The Insurgent Democrat Taking On David Valadao

BAKERSFIELD, California — The campaign camera was rolling as Randy Villegas changed the oil in his car at his family's Bakersfield auto shop.

Growing up, said Villegas, the young progressive backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Anytime I wasn’t in school, I was here in the shop.”

That’s the image Villegas’ campaign is working to project as he tries to unseat Republican Rep. David Valadao in one of the most consequential House races in the country: not the liberal political scientist with a doctorate, but the son of a working-class Central Valley family who has experienced the struggles of voters he says both parties have overlooked.

Villegas, a 31-year-old progressive serving in his first elected office, argues establishment Democrats who supported his centrist opponent in the primary fundamentally misunderstood his low-turnout, majority-Latino district. Voters in California’s rural Central Valley are more politically engaged than Washingtonians afflicted with “consultant brain rot” might think, he said, but they’ve been given little reason to vote by politicians he casts as beholden to their donors.

“Working families in the Central Valley have been left behind by politicians in both parties, who will sell us out to corporate interests and will sell us out to billionaires,” Villegas said later that evening at a town hall. “It’s time that we have somebody who’s only going to be accountable to us here in the Central Valley, not to billionaires, not to corporations.”

Democrats have repeatedlytried and failed to activate low-propensity voters in the region, underscoring the challenge of turning their solid registration edge into votes. Villegas is now testing whether a different kind of candidate can do it.

His bid comes as Democrats see an opening in the traditionally conservative Central Valley. They have ammunition in President Donald Trump’s unpopular tariffs and war in Iran, while California’s new congressional maps could make the seat more competitive. Political outsiders winning races around the country have only strengthened the case for a candidate like Villegas, who was not the Democratic establishment’s first choice.

In fact, he might not be in the contest at all if the people who gave him his start in politics knew how progressive he was. His unlikely path to the congressional ballot began with another political opening that few expected him to fill: an appointment to a conservative school board after a recommendation that a board member gave between contractions, while in labor.

Villegas was 27 and had just started teaching political science at a community college the year before when he applied for an appointment to a vacant seat on the Visalia school board as a longshot candidate. The board was split between moderate and conservative factions, and neither side could agree on a pick. Megan Casebeer, a more liberal member who was in labor that night, joined the meeting by video and suggested that her colleagues take a closer look at Villegas, who wasn’t even one of the finalists.

The board ultimately chose him, launching his political career.

“At the time, who was Randy? He was just a college professor, a young guy,” Casebeer said in an interview. “I didn't even really know what his political leanings were.”

The board may not have known his politics, but Villegas had already spent years challenging both parties.

His youth-journalism columns, many written when he was 21 and finishing his undergraduate degree, frequently took aim at then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy, but he also pressed Democrats. He urged Rudy Salas, a moderate state lawmaker, to support California’s sanctuary law, and in 2018 criticized Rep. Jim Costa for backing GOP spending legislation that excluded protections for DACA recipients. Most House Democrats opposed it, and the government shut down. “Though Valadao and Costa both claim to support Dreamers, neither stood their ground,” Villegas wrote in the Bakersfield Californian.

He interned for Salas — who failed twice, in 2022 and 2024, to unseat Valadao — and Rep. John Garamendi. Instead of going to law school to help his undocumented parents get legal status as he once planned, he pursued a PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying young people from mixed-status Central Valley families, like his. He concluded in his dissertation that many who rarely turned out to vote nonetheless cared about politics but that neither party had figured out how to engage them.

A Republican National Committee spokesperson said the organization has spent months poring over his academic work, and has swiped at it in conservative media. Republicans have also seized on his service on the board of Power California, a youth political organization, pointing to the group’s progressive views on policing. But their attacks have mostly focused on his school board record. Republicans have repurposed a hit used by Villegas’ primary opponent Jasmeet Bains highlighting the Visalia board’s unanimous vote to settle a sexual assault lawsuit with former students while keeping their identities and some of the terms confidential.

“Villegas is a dangerous, morally bankrupt fraud who belongs nowhere near Congress, let alone another school board,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Christian Martinez said in a statement. (Villegas has defended the vote, saying it provided alleged survivors with necessary restitution rather than silencing them, and he cast the attacks as exploitation of their trauma for political gain.)

Valadao’s campaign declined to comment, but he has acknowledged the competitiveness of the race. “Do I worry about the enthusiasm on the Republican side? Absolutely, and that's something that we'll have to manage as we go forward,” Valadao told NOTUS in January. “But I think both parties are really struggling with the enthusiasm on their side.”

Valadao, a dairyman born to Portuguese immigrants in the Valley, is living proof that a personal profile like Villegas’ can resonate in the district. He frequently recalls during interviews growing up milking cows after school and between sports practices, and — with the exception of 2018 — has won cycle after cycle. Villegas, who was born in Orange, California after his parents immigrated from Mexico, said he remembers painting the BMW repair shop as a kid after his father opened it in 2006, and as he got older, changing oil, fixing brakes and doing inspections on weekends and during breaks.

He has frequently invoked his family’s experience when attacking Valadao’s vote for Medicaid cuts, which Democrats have made a central campaign focus — and paired that criticism with a call for universal health care, noting that his family relied on Medicaid and SNAP when he was growing up.

Valadao has defended his support for last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” arguing the entitlement program’s new work requirements for some recipients will motivate community engagement. He has also taken credit for ensuring that counties with high unemployment rates, such as those in the Valley, can get waivers for the requirements.

At the August town hall focused on health care, Rep. Ro Khanna predicted that the same progressive, anti-establishment streak that makes moderate Democrats in California nervous would make Villegas “a national star” in Congress. Villegas said in an interview afterward that was not necessarily his aspiration, but that the comment reflected how national progressives view him as a key member of the movement they’re trying to build.

Scoring a progressive victory on purple turf may hinge on whether Villegas can mobilize unreliable voters faster than Republicans can use his ideology and relative inexperience against him. He has, like similarly minded candidates, sworn off taking corporate PAC money to win that race, and despite outraising Valadao last quarter, he ended the period with less than $600,000 on hand after a bruising primary, far trailing his opponent’s $3.3 million.

The total spent by November is likely to far exceed those sums, if the primary and past cycles in the district are any indication. Both parties’ House campaign arms have added the race to their lists of competitive seats, signaling coming infusions of national money. Democrats' House Majority PAC is getting started this week, reserving more than a half of a million dollars worth of English and Spanish TV ads, according to a spokesperson. But in a district heavily reliant on the agriculture and oil industries, some of Villegas’ supporters are bracing for a flood of industry cash supporting Valadao.

“Valadao and the Republican Party and all of the super PACs are going to pour millions of dollars into this district. They are. But the thing is, Randy's got a wonderful work ethic, and he's true to his word,” said Cathleen Jorgensen, the chair of the local Democratic Party in Kings County. “We’ll see what happens.”