Rep. Young Kim said Wednesday that she plans to run for reelection next year in a new House seat in eastern Orange County, while her longtime friend Rep. Michelle Steel said she’s taking aim at a north county seat that will include Little Saigon.
Meanwhile, former GOP Assemblyman Scott Baugh said he’ll challenge Rep. Katie Porter in the county’s reimagined north coastal district, insisting that his conservative ideology is better suited for the area that figures to be virtually split between registered Republicans and Democrats.
“My hero is former President Ronald Reagan,” Baugh said. “Hers is left-wing Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who she says is her mentor.”
The domino of announcements comes two days after California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission approved new political boundaries for the state’s 52 House, 40 state Senate and 80 Assembly districts. The maps are redrawn every 10 years to balance out populations following the census.
House members don’t have to live in the district they represent, though it’s considered politically favorable. Neither Kim nor Steel currently live in the district where they plan to run, and their campaign spokesman didn’t respond to a request about whether they might move to rectify that.
The new map lines released Monday put Kim, R-La Habra, out of her current House district — which includes northeastern Orange County along with portions of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties — and into a district now largely represented by Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Whitter. Kim said she plans to run in the new CA-40, which stretches from south Orange County to include both Yorba Linda and Chino Hills in San Bernardino County and where voter registration is expected to lean Republican by about six percentage points.
Kim notes that she is familiar with the area, with CA-40 overlapping her current district by including Yorba Linda, Chino Hills and Anaheim Hills. Her campaign also is well financed, with $1.95 million in the bank at the end of the last quarter.
So far, no major Democratic contenders have declared an interest in running for the CA-40 seat. However, Mission Viejo Councilman Greg Raths, a Republican who last year lost a House bid to Porter by seven points, posted to social media that he intends to run again.
As for Steel, who’s Korean American, she’ll be facing a serious challenge in the new CA-45 from Democrat Jay Chen, an intelligence officer in the Naval Reserves who owns a local real estate firm. Chen, 43, previously ran for Congress in 2012 against GOP incumbent Ed Royce, who was Kim’s boss at the time. Chen, who is Taiwanese, lost to Royce by nearly 40,000 votes but earned 42.2% of the vote in a district that at the time still leaned heavily red.
The new CA-45 looks to lean blue by five percentage points, with a third of its voters Asian American and another quarter Latino.
Steel already is touting endorsements from the Republican Party of Orange County and Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, among others.
“Although the district lines have changed, my mission has not. I have spent my entire career as a public servant fighting to protect California taxpayers, to lower crime rates, and to hold government accountable when it fails the people, and I will continue to do that work.”
Chen, who counts support from U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, and Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, noted he is one of only five candidates nationwide to be placed on the New Dem Action Fund Watchlist, sponsored by The New Democrat Coalition. However, his campaign efforts so far targeted Kim, with a pivot to focus on Steel still to come.
Steel had $1.35 million in cash at the end of the last quarter, while Chen had $782,081 and says he’s on track to finish the year with more than $1 million in the bank.
In the new coastal seat, CA-47, Porter enters the race with a massive $14.5 million war chest, having raised more money last quarter than any other Democrat in the House.
But Baugh, a governmental affairs attorney out of Newport Beach, argues his platform of “more freedom and liberty for people” is a better fit for the purple coastal district, which is projected to lean blue by just 1 percentage point.
Baugh was in the Assembly from 1995 to 2000 and was chair of the O.C. GOP for 11 years. He lost a 2018 bid for the current coastal district when he was challenging his former political mentor, 30-year Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. Baugh opted not to run again in 2020, but said he wanted back in the race if Steel didn’t run.
Also in the new CA-47 is Republican Brian Burley, an IT professional from Huntington Beach who last yer lost to Steel in her current district’s primary.
One key person not in the CA-47 race: Harley Rouda.
The Democrat from Laguna Beach flipped Steel’s current seat in 2018 but lost to her last year, then immediately started campainging to regain the seat in 2022. On Tuesday, after Porter said she’d run in the new coastal district, Rouda’s team said he was still targeting that seat. But on Wednesday, Rouda said, he and his family would be “taking this opportunity to spend the holidays together, and evaluate all the options laid before us.”
But Rouda also took a jab at Porter in his statement, saying she “has left the district that includes 70% of her constituents, and is now running in my coastal district.” Porter lives in the new coastal district and her three kids go to school there. But, much like Baugh, Rouda argued he’s a better ideological fit for the new CA-47.
“I believe this district’s voters want moderate, pragmatic leadership, and I firmly believe that I am the most electable Democrat in this district,” Rouda said. “But I am also a realist.”
Candidates have until March 11 to officially enter these races before the June 7 primary.
Source: Orange County Register
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