face here should be.
Three candidates are on the primary ballot. Republican incumbent David Valadao is running for a seventh non-consecutive term. Two Democrats are running to take him on: Visalia Unified school board trustee and College of the Sequoias political science professor Randy Villegas, who is running an explicitly progressive, no-corporate-PAC campaign; and Kern County Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains, a Delano family physician.
The fracture inside the Democratic Party is the central tension of this race. Neither Villegas nor Bains was able to win the California Democratic Party’s endorsement at its February convention in San Francisco. Villegas led 55-to-45 in the pre-convention delegate vote. Bains then pulled ahead at the endorsing caucus itself with roughly 56% of the vote — short of the 60%threshold required to lock down the state party endorsement. Local Democratic county parties have since been instructed to refrain from endorsing.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee jumped in on its own earlier this month, adding Bains to its “Red to Blue” program, which prompted a public rebuke from the Congressional Progressive Caucus — which has endorsed Villegas — and from the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Linda Sánchez. The Democrats of the south Valley have, in short, not chosen a standard-bearer.
Across the three most public candidate events of the primary cycle, Villegas is the only one of the three candidates who has actually shown up. In February, CalMatters reported that he was the only candidate to appear at an on-campus candidate forum for CA-22. On May 2, Radio Bilingüe held a public forum in Fresno on the race; Bains and Valadao did not appear, Villegas did. Four days later, KGET 17 set up a 60-minute televised debate; Valadao and Bains both declined. According to KGET, the station made several attempts to accommodate the candidates’ schedules and was told repeatedly that they were too busy. Bains’s campaign has cited prior commitments at each forum.
Across the entire campaign cycle, Villegas told Fresnoland, neither Bains nor Valadao had attended any of the six public forums or debates the three of them had been invited to.
Valadao also declined an interview with Fresnoland; Bains and Villegas each gave one.
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The new CA-22 district was redrawn last year under Proposition 50, the constitutional amendment that California voters approved in November 2025 as a Democratic Party response to Texas Republicans’ mid-decade gerrymander. The new district now includes the City of Fresno, snaking from the east side of Bakersfield north through Delano, McFarland, Lindsay, Strathmore, southern Hanford, most of the city of Tulare, then west through Huron and Kerman and into a northwest corner of Fresno — broadly, the Figarden loop area north of Shaw Avenue and west of Fruit.
The district loses Republican-leaning Avenal to the redrawn District 18, the north side of Porterville to Vince Fong’s District 20, and a chunk of west and south Kern County. The right-leaning towns of Coalinga and Lemoore are not in the new 22nd district. The new lines give Democrats a 16-point voter-registration advantage, but the district is still rated a Toss-up due to historically abysmal Democratic turnout, especially among Latinos.
The structural issues stacked on the next CA-22 representative’s desk are unusually high-stakes. Valadao voted yes on H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation bill rebranded by Republicans as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and signed into law on July 4, 2025, after he publicly pledged he would not vote to cut Medicaid. The bill, by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate, will result in 17 million people losing health coverage by 2034, and up to 2 million Californians. As many as 30,000 Fresno County residents could lose health insurance.
Before the new lines were drawn, Valadao’s district had the highest Medicaid enrollment of any congressional district in the country — 68% of his constituents — and Bains has built her candidacy around this single vote. Villegas has built his platform around the argument that the answer to the cuts is Medicare for All, and arguing that neither Bains nor Valadao can be trusted on healthcare because both take corporate health-industry money.
Other long-running fights are also in play, from water to immigration: a federal lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity over the Trump administration’s “Action 5” Central Valley Project operations plan, which would move more water from the Delta to south-of-Delta agricultural contractors; the proposed Delta Conveyance Project tunnel; the bipartisan Farm Workforce Modernization Act and the DIGNITY Act, the only two immigration reform vehicles in Congress with any meaningful Republican support; ICE enforcement that has killed at least two U.S. citizens in 2026 alone; and federal cuts to Head Start, CalFresh, USDA Rural Development and the Community Services Block Grant that anti-poverty agencies like Fresno EOC and small West Side cities like Mendota, Firebaugh and Huron rely on.
