{"id":311,"date":"2026-05-29T14:12:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T14:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=311"},"modified":"2026-05-29T14:12:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T14:12:23","slug":"a-bernie-backed-community-college-professor-fights-for-the-soul-of-the-democratic-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=311","title":{"rendered":"A Bernie-Backed Community College Professor Fights for the Soul of the Democratic Party"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div><ul><li><span>Share on Facebook<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span>Share on Twitter<\/span><\/li><li><i><?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<svg>\n<\/svg><\/i><span>Share on Bluesky<\/span><\/li><li><span>Email<\/span><\/li><li><span>Comments<\/span><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span>At campaign stops<\/span> across California\u2019s 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.<\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=309\">Andy Kim: Nothing\u2019s Improved Since Minnesota\u2014Except Private Prison Profits<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For Villegas\u2014a 31-year-old community college professor running for Congress in a largely Mexican American district\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s actions in the Middle East, even if it means inviting opposition\u2014and massive negative ad buys\u2014from groups aligned with AIPAC? Should party leaders in Washington continue to elevate moderates over populist candidates on the left?<\/p>\n<p>Just before I arrived in Bakersfield earlier this month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee\u2014the party\u2019s official campaign arm for House races\u2014formally 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:\u201c<em>Dime con qui\u00e9n andas y te dir\u00e9 qui\u00e9n eres<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTell me who you\u2019re with and I\u2019ll tell you who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No one I spoke with felt confident predicting who would win the primary. They assume the race is close, but there\u2019s hardly any public polling. Whoever prevailswill 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.<\/p>\n<p>Support for Donald Trump surged in the district in 2024\u2014one 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. \u201cI\u2019ve been asked about this district\u2026a hundred times in the past decade,\u201d Madrid told me. \u201cThe only other time I said that Valadao was going to lose was 2018.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If Madrid is right that a Democrat will win\u2014and there\u2019s no guarantee he is\u2014the bigger question will become: What <em>kind<\/em> of Democrat? Villegas sees the race as a fight for the \u201csoul\u201d of the party, while Bains rejects that premise entirely. \u201cYou\u2019ll never hear me say that,\u201d she told me over the phone. Nor, she noted multiple times, would voters hear her \u201cwhine\u201d about who is endorsing her opponents, which is how she describes Villegas\u2019 complaints about the party\u2019s campaign committee. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see Dr. Bains doing a press conference on the things that matter to voters,\u201d she added. \u201cIt is a point of privilege to have so much time in your life that you\u2019re going to put things together to whine about endorsements. That is sick.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span>The Central Valley<\/span> 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\u2019s contest are children of immigrants. Valadao\u2019s parents were part of a wave of Portuguese migration to the valley from the Azores. Bains\u2019 parents are Sikhs from Punjab in India. Villegas\u2019 family comes from the Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoac\u00e1n.<\/p>\n<p>Latinos make up most of the Central Valley\u2019s population, including about 75 percent of residents and 65 percent of voting-age citizens in the 22nd District. It\u2019s 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\u2019s farmland, the Central Valley produces a quarter of its food. But the money often doesn\u2019t stay where it\u2019s made.<\/p>\n<p>In theory, these economic inequities\u2014combined with Trump\u2019s attacks on immigrants\u2014should have galvanized Democratic power in the region. Instead, the party\u2019s 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 <em>The Grapes of Wrath.<\/em> 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\u2014finishing 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2014and 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, I met with Ramirez again at his office in Fresno. In a reflection of what polls show nationwide, he\u2019s now seeing Latino voters revolt against Trump and his broken promises to control the cost of living. He added that the president\u2019s 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\u2019s crackdown more stark than the TV news programs favored by older generations.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Esmeralda Soria, one of Bains\u2019 fellow Central Valley\u2013based 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\u2019d voted for Trump under the assumption that his administration would mostly target violent criminals, Soria said. \u201cOh my God,\u201d she continued, summarizing the response, \u201cwhat did we do?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t chosen sides, though the move did not surprise him. Madrid was also critical. \u201cThey need to stay the hell out of it,\u201d he said about the party\u2019s campaign committee getting involved in the race. \u201cAny party needs to stop picking candidates and pushing candidates out. It needs to focus on bringing voters in.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span><span>By early May,<\/span><\/span>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. \u201cDime con qui\u00e9n andas y te dir\u00e9 qui\u00e9n eres.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite forswearing donations from corporate PACs, he\u2019s managed to outraise Bains, a two-term Assembly member with half a million constituents and a record of supporting wealthy Central Valley industries. He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>After the forum in Stratford, I joined Villegas for the city of Hanford\u2019s 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\u2019t have much time to decide, so he went with the guy who was most obviously like him. \u201cI\u2019m going to be honest, he just appealed to me because he\u2019s Latino.