By Maya C. Miller, CalMatters
California may have a reputation as a bastion of blue, but there are only so many Democratic voters to go around.
Under Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to gerrymander California’s congressional maps to favor Democrats, no incumbent Democrat would take on more Republican voters than Rep. Robert Garcia of Long Beach.
RELATED: First Bay Area D.A. joins 29 others across California opposing Prop. 50
Garcia’s new district, rather than stretching north from his home town into liberal Los Angeles County, would instead shift southward to encompass a coastal slice of conservative Orange County — notably, the conservative-leaning cities of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.
Absorbing those GOP voters into the 42nd congressional district is a point of pride for the 47-year-old Peruvian immigrant, a gay progressive whose sharp-tongued condemnations of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk catapulted him into party leadership as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, the chamber’s main investigative arm.
He also serves on the committee’s viral “DOGE” subgroup, where he and a group of fellow young progressives use their speaking time to lob sardonic rhetorical questions that cast the proceedings and the chairwoman, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, as absurd and even laughable.
“Are Bert and Ernie part of an extreme homosexual agenda?” Garcia asked Paula Kerger, president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service, during a hearing in March as his staffer held up a life-sized image of the beloved muppet duo.
If his party retakes control of the House next year, Garcia would almost certainly ascend to chair the committee, which has vast subpoena powers, and would become the face of congressional Democrats’ resistance to Trump.
But don’t expect Garcia, a former Long Beach mayor and city councilor, to back down from his anti-MAGA bully pulpit just because he would then represent a town whose city council has embraced the moniker “the MAGA-nificent seven.”
“Folks have asked, ‘Hey, you know, you’re pretty progressive. Is this gonna impact the way you take on Trump or the oversight committee?’” Garcia told political commentator Katie Phang during a virtual fundraiser for Prop. 50 last month.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
Garcia’s certainty that he’ll win re-election next year, regardless of which maps are used, is precisely the problem with creating noncompetitive districts as Prop. 50 proposes to do, said state Sen. Tony Strickland, a Republican former mayor of Huntington Beach.
The city is currently represented by a Democratic congressmember, Rep. Dave Min of Irvine, who succeeded Democrat Katie Porter when she unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate last year. But since the district is currently drawn as a competitive seat, Strickland said, Min must win favor from at least some conservative voters if he wants to stay in office. That wouldn’t be the case for Garcia, should Prop. 50 pass.
Strickland and other local officials in coastal Orange County are skeptical that Garcia — a former Long Beach mayor who said he’s thrilled that his new district would include the entire city — will prioritize their cities’ needs, especially if he doesn’t need their votes to win.
“The problem with Prop. 50 is you have predetermined elections. You already know who your congressman is before election day,” Strickland said. “As a pretty conservative city, both Newport and Huntington will have one of the most liberal members of Congress. And I just don’t think that’s healthy.”
“We want to govern ourselves”
While Huntington Beach has long asserted its conservative tilt by resisting compliance with state laws they view as too liberal (such as housing construction requirements), the city in recent years has embraced the national culture wars and grabbed headlines for leading a conservative backlash to the state’s ruling Democrats in Sacramento.
Residents last March approved a ban on flying the rainbow LGBTQ Pride flag on city property. They greenlit a controversial ordinance requiring voters to bring ID to vote, which Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber argue violates state election laws. (Oral arguments before an appeals court are scheduled for Oct. 22).
And a simmering battle over sexual content in children’s books and Huntington Beach’s public library came to a head in June.
The city council had previously approved a controversial ordinance establishing a community review board for library books — what critics dubbed a book ban — and also briefly explored privatizing the library, policies they saw as a counterbalance to the state Legislature’s ultraliberal, “woke” laws. But this summer, via special election, voters overwhelmingly supported repealing the review board and limited the city’s ability to outsource library services.
“We really just want home control. We want to govern ourselves,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns. He doesn’t know Garcia personally, but as a former police officer in Long Beach he’s familiar with the former councilmember’s left-leaning politics.
“Hopefully he’s open to helping us, but if he comes in and tries to break us, you know, break our community and try to crush our council in some way,” Burns said, speaking of Garcia, “well, we’re going to resist. We’re not going to get along.”
Garcia argues that the successful repudiation of the library crackdown is evidence that the city council’s right-wing approach doesn’t fully represent residents’ values.
“The vast majority of Huntington Beach are good, hard-working, middle-class folks that want a just future for themselves,” Garcia told CalMatters in an interview. “That’s who I’m gonna represent.”
Garcia reiterated that he’s unafraid to speak out, even when he disagrees with decisions made in cities that he represents. Even so, he said he would be proud to represent everyone in his proposed new district and would fight hard to bring federal dollars home to support local projects. He said he would prioritize issues that “everyone cares about,” such as increased affordability, combating climate change and curbing corruption.
Still, Garcia also repeatedly noted that the proposed district would still be solidly Democratic. He effused confidence that he would handily win re-election next year and, he hopes, help Democrats retake control of the House.
Democrats have come under fire for drawing the new maps behind closed doors without input from the public or the independent citizens redistricting commission. But Paul Mitchell, the election data guru and redistricting expert who penned the proposed maps, said that in redrawing Garcia’s district to include coastal Orange County, he and his team hewed closely to proposals that advocacy groups previously presented to the independent commission.
Moving Garcia’s district to Orange County was crucial to shore up support for three vulnerable Democrats — Min along with Representatives Derek Tran and Mike Levin — and creating two newly redrawn districts, currently held by Republican representatives Ken Calvert and Darrell Issa, that Democrats believe they can flip.
“That was a critical piece of the puzzle,” Mitchell said in an interview. “It facilitates everything in Southern California.”
Fellow California Democrats have sung Garcia’s praises for graciously allowing his district to go from one that Vice President Kamala Harris won by more than 32% last November to one in which Democrats only have a 10 percentage point registration advantage.
“Robert Garcia is an incredible team player,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chair of California’s Democratic congressional delegation, in a written statement. “He’s taking in some historically Republican neighborhoods, but it’s still going to be a Democratic district.”
During the same virtual fundraiser in September, Garcia told viewers that taking on more Republican voters was “the right thing to do” because “our democracy’s at stake.”
“This is not a moment for us to worry about not having competitive seats or about being in Congress for a lifetime,” Garcia said. “This is about winning the majority to protect people and to save our country.”