Read more about where each candidate stands below.
What does a member of Congress do?
There are 435 voting members of the U.S. House of Representatives, each elected to a two-year term from a single congressional district. They write and vote on federal legislation, appropriate federal spending, confirm certain executive-branch actions, and conduct oversight of federal agencies. House members also direct federally funded earmarks (now called Community Project Funding) to their districts and serve as their constituents’ first line of contact with federal agencies — Social Security, USDA, Veterans Affairs, FEMA. As of January 2026, members of Congress receive an annual salary of $174,000.
Candidate: Randy Villegas
Job: Associate professor of political science, College of the Sequoias; trustee, Visalia Unified School District Area 6; co-owner with his father of an auto repair shop in Bakersfield
Age: 31
Residency: Visalia (just outside the new CA-22 line; works in the district daily, but the U.S. Constitution requires only same-state residency for a House member)
Notable Endorsements: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, Congressional Hispanic Caucus BOLD PAC, Working Families Party, Dolores Huerta, Rep. Ro Khanna, Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, Food & Water Action
Villegas, 31, was born and raised in Bakersfield, the son of Mexican immigrants — his father from Michoacan, his mother from Guerrero. He grew up working at the swap meet every weekend and then in the family auto shop on K Street in Bakersfield, which his father opened in 2006. He started in sixth grade, putting business cards on every BMW and Mini Cooper around town, painting the shop walls, holding the flashlight under his father’s car. He was the first in his family to go to college, graduating from Golden Valley High School in 2012, earning an associate’s degree at Bakersfield College and a bachelor’s at CSU Bakersfield, with a semester at Fresno State in between. He earned his master’s and his PhD in politics at UC Santa Cruz with an emphasis on Latin American and Latino Studies on a full-ride scholarship. He became a professor at College of the Sequoias at 25. He was appointed to the Visalia Unified school board in December 2021 and elected to Area 6 in 2022. He won the American Political Science Association’s 2025 Community College Faculty Award.
He lives in Visalia with his wife, Carina. Before grad school he worked as a journalist and community organizer in Bakersfield. He is an affiliate of the Working Families Party. During the pandemic, the family auto shop did not qualify for the federal Paycheck Protection Program; he briefly considered dropping out of his PhD program to take a full-time job and help support his family.
Villegas is, by some distance, the most credentialed scholar of Central Valley politics ever to run for this seat. In 2022, he wrote a 300-page PhD dissertation on what is wrong with the Valley’s politics, and on the people he believes are most likely to fix it.
For the die-hard follower of Valley politics, Villegas’ thesis is an extremely rare document.
Most people running for Congress produce campaign websites and deliver carefully hedged speeches and press statements; Villegas produced, before he ever ran for Congress, a peer-reviewed, citation-heavy diagnosis of the same political system he is now asking voters to send him to Washington to confront.
And, scrappily, he is in it himself — at one point waiting an hour and a half outside the ICE processing facility in downtown Bakersfield to pick up a released Mesa Verde detainee he had never met, only to find out the man had been quietly let go 30 minutes earlier without notice. The dissertation describes him bolting out of his car on foot in search of a stranger he feared local law enforcement would re-arrest. They eventually found each other and shared tacos.
The dissertation’s argument, in the simplest summary, is that the South San Joaquin Valley is not the politically inert place it is sometimes treated as in coastal media — that the 75%-Latino south Valley is, in fact, an under-mobilized political force whose ability to win has been actively held in check by two political machines, one operating in each major political party. Stopping the dual reign of those two machines is the analytical project of the dissertation. It has also become, fairly obviously, the political project of Villegas’s campaign.
The Democrats, Villegas argues, are ruled here by people he calls “Valleycrats” — a coinage he uses for a recurring pattern of Central Valley Democrats who run as moderates, break with their own party on the issues their districts’ oil and ag industries care about, and, if they get lucky, quietly exit into government affairs jobs at refineries and oil-industry trade associations.
