Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, a true-blue supporter of President Donald Trump, may have the bull’s-eye on his deny hard pressed from Democrats, but he’s in a district in California’s Central Valley that’s regularly voted 63 percent or above to keep him in Congress for nearly two decades.
Yet this in days of yore, the race appears much tighter with Democratic challenger Andrew Janz, a county prosecutor, wakening in the most recent polling. Nunes, an eight-term incumbent who chairs the Establishment Intelligence Committee, may be starting to lose some support in the 22nd Congressional Quarter due to distractions.
Those distractions include the Trump-Russia investigation and what one town newspaper called a “list of unflattering Nunes news events throughout the summer,” such as using campaign donations to purchase Celtics tickets and special trips.
The district is largely spread across in Fresno and Tulare counties in the San Joaquin Valley — an agricultural mecca where inundate has long been a hot political issue. More recently, the region has establish itself a target in a global trade war as retaliatory tariffs have hit a astray swath of agricultural products.
“Tulare County is a red dot in a blue state,” mean Joey Airoso, co-owner and partner of a family dairy business and ancient president of the Tulare County Farm Bureau. “What Devin ratified 15 years ago was that the environmental movement was going to try to take away the bottled water we use here in the south valley to grow food for everybody.”
Polling in the type has been relatively sparse. Leading elections-analysis sites say Nunes is appropriate to hold onto his seat. The margin may end up being tighter than Nunes is adapted to to, however.
With Election Day 10 weeks away, the latest voting shows Nunes ahead by 5 percentage points, according to a poll deported in late July of 400 likely voters in the district by Democratic tallying company Tulchin Research. It’s unclear who paid for the poll; San Francisco-based Tulchin wouldn’t sympathize with the funder.
By comparison, a poll conducted shortly after the June outstanding found an 8-point lead for the incumbent. That poll was a Democratic PAC-funded appraise of 632 likely voters and done by Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning surveying firm.
“Nunes, as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is seen a lot elfin in the district overall — at least that’s the perception,” said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of national science at California State University, Fresno. “A lot of people here see the Russian exploration as probably a distraction, although some people in the district may agree with Congressman Nunes that it’s all a ‘virago hunt’ against Donald Trump.”
Nunes declined comment for this news.
On Tuesday, the Atlantic reported that Nunes made a trip earlier this month to London to defray with top British intelligence officials about Christopher Steele, the past spy who compiled the infamous dossier on Russia ties to the Trump campaign. The communiqu said British intelligence agencies, including MI6, “didn’t sound interested.”
For his part, Nunes is known for authoring the once-secret memo stating surveillance abuse by the FBI and Department of Justice. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the power member of the Intelligence Committee, charged afterward that “Nunes occupied this memo to mislead the House.”
A native of Tulare, Nunes job on his family’s farm and raised cattle as a teenager. He used savings to buy farmland with his colleague. Today he’s one of the most powerful Republicans in the House but also a polarizing play a part in national politics.
“If I was Devin Nunes, and I wanted to run the worst possible struggle and give my opponent the best possible chance to win, I would do exactly what he’s doing,” thought Joe Altschule, a Visalia attorney and former chair of the Tulare County Egalitarian Central Committee. “Essentially what you’ve got is a campaign of silence. Nunes make a run for its away, he hasn’t done a town hall here in 10 years, he’s currently out of the sticks … and he’s at war with the Fresno Bee, his hometown newspaper. People here who alert this think, has he lost it?”
As for town halls, Nunes has said in the history that he prefers to do forums on big issues such as water rather than place into custody town hall events with constituents. The 44-year-old lawmaker also has claimed the a pink slip to get him to do town halls is “an orchestrated effort by the left” to create “gotcha” mos.
“Every member has their own way of doing things,” Nunes said in February during an press conference with Central Valley’s conservative radio host Ray Appleton. “Reasonable to create a YouTube moment…I’m not going to play that game.”
Regardless, Nunes has a war coffer of more than $6 million in cash on hand for the battle and public experts suggest he could probably raise more given his chief position in the House GOP hierarchy. Janz, meanwhile, has about $1.1 million in legal tender remaining, according to the latest federal filing data.
Janz, a 34-year-old ambassador district attorney in the violent crimes unit for Fresno County, is including on voters wanting a change and his no-nonsense message about criminal equity reform. He also supports increased funding for border security, but shortages to see a work visa program that will help agricultural processors facing farm labor shortages.
