3 women in race to unseat a House GOP stalwart
In the foothills of the Sierra, three Democratic women are convinced they can unseat veteran GOP Rep. Tom McClintock, one of the nation’s most conservative congressmen.
But the primary battle among the political novices has too often turned the Democrats’ focus toward one another rather than the incumbent.
“It’s a very competitive race,” said Regina Bateson, a 35-yearold political science professor who took an unpaid leave from her job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to return to California and run.
There’s plenty at stake for Bateson and the other two Democrats, Jessica Morse and Roza Calderon. With McClintock virtually guaranteed the first spot in Tuesday’s top-two primary, only one of his challengers for the Fourth Congressional District seat is likely to advance to the fall campaign.
Any of the Democrats would be a major change from the 61-year-old McClintock, whom the American Conservative Union has rated as California’s most conservative congressman. Democrats figure that if they’re ever going to beat him, this is the year, with their base energized.
On his campaign website, McClintock argues that gun
control only disarms law-abiding citizens and that there are better ways to deal with the firearms problem.
“Executing murderers works,” he said. “Locking up other gun predators until they are old and feeble works. Confining the dangerous mentally ill so they can be treated works. Responsible armed citizens who can return fire works.”
McClintock had a 0 percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters in 2017 and carries a lifetime mark of 4 percent. His efforts to allow at least some logging in national parks like Yosemite have outraged environmentalists.
At a town hall meeting in Mariposa last year, McClintock brushed away concerns about global warming, drawing jeers when he said, “Climate change has been going on for 4 billion years. The planet has been warming on and off since the last ice age.”
He also said he would not support any environmental regulations that would “wreck the economy.”
His Democratic challengers see opportunity in such positions.
“We don’t need to have politicians elected, but public servants,” said Morse, 36, a graduate of Princeton University who has worked overseas with the military and for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
While all three Democrats agree McClintock has to go, their infighting isn’t making that any easier.
Take the simple question of who has roots in the district, which sprawls from the eastern suburbs of Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and then south through the Sierra foothills to Yosemite and Kings Canyon national parks.
Residency can be a strong election issue for Democrats, since McClintock doesn’t live in his district. He represented a Thousand Oaks (Ventura County) state Senate district, hundreds of miles away, when he was elected to Congress in 2008, and now he lives in Elk Grove in Sacramento County.
A TV ad released by Morse last week chided McClintock, saying that “in 10 years, Tom McClintock has never voted for himself because he doesn’t live in our district.”
But Morse, who now lives in Pollock Pines in El Dorado County, grew up in Carmichael, a Sacramento suburb that is also outside the district. So instead, she talks about being “a daughter of the foothills,” and the time she spent at her family’s Gold Run homestead in Placer County, which is in the district.
Bateson, who grew up in Roseville in Placer County, charges that since Morse didn’t move into the district until 2017, she can’t connect with voters. “It’s hard to claim to be local when you never lived here,” she said.
But Bateson, who moved back to Roseville last year, did her undergraduate work at Stanford, received her doctorate from Yale, worked for the State Department in Washington, D.C., and Guatemala and since 2015 has lived, worked and voted in Massachusetts.
“Look at both of them,” said Calderon, a 33-year-old resident of Granite Bay in Placer County. “They both moved back to California when they were getting ready to run.”
Calderon and Bateson worked together in an unsuccessful effort to block Morse from getting the state Democratic Party endorsement in February. Calderon, who came to the United States as a refugee from El Salvador when she was 2, argues that local party leaders and supporters of the other two candidates are trying to hamstring her campaign.
“People have asked me to drop out and run for local office,” she said. “I’ve been blocked every step of the way. I’m just not the candidate they want.”
Calderon is the most liberal of McClintock’s challengers. Calling herself “an average Joe” who went to community college and then Humboldt State University, she wants to see a single-payer health care plan “that starts right now” and immediate citizenship for all the young immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Morse says that as a congresswoman she would concentrate on local issues, such as fire protection and environmental concerns.
“I want to redirect people to issues in their front yard, rather than what they see on cable TV,” she said.
Bateson said the economic well-being of the district will be her emphasis, which includes work on issues like climate change.
“I’m very pragmatic,” she said. “I’m focused on doing the most good for the most people in the shortest amount of time.”
Whoever wins is going to have a tough time in the fall campaign, Bateson said.
“I know Tom will criticize anyone who runs as a socialist and maybe even a Marxist,” she said.
But the possibility of harsh words from McClintock could be the least of the problems for a Democratic challenger. While party leaders have tagged the Fourth District as a Democratic target, it’s much more of a seat they would like to have than one they seriously hope to win.
Republicans outnumber Democrats there, 43 percent to 29 percent. In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the district, 54 percent to 39 percent. McClintock did even better, collecting 63 percent of the vote in winning a fifth term.
“We’re talking about a very conservative district,” said Chris Baker, a consultant for McClintock. “Tom represents the viewpoint of the majority of the people in the district, where half the likely voters identify as conservatives.”
It’s Democrats, not McClintock, who are out of step in a district where polls show that around 56 percent of the voters have a favorable opinion of Trump, he added.
The Democratic challengers “are upset that their member of Congress represents what the majority of people in the district believe,” Baker said. “They’re in favor of tax cuts. They like the Second Amendment.”
There’s little doubt, however, that the congressman faces what could be his toughest re-election challenge. Because of California’s strong Democratic lean and the success Morse and Bateson have had raising money, political prognosticators are giving the Democrats a long-shot chance of ousting McClintock.
There’s also a question of just how seriously the incumbent is taking the Democratic threat. While McClintock has outspent his challengers so far, his campaign website shows a Twitter feed that has been dark since December. On his home page is the announcement of an endorsement from his 2014 campaign.
Republican overconfidence could be good news for Democrats.
“There are people here who love Tahoe and Yosemite,” and dislike McClintock’s environmental stands, Morse said. “People really want to see a change in the district.”