He names names. Michael Rubio: elected to the Kern County Board of Supervisors as the lone Democrat, won a state senate seat in 2010, then resigned mid-first-term to take a government affairs job with Chevron. Nicole Parra: kicked out of her own Capitol office by Democratic leadership for refusing to vote with her caucus on the state budget, later went to a refinery. Willie Rivera: the youngest Bakersfield city councilmember in history at 22, took a job as Director of Regulatory Affairs for the California Independent Petroleum Association while still on council, then resigned in 2020 for a job at Aera Energy. Rudy Salas — Valadao’s 2022 and 2024 challenger — was stripped of a chairmanship in 2017 for being the sole Democrat to oppose the gas tax, and in 2020 received an A-minus rating and endorsement from the NRA Political Victory Fund. Villegas shows these Valleycrats can’t confront Trump because the Valleycrat playbook is not to beat the right but to accommodate it.
In Fresno, the institution Villegas most clearly identifies as capturing the local policymaking process is the local press. The press, he shows, writes the political boundaries and holds court with developers — and the conflicts of interest are stacked thick.
Take the GV Wire podcast “Unfiltered.” The outlet itself was launched by Granville Homes CEO Darius Assemi, the head of one of the largest homebuilding firms in the region, with permits before the same city council that GV Wire’s reporters cover. The podcast has been co-hosted by Fresno City Councilmember Mike Karbassi, a self-described “blue dog” Democrat, and Steve Brandau, a Republican Fresno County supervisor.
Villegas also lampoons Alex Tavlian, executive editor of the rival outlet San Joaquin Valley Sun, who was simultaneously a political consultant for Mayor Jerry Dyer’s campaign. Tavlian also drew the supervisorial map that the Fresno County Board of Supervisors adopted — a map that Villegas argues will let so-called Blue Dogs and Republicans run the Fresno County Board of Supervisors together for years to come.
On the south end of the Valley — the major territory of this congressional race — Villegas argues a second political machine is at work: an oil-and-ag-funded Republican political machine that does not bother accommodating anyone, because it does not need to.
The machine, in his telling, is built around the consulting firm Western Pacific Research, run by Mark and Cathy Abernathy. Cathy Abernathy was once an aide to U.S. Rep. Bill Thomas. Bill Thomas, while still a Bakersfield College political science instructor, recruited Raymond Gonzalez to run for state assembly in 1972 and then turned around and ran against him two years later. Western Pacific Research’s client list, Villegas notes, has been the spine of conservative governance in Kern for decades: Thomas, Kevin McCarthy, Vince Fong, state senators, the Bakersfield mayor, county supervisors, city council members. Kevin McCarthy began as an intern for Bill Thomas; became his chief of staff; ran for state assembly; took Thomas’s seat in Congress. Vince Fong began as a Thomas intern, became McCarthy’s district director, ran for state assembly, then took McCarthy’s seat in Congress. The pipeline, Villegas writes, “has been well-oiled and operating for decades.” Republican candidates in Kern, he adds, “dared not run without kissing the ring of Mark Abernathy.”
The dissertation’s most concrete illustration of how the South Valley Republican machine functions in real time is the 2020 fight over the Mesa Verde Immigrant Detention Center expansion in McFarland. In February of that year, 10 days before a planning commission vote, youth organizers got word that executives of the GEO Group — the second-largest private prison operator in the world — had come down to Bakersfield to have dinner with McFarland business owners. In Villegas’s retelling, the anti-detention center activists crashed the dinner, surrounding the table and unfurling a banner reading “Abolish prisons and detention centers.” Among the attendees, Villegas writes, were the warden of Mesa Verde, Cathy Abernathy of Western Pacific Research, her vice president Matthew Martin, and longtime Kern County Republican Party operator Alberto Llamas. The planning commission deadlocked 2-2. The mayor of McFarland resigned the next day and was replaced by a former GEO employee. A GEO vice president offered a $1,000 scholarship to every McFarland High School senior if the council voted unanimously to approve the conversion. The council voted unanimously to approve.