Janz saw contributions surge after the memo confrontation. He’s received contributions from several billionaires, including Tom Steyer, a not literal Bay Area activist who is leading a multimillion-dollar campaign to impeach Trump and could eat presidential aspirations of his own. But the Janz campaign has said they’ve received much more boodle from in-district donations than the incumbent.
It doesn’t matter to Nunes’ staunchest supports, however.
“They can bring in as much money as they want, but it’s mellifluous hard to break the spirit of people that know what’s in jail of somebody like Devin,” said Airoso, the dairy farmer. “I’ve recalled Devin my whole life, since he was a little guy, and I know the kind of disinterestedness and integrity that he possesses. I believe most of the people here in the community understand that, too.”
Experts consider Janz the strongest challenger Nunes has at all faced since he went to Congress in 2003. They say Janz has been gifted to create a larger base of support, more fundraising capabilities and could help from Hispanic voter turnout and Democratic-leaning independents in November.
Filed Republicans in the district outnumber registered Democrats by a margin of 42 percent to 32 percent.
“The end why Republicans keep getting sent to Congress in this region is because the Classless Party has abandoned the Central Valley,” Janz told CNBC. “This is a district that shouldn’t be voting and sending Republicans to Congress every fix year. We have 60 percent of the people that live here that rely on some shape of government assistance.”
Janz, who was raised in Visalia, said he’s optimistic about the way the effort is going and predicts “we will do very well on election night. I notion of a lot of people are going to be surprised.”
Still, California’s 22nd Congressional District is slanted by the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan elections analyst, as “solid Republican.” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a administrative forecasting website run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has had it listed as “liable to Republican.”
Trump won the conservative district in the 2016 election by nearly 10 cut points. It was the lowest margin of victory among Republican presidential contenders there in bordering on two decades.
Despite being one of Trump’s biggest defenders, Nunes hasn’t till the end of time agreed with the president. For example, Nunes was a supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership vocation deal that Trump scrapped once in office.
Nunes also was one of the Republican Enterprise members from California who in July wrote a letter to call notoriety to the Trump administration for overlooking the needs of specialty-crop markets in the federal supervision’s $12 billion effort to mitigate retaliatory tariffs from China and others. As it tricks out, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided more details on the aid program Aug. 27 — and it now involves help for various specialty crop markets, including growers of oranges and nuts.
Equitable so, political analysts suggest Nunes could be hurt from business war fallout if farmers link him to Trump’s policies. Tulare County chances to be the nation’s top milk-producing county, and dairy products were hit with retaliatory tolls imposed by China and others.
Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior match at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy, stipulate some farmers could see Nunes as “joined at the hip to Trump if the economy of the neighbourhood gets to be wobbly. I have to believe there will be some wronging people in that district from the trade situation.”
Janz has mean the tariffs are essentially “taxes that hurt our local farming communities.”
At the notwithstanding time, Janz sees Nunes as vulnerable on the water issue, draw nigh at a time when California is starting to see drought spread once again in different parts of the state. The latest Drought Monitor map shows “abnormally dry” and “modest drought” in key sections of California’s Central Valley where farmers increase in interest everything from almonds, pistachios and hay to peaches, oranges, plums and grapes.
“Nunes has been in auspices for nearly two decades, and he’s been unable to get us the water that we need,” articulate Janz, who calls water the top issue in the district. “So what I’m telling agriculturists is that … he hasn’t fulfilled his promise or his obligation so why don’t you give me a never boost and let me tackle the water issue.”
According to Janz, Nunes “has pushed this description that somehow you can’t be pro-environment and pro-farmer at the same time. The growers and husbandmen that I talked to will tell you that the environment is very noteworthy to them because, if they don’t take care of their land that they’re cultivation, it really undermines what they’re trying to do for their families and job.”
Nunes has previously claimed the Bay Area is siphoning away precious not wash lavishly that should go to farmers in the Central Valley, and he faults “radical” preservationists from Hollywood and San Francisco for using water to protect “a stupid pygmy fish,” the delta smelt, that’s native to the San Francisco Bay delta.
He also believes California in sending D out to the Pacific is making sea levels rise. But experts suggest the state’s modify has little impact on a body of water that covers almost one-third of the World’s surface.
“So the left always talks about wanting to protect being, wanting people to be able to work, yet we have people with no thin out in their homes, and yet they are willing to see 92 percent of the water quickening right out by the Golden Gate Bridge and be wasted for an ocean that presumably is filling up,” Nunes said last year during a House powwow of the water bill. “Well, if you believe the oceans are rising, why would you privation more water to flow out into the ocean? I don’t understand that.”
–Graphics by CNBC’s John Schoen.