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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 Pe\u00f1a, was wearing a Stussy T-shirt and gym shorts. He knew Villegas was running for something but he wasn\u2019t sure what.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A switch seemed to flip on in the professor. There are two national legislative bodies, he explained: the House and the Senate. He\u2019s running for the House.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe House of California, though?\u201d Pe\u00f1a asked. \u201cNot like the country?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>No, the whole country.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOh, shit,\u201d Pe\u00f1a replied. \u201cDavid Valadao is that big?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pe\u00f1a wanted to know if Villegas identified as a social Democrat and appeared skeptical when the candidate didn\u2019t immediately embrace the label.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Villegas called himself a populist. \u201cBasically, it\u2019s us against them,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders\u2014I love Bernie, he\u2019s like my political hero\u2014but I\u2019ve talked to people at the door who were Republicans who were like, \u2018Yeah, gas is crazy. Why are we spending a billion dollars a day in Iran?\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s the top vs. the bottom,\u201d a won-over Pe\u00f1a interjected. \u201cThere\u2019s no war but the class war.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=306\">\u201cMind-Bogglingly Crazy\u201d: Climate Experts Alarmed by Europe\u2019s Deadly Spring Heatwaves<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Pe\u00f1a 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, Pe\u00f1a has the chance to support a fellow Mexican American who\u2019s been inspired by the Vermont senator.<\/p>\n<p>In the booth of a brightly lit Mexican restaurant a few minutes away, Villegas described a journey not all that different from Pe\u00f1a\u2019s. 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\u2014and, at one point, fake <em>Yu-Gi-Oh!<\/em> cards\u2014at the Bakersfield swap meet.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2014ranging from a college selfie with Carl Bernstein to later praise for the historian Michael Kazin\u2019s analysis of populism. While in college in Bakersfield during the 2016 campaign, he met Sanders when the senator came to town. \u201cI was like, holy shit, this man is someone I believe in and someone I can get behind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2014including 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 \u201cSuper Pacs and interest groups\u201d; Rock was labeled \u201cHaving a fair election.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span>As a child,<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Like Villegas\u2019 father, Bains\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2019s economy. Whether her voting record has always benefited the workers at those companies is more debatable.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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\u2014including on bills limiting security deposits charged by landlords and so-called \u201cjunk fees\u201d that companies add to the price of goods and services.<\/p>\n<p>Still, her legislative record has earned her plenty of supporters, and she\u2019s endorsed by the California Federation of Labor Unions, a key player in state politics. Tania Salinas, president of the AFL-CIO\u2019s 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\u2014many of whom work in the fossil fuel industry. Salinas said she worries that Villegas\u2019 refusal to take corporate money would hinder his ability to attract investment to the district. \u201cHow does that translate when you\u2019re talking about industry?\u201d Salinas added. \u201cIf you cannot talk to industry\u2026how is that going to translate to jobs?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cprimaries when we feel that one candidate stands out as the strongest possible nominee to ensure that we win in the general election.\u201d DelBene argued that Bains will benefit from contrasting her work as a doctor with Valadao\u2019s vote to cut Medicaid spending as part of Trump\u2019s \u201cBig Beautiful Bill.\u201d The GOP\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cwhining\u201d about the campaign committee\u2019s endorsement, she wanted to make sure I knew that he lives outside the district. She\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>I was also eager to get Bains\u2019 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: \u201cYes.\u201d But weeks later, after a video of their responses leaked, Bains walked back her claim.\u00a0\u201cI approach the word genocide with care, and I don\u2019t believe it applies to Israel,\u201d she said in a statement posted on her campaign website.<\/p>\n<p>The legal debates around which atrocities amount to genocide are complex, but it\u2019s 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 hadinitially called Gaza a genocide and where she stood now.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe problem is litmus tests,\u201d Bains began. \u201cLitmus tests for complex issues are the problem.\u201d But it was clear that Bains did not actually want to say anything specific about Israel or Gaza\u2014neither of which she mentioned by name over the course of a more than three-minute answer. \u201cFor a physician like me, who holds her Hippocratic oath higher than her oath for office, any innocent life lost is a devastation,\u201d she said. \u201cThere has been loss of life on both sides. There has been loss of life in many areas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For his part, Villegas issued no such retraction. \u201cIncreasingly, people are aware that we are sending billions and billions of dollars to this genocidal regime that has universal healthcare\u2026while we do not,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 entire campaign. Overall, outside spending for Bains far exceeds the amount being deployed in support of Villegas.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u201cThe most amazing thing was when the ACA was passed,\u201d she said, referring to President BarackObama\u2019s Affordable Care Act. It was an obvious contrast to Villegas\u2019 push for Medicare for All.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s success; the other by the long tail of Sanders\u2019 defeats. Bains may consider it absurd to see the race as a fight for the soul of the party. 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