The dissertation’s third — and largest — claim is about who has the political capacity to break this arrangement. The classical political-science literature predicts that youth from Latino mixed-status immigrant families will participate at low rates: their parents can’t vote, can’t donate, can’t model conventional civic behavior. Villegas’s data finds the opposite. Mixed status, he argues, is a mobilizing identity for young Latinos in the Valley — they know their vote does not represent only them, but the people in their lives who cannot cast one. They are, in his words, “the vanguard on the front lines of organizing and strategizing” in this region.
Translated, Villegas’s dissertation describes a base. This base of untapped voters, he finds, have long been held back by Valley political machines. Whether, with the right candidate, that base translates into a primary electorate that can beat Valadao and Bains — whom Calmatters and the Hanford Sentinel have called “Valleycrats” — is one of the questions the June 2 result will answer.
Why is he running?
Villegas said he announced first — in April 2025 — because Valadao “has been elected into office since I graduated high school, and it’s ridiculous,” and because the same federal programs his family relied on are now being cut.
“I grew up on Medicaid. I grew up on free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs,” he told KGET. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for those opportunities.”
What is his position on the Big Beautiful Bill and Medicaid?
His own position is Medicare for All.
“I actually support Medicare for All and health care as a human right,” he said. He cited constituents who drive seven to eight hours to Tijuana for dental work, prescription drugs, or routine care, and said the U.S. pays roughly twice what comparable countries pay for healthcare.
He linked his willingness to take this position to his refusal of corporate PAC money: “I can talk about these issues honestly and earnestly, because I don’t take their money.”
What is his position on water — the Delta tunnel, Sites Reservoir and CVP allocations?
Pressed for a yes-or-no on the Delta tunnel and Sites Reservoir, Villegas said he did not think the issue was that simple.
“We do need to have water for our communities, but we also need to make sure that we’re having the right balance, to make sure we’re protecting our environment, to make sure we’re protecting communities,” he said. “And more than anything, I want to make sure that we are fighting for working families and small and medium-sized farmers to have their fair share.”
He grounded the answer in the drinking-water crisis in small unincorporated Valley towns. He said he had recently met elderly women at a community center in Arvin who spend $80 to $100 a month buying bottled water from Costco because they don’t trust what comes out of their faucets.
“Why is it that people know the stories of Flint, Michigan, but people don’t know about Arvin, California?” he said. “People don’t know about residents in Porterville, when we had a major drought, having to shower in vans.”
He said he would partner with the Community Water Center on federal-state funding solutions, look at service consolidation, surface-water expansion, and activated-carbon filter funding, and would prioritize small and medium-sized farmers competing against corporate monopolies that have, in his framing, “amassed water rights throughout the years.” He also pointed out that Valadao has not publicly addressed the wave of family-farm closures across the district in 2025.
What is his position on immigration legislation — Dignity Act, Farm Workforce Modernization Act, E-Verify?
Villegas said he is “absolutely a yes” on both the DIGNITY Act and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. He opposes a federal E-Verify mandate and called instead for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship.
He noted that DACA recipients have been in legal limbo for over a decade and that there has not been a comprehensive immigration reform in over 40 years.
Asked about his support for a Farm Workforce Modernization Act co-sponsored by Valadao, Villegas argued that Valadao’s record on ICE funding speaks louder than his bill sponsorships, citing Valadao’s vote for what Villegas said amounts to tripling ICE’s budget. He also said he would make banning private immigrant detention a priority in Congress and said he has met directly with detainees inside Mesa Verde, McFarland, and Bakersfield facilities — work that began as part of his dissertation fieldwork and continued after.
What is his position on ICE accountability and local cooperation with detainers?
Villegas was unambiguous.
“I do not believe that local law enforcement should be cooperating with ICE,” he said. He said ICE has been racially profiling people and has killed Americans in cold blood, and that he would support prosecuting any ICE agent who has violated the Constitution and harmed members of district communities.
He said Valadao has supported expanding ICE’s budget without any reforms or accountability.
What is his position on federal cuts to programs like Head Start, CalFresh, and USDA Rural Development?
Villegas said he would fight to restore funding and go beyond restoration to expansion. He named universal child care, universal health care, and tuition-free public higher education and trade schools as core priorities — citing universal child care programs in New Mexico, New York, and Vermont as proof of feasibility.
He criticized the framing that the federal government cannot afford these programs.
“We’re spending a billion dollars a day in this war in Iran that nobody asked for, that’s driving up fuel prices,” he said.
He also said he would support a temporary suspension of the federal gasoline and diesel taxes to provide immediate relief for working families.
What endorsements has he received?
Villegas’s coalition is built around the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and major national environmental groups. Endorsers include:
- U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders
- U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna
- Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC
- Congressional Hispanic Caucus BOLD PAC
- Latino Victory Fund
- Working Families Party
- Leaders We Deserve PAC (David Hogg)
- Former U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas
- Dolores Huerta
- National Nurses United
- All four in-district Democratic Party county chairs (Cathy Jorgensen of Kings, Christian Romo of Kern, Josh Evans of Tulare, Ruben Zarate of Fresno)
- Bakersfield Vice Mayor Manpreet Kaur
- Food & Water Action
- Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund
- Oil Change Action
- Climate Hawks Vote
- GrayPAC
The Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund’s April 9, 2026 endorsement release credits Villegas as a school board trustee with banning the use of RoundUp on school property.
Who are his top donors?
Villegas raised more than $1.3 million across the cycle through May 13, with $720,000 in cash on hand at the end of Q1. He has pledged to refuse corporate PAC money.
Candidate: Jasmeet Bains
Job: California state assemblymember, Assembly District 35 (since 2022); practicing family medicine physician at Adventist Health Delano; medical director of Bakersfield Recovery Services; chief medical officer for the Central Valley with the California Medical Assistance Team
Age: 40
Residency: Born and raised in Delano (Kern County); lives in Bakersfield
Notable Endorsements: Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (Red to Blue program), SEIU California, EMILYs List, 314 Action Fund, Teamsters Joint Council 7, AFSCME California
Bains is the daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from India who settled in Delano. She is the first South Asian woman in the Legislature in California history. She earned a biology degree from Illinois Institute of Technology and an MD from the American University of Antigua — a Caribbean medical school that Republican opponents have at times tried to use against her — and a primary-care psychiatry fellowship at UC Irvine. She chaired the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission in 2018.
During the COVID-19 pandemic she served with the state’s emergency medical response team and continues to see patients on weekends at the Delano clinic she says is now threatened with closure under H.R. 1. Before that, she worked at her father’s Chevrolet dealership in Taft during the Great Recession.
She was elected to Assembly District 35 in 2022, defeating fellow Democrat and Kern County Supervisor Leticia Perez. Bains’s record in Sacramento on breaking with Democrats on key oil legislation has been controversial.
In March 2023, she was the only Assembly Democrat to vote against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s oil price-gouging penalty bill. The morning after, she tweeted: “Stand alone if you must, but always stand for truth.” Newsom’s then-chief of staff Dana Williamson replied: “Alone and confused you shall likely remain.” Days later, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon stripped Bains of her seat on the Assembly Business and Professions Committee. She was reinstated about a month later.
Despite voting against the oil price-gouging bill, Bains successfully worked to get the head of the California Air Resources Board to resign. In May 2025, she publicly demanded that CARB Chair Liane Randolph resign after Randolph testified before the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee that CARB does not directly analyze retail gas-price impacts when crafting air-quality regulations. Randolph announced her retirement that September.
Bains also split with the Democratic Party over voting issues. In August 2025, she became the only Democrat in the Assembly to vote against ACA 8 — the Texas-response constitutional amendment that became Proposition 50, which passed statewide by 28 points two months later.
In 2024, she was one of the first lawmakers to endorse Proposition 36, the criminal-penalty initiative aimed at harsher penalties for misdemeanors such as theft, funded by Walmart, Target, Home Depot, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association — which represents prison guards in Corcoran, Avenal and elsewhere — and the California Republican Party.
Per a 2024 OpenSecrets/CalMatters analysis cited by KGET, Bains received the second-highest amount of oil-and-gas-industry contributions among 56 California legislators tracked. CalMatters has more than once referred to her as the lone Democrat or “Valleycrat” in its coverage of the oil-profits fight.
Why is she running?
Bains points to Valadao’s H.R. 1 vote. She said she had taken him at his word when he pledged not to vote for any bill that cut Medicaid: “In the valley, your word is your bond, and he didn’t keep his word.”
Her own clinic in Delano, she said, is now at risk of closure under the bill, and her motivation is rooted in her medical practice rather than political ambition: “I didn’t grow up thinking I’d ever run for Congress.”
What is her position on the Big Beautiful Bill and Medicaid?
Bains called the rural-health offset a betrayal of the Valley.
The $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, she said, brings in roughly $300 million to California after a national cut to Medicaid of roughly a trillion dollars — “pennies compared to the devastation that our hospitals are experiencing.”
She said the Kern County burn unit is scheduled to close on June 30, when the Grossman Burn Center at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital in Kern County is set to shut it down. She said the closure means burn patients and firefighters in her community will now have to travel three hours for care.
She supports protecting and expanding Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, and restoring “Medicaid funding that Valadao cut” and the ACA tax credit. Asked about Medicare for All, she stopped short of endorsing it as a slogan but said: “Medicare needs to be for everyone. Healthcare is a right.”
She returned repeatedly to her experience as a Medi-Cal physician.
“I’ve worked in the trenches,” she said, naming federally qualified health centers in Bakersfield and Tulare and pointing to her appointment to the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission as evidence that her policy authority is rooted in clinical practice.
She shared a story from her Delano clinic of a mother feeding Pedialyte to her infant because she could not afford formula.
What is her position on water — the Delta tunnel, Sites Reservoir and CVP allocations?
Bains declined to take a yes-or-no position on either the Delta Conveyance Project or Sites Reservoir.
“I haven’t looked into the individual projects,” she said. “However, what I am for is delivering more water to the valley.”
She criticized state and federal officials for failing to act faster on Delta pumping during the 2023 atmospheric river events to increase Delta pumping. She framed her position as one of accountability rather than infrastructure preference.
“We’re done with talking points,” she said. “They want to see action. They want to see deliverables.”
What is her position on immigration legislation — Dignity Act, Farm Workforce Modernization Act, E-Verify?
Bains was not pressed in her interview with Fresnoland on her specific position on the bipartisan DIGNITY Act or the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, but said she supports comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship and that healthcare should not depend on immigration status.
“I am a doctor. I took an oath to do no harm, to protect everyone.”
She did not stake out a public position on a federal E-Verify mandate.
What is her position on ICE accountability and local cooperation with detainers?
Bains said ICE “has its place” but called current operations “atrocious” and “way overboard,” citing the killings of U.S. citizens by federal agents.
“We have to also hold ourselves accountable and have a level of humanity,” she said. “Loss of innocent life is not okay, and I will never, ever accept that.”
She did not commit to specific votes on cutting ICE funding or restricting cooperation with local detainers.
What is her position on federal cuts to programs like Head Start, CalFresh, and USDA Rural Development?
Bains pointed to her state-level work. She introduced an Assembly bill earlier this session to allow California to backfill CalFresh funding during federal shutdowns or appropriations lapses, citing the October 2025 federal shutdown that left her constituents without food assistance while the governor of Louisiana, she said, used state money to fill the gap.
She noted that the Central Valley has been short on physicians for generations.: “The Central Valley has been designated since 1978 as a healthcare shortage area, and all we’ve had is our politicians represent us and talk about it and have done shit for it.”
Where does she stand on the DCCC endorsement and Villegas’s pre-convention delegate win?
The race’s most public flashpoint inside the Democratic Party is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision earlier this month to add Bains to its “Red to Blue” program, which the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Linda Sánchez publicly rebuked.
Bains brushed off the larger question of whether the DCCC was overriding local delegates.
“I am a person that’s fighting for the valley. I’m not fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party,” she said. “I am the only candidate in this race that can vote in CA-22 because I live in CA-22.”
She did not attend the May 6 KGET-17 televised debate. She did not attend Radio Bilingüe’s May 2 Fresno forum either, citing prior commitments.
What endorsements has she received?
Bains’s coalition is built around establishment Democratic infrastructure and large labor:
- Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (Red to Blue)
- EMILYs List
- 314 Action Fund (scientists/physicians)
- AAPI Victory Fund
- Elect Democratic Women
- ASPIRE PAC
- Healthcare for Action
- FamMed PAC
- New Dem Action Fund
- SEIU California
- Teamsters Joint Council 7 (the largest union in the Central Valley)
- United Brotherhood of Carpenters / California Conference of Carpenters
- AFSCME California
- IBEW Local 428
- National Union of Healthcare Workers
- UNAC/UHCP (United Nurses Associations of California)
- IUPAT District Council 36
- California Faculty Association
- Bakersfield Professional Firefighters Association
- Delano Police Officers Association
- Kern, Inyo and Mono Counties Building and Construction Trades Council
- Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis
- U.S. Reps. Mike Thompson and Zoe Lofgren, plus eight additional members of the California congressional delegation
Who are her top donors?
Bains had $700,000 cash on hand as of May 13, after raising $457,226.60 in Q1.
Candidate: David Valadao
Job: U.S. Representative, California’s 22nd Congressional District (since 2023; previously represented the old 21st District 2013-2019 and 2021-2023); dairy farmer; chairman of the Republican Governance Group
Age: 48
Residency: Hanford
Notable Endorsements: California Republican Party
Valadao did not respond to multiple requests for an interview from Fresnoland, has not appeared at any of the public forums Villegas attended this spring, and declined the KGET 17 televised debate. What follows is drawn from his public statements, post-vote press releases, and local reporting.
Valadao is one of the last two House Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and the only of the pair that didn’t lose his seat over the impeachment vote. He represented the old 21st District from 2013 to 2019, lost to Democrat T.J. Cox in 2018, then won the seat back in 2020 in a rematch and has held it under its current 22nd District numbering since. (Cox has since pleaded guilty to wire fraud.)
Valadao’s parents emigrated from the Azores Islands of Portugal in 1969 and his father started a small dairy farm in Kings County in 1973. The Valadao family business grew to two dairies and over 1,000 acres of farmland in Kings and western Tulare counties. The family’s separate Triple V Dairy went through Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings in 2019 after being seized the prior year by Rabobank over roughly $8.3 million in unpaid loans.
In December 2024, he was unanimously elected chair of the Republican Governance Group, the member House GOP caucus formerly known as the Tuesday Lunch Bunch, which positions itself as the center-right counterweight to the Freedom Caucus inside the House GOP conference. As chair, he has helped negotiate the GOP majority’s positions on appropriations, including Medicaid policy.
Why is he running for re-election?
Valadao’s public reasoning, drawn from press releases and from his interview with the Hanford Sentinel, has emphasized two themes: appropriations he says he has secured for the district, and the bipartisan Farm Workforce Modernization Act.
The Hanford Sentinel reported in its late-April primary preview that Valadao is confident he’ll secure enough votes in the open primary to move on to the general election without much trouble, thanks to a record he says he has built for the district.
What is his position on the Big Beautiful Bill and Medicaid?
Valadao voted yes on H.R. 1 on July 3, 2025, after publicly pledging earlier in the year that he would not vote for any bill that cut Medicaid. In a statement released the day of the vote and reported by the Business Journal, he called the vote “not an easy decision”.
“After numerous conversations, an additional $25 billion was added to the newly established Rural Health Transformation Program — which will help to support rural and other at-risk hospitals in my district — bringing the total to $50 billion,” Valadao said. “I’ve been assured by the administration that it will be structured in a way that benefits our providers and keeps our hospitals and communities running.”
Valadao has continued to push the $50 billion fund as a Central Valley win. On Jan. 12 he joined Rep. Vince Fong and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz at a roundtable with Central Valley health care providers on the Kern Medical hospital campus to discuss the program. Conservative media has gone on to frame Valadeo as bringing “real relief to rural health in the Central Valley.”
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that H.R. 1’s healthcare provisions will result in 11.8 million people losing coverage by 2034. The Kaiser Family Foundation has calculated that the bill will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over 10 years. Half of the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program is distributed equally across all approved states regardless of population or rural-hospital density, meaning California’s first-year award is in the same range as states with a fraction of its population. NPR reported in January that rural health advocates “say the looming cuts will leave hospitals struggling to survive, making it difficult to fully take advantage of the rural funding opportunity.”
Before Proposition 50 redrew the lines, Valadao’s district had the highest Medicaid enrollment of any congressional district in the country, with 68% of residents on the program.
What is his position on water — the Delta tunnel, Sites Reservoir and CVP allocations?
Valadao has been a consistent advocate for higher south-of-Delta CVP allocations, more above-ground storage, and the Trump administration’s Action 5 operations plan. He has touted the $1 billion in Western water storage funding inside H.R. 1 as a Valley win. He has not publicly opposed the Delta Conveyance Project.
What is his position on immigration legislation — Dignity Act, Farm Workforce Modernization Act, E-Verify?
Valadao is one of the original Republican co-sponsors of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would allow undocumented farmworkers to earn legal status through continued agricultural employment while modernizing the H-2A guest worker program, and has co-sponsored the bipartisan DIGNITY Act introduced by Florida Republican María Elvira Salazar, which pairs stronger border security with an earned-legal-status process for longtime undocumented residents.
He has pushed back on framing those bills as amnesty. “If a person is allowed to pay a fine, pay back taxes, to be able to get right with the law, I think that is, I mean, one, it’s not the definition of amnesty. It is allowing people to resolve their issues,” he told the Hanford Sentinel. “And we do that on so many other fronts outside of immigration, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do that on this as well.”
In a January 2025 interview with Valley Ag Voice, Valadao called the Farm Workforce Modernization Act “the centerpiece” of his agricultural immigration agenda: “But for agriculture specifically, the Farm Worker Modernization is the centerpiece. Things that we’ve done in appropriations are things that would be helpful, but they would just be helpful in the current law. Farm Workforce Modernization is probably the one that has the most actual impact.”
In September 2025, Valadao co-convened a bipartisan immigration roundtable in Fresno with Democratic Rep. Jim Costa, the Nisei Farmers League, and the Fresno County Farm Bureau. He said in a statement that “decades of inaction have left us with an immigration system that fails to meet today’s challenges, creating uncertainty for our farmers and for the many undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked peacefully in the Central Valley for years.”
What is his position on ICE accountability and local cooperation with detainers?
Valadao voted for H.R. 1, which contains a major increase in funding for ICE and Department of Homeland Security enforcement. After ICE operations in Los Angeles in June 2025, he posted a statement on X that broke with House Republican leadership:
“I remain concerned about ongoing ICE operations throughout CA and will continue my conversations with the administration — urging them to prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.”
Valadao has not publicly stated a position on whether local California law enforcement should cooperate with federal detainers.
What is his position on federal cuts to programs like Head Start, CalFresh, and USDA Rural Development?
His public statements on the federal cuts to anti-poverty programs that came with H.R. 1 have emphasized the Rural Health Transformation Program and the bill’s tax provisions — extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, elimination of taxes on tips and overtime, and an expanded Child Tax Credit — rather than the line-item cuts to Head Start, the Community Services Block Grant, USDA Rural Development, or SNAP.
What endorsements has he received?
Valadao has the California Republican Party’s endorsement and has historically run with support from the California Farm Bureau, the National Federation of Independent Business, and a coalition of agricultural and water-district associations. His campaign has not published a comprehensive 2026 endorsement list.
Who are his top donors?
As of May 13, Valadao has raised approximately $4.1 million, with $2.9 million cash on hand — more than four times either Democratic challenger.Valadeo is a prolific fundraiser, raising $26 million for his campaigns since 2012, according to Opensecrets. The majority of his contributions come from agriculture, dairy, water-district,and corporate PACs.
