Central Valley GOP congressman fights to keep seat he won by 564 votes

Sept. 28, 2024 3 AM PT

COALINGA — On a scorching summer day in Fresno County, Rep. John Duarte (R-Modesto) stood in the shade of Axel Gomez’s yard, making his pitch for a second term.

As Gomez’s representative in Congress, Duarte said, he had partnered with housing groups to bring more affordable housing to the region to help attract families. More families would mean a stronger tax base to support towns such as Coalinga, which just two years ago nearly ran out of water after its primary source — piped in from a federal reservoir 90 miles away — was severely curtailed during a drought. The city had to buy water on the open market at exorbitant rates to keep residents’ faucets flowing.

Gomez, a farmworker, spoke about Coalinga’s need for housing, and for police accountability. He told Duarte that his employer, as well as his father’s, had capped their hours to sidestep a state law that requires farms to pay laborers overtime if they work more than 40 hours a week.

“This is the first time I’ve had a congressman come by and take an interest in the people,” observed Gomez, 28.

A few minutes later, his mother, Patricia, came out of the house and joined the conversation. She shared a copy of her latest electricity bill: $1,270.96. If the congressman could do something about lowering the rate and the price of everything, she said, he would earn her vote. While Duarte offered no clear answers, she was impressed he was out on foot talking to voters.

“Pa ‘delante,” she said, offering a thumbs-up. “Moving forward,” Gomez translated.

“I want to do the job. I’m not a career politician. I won’t be here forever, but when I am here, we’re doing the job,” Duarte told them.

Rep. John Duarte (R-Modesto) chats with a constituent next to an American flag.

The conversation took nearly half an hour — one of four he had over the course of an hour as he knocked on constituents’ doors in late August to make his case for their vote.

Here in Congressional District 13, Duarte, 58, faces an uncertain path to reelection against his Democratic challenger, former state Assemblymember Adam Gray, 47. Both have raised millions of dollars to fuel their campaigns in one of several California districts considered key to whether Republicans are able to hold on to a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after November.

In 2022, Duarte bested Gray by just 564 votes. A recent poll by Cal State Long Beach, USC and Cal Poly Pomona found that Gray holds a 2-point lead over Duarte, a gap small enough to fall within the survey’s margin of error.

On Oct. 25, the two will take the stage in Modesto for a debate hosted by the Maddy Institute.

Adam Gray points to land where a new medical school will rise at UC Merced.

The district they are vying to represent is 67% Latino and spans a large swath of Central Valley agriculture. It encompasses all of Merced County and parts of Fresno, Madera, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, and includes the cities of Merced, Los Banos and Coalinga, as well as portions of Modesto and Turlock.

Duarte, a Central Valley native and fourth-generation farmer, casts himself as a moderate Republican who will break ranks with his party to represent the interests of his constituents. Unlike the deep blue congressional districts that surround the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the Central Valley often registers purple. It is home to the state’s highest concentration of conservative Democratic voters. In Congressional District 13, about 42% of voters are registered Democrats, compared with 29% registered as Republican and 22% registered with no party preference.

Being a Republican congressman in a district that leans Democratic can be a delicate dance. While Duarte has largely voted along Republican Party lines in his freshman term, he has expressed more moderate views on issues such as abortion and immigration, two topics that incite his party’s base.

In 2023, House Republicans pushed through the Secure Our Borders Act, which, among other provisions, would have enacted stricter limits on asylum eligibility, revived construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall, and required companies to verify that their employees were legally eligible to work in the U.S. using the federal E-Verify system.

Duarte was one of only two House Republicans to vote against the bill, citing concerns about the E-Verify program. The measure ultimately failed to pass the Democratic-led Senate.

Duarte also has broken ranks with GOP leaders to support immigration reform proposals that would create a pathway to citizenship for participants in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a federal program that gives qualified undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children the ability to live and work here legally, through renewable permits.

On the issue of abortion, Duarte describes himself as pro-choice. But he has said he opposes a federal right to abortion and instead supports leaving abortion policy to individual states. He voted with House Republicans last year to support a bill that would threaten medical providers with prison time for failing to resuscitate infants born alive during an attempted abortion — an exceedingly rare occurrence that abortion rights proponents said was intended to discourage doctors from performing the procedure. The measure has yet to pass the Senate.

Adam Gray, wearing a blue down vest, walks on the UC Merced campus.

His opponent, Gray, describes himself as a centrist who worked across the aisle as a state Assembly member to pass bipartisan legislation. He founded the Problem Solvers Caucus and is quick to say both parties are to blame when it comes to Congress not getting enough done to help Americans.

Gray was born and raised in Merced and grew up working at his family’s dairy supply and feed store. He makes his living working at a construction company and as a lecturer at UC Merced, teaching a course on the state Legislature.

Gray, who served in the state Assembly for 10 years, said he decided to run for office again when he saw the “complete dysfunction, chaos and an inability to do anything” in a Republican-led House.

Voters, he says, are concerned about the cost of living and housing and are frustrated with partisan politics. He said his work in the state Legislature speaks to his ability to get results: He helped secure $3 billion to build new water storage projects in the Central Valley and funding to establish a medical school at UC Merced.

He has bucked his own party on water conservation issues, opposing various Democratic-led efforts to curtail the amount of state and federal water flowing to San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts.

“A lot of people, they grew up working hard in the valley. Many of us worked on farms, either as farmworkers or farmers, or maybe truck drivers,” he said.

And just as Duarte won a district where voters lean Democratic, there are staunch Republicans who appear ready to cross party lines to support Gray.

One of Merced County’s more well-known conservatives, Sheriff Vern Warnke, said his working relationship with Gray during Gray’s time in the Assembly convinced him that Gray would be an advocate for law enforcement and Merced County communities.

“Yes, I’m a cowboy, redneck, right-wing conservative, Republican, all of that,” he said. “I went person over party, and I do believe Adam getting in there would be a good fit. It’d be another voice to contact in Washington.”

Rep. John Duarte, left, talks to rancher Matt Toste before a town hall meeting in Coalinga.

In his own campaigning, Duarte has stressed his personal experience as a farmer who understands the burdens of what many locals see as overzealous environmental regulations when it comes to farming. In 2017, federal regulators fined Duarte $1.1 million for violations of the Clean Water Act after he cleared protected wetlands on property he owns in Tehama County to plant wheat. The case made him a hero among property rights activists.

During his August visit to Coalinga, Duarte held a town hall to update constituents on his actions in Congress and what more he hoped to achieve. He talked about working with local mayors to make sure their towns have access to “abundant, reliable, affordable” surface water. And he said he hoped to push through immigration reform that includes amnesty for DACA recipients.

He railed against the ballooning costs of the high-speed rail project that will cut through the Central Valley. And he spoke about successes: securing $5 million to repave roads in Mendota.

When it came time for questions, Coalinga City Councilmember Nathan Vosburg told Duarte he was concerned about the congressman’s support for amnesty for undocumented residents and his no vote on the Secure Our Borders Act.

Wouldn’t the congressman agree that employers should face criminal penalties for hiring immigrants who lack legal status and that illegal immigration negatively affects all Central Valley families, Vosburg pressed.

Duarte explained that the amnesty he supports would be a pathway to citizenship specific to DACA recipients and undocumented individuals who have worked in the U.S. for several years and have no criminal record.

“I owe it to my district to vote for it,” he said. “This is a swing district, if there ever was one, and I’m going to exercise the advantages of that, meaning I can step into the middle of these issues.”

Vosburg, a Republican, was unsatisfied. But he said he would vote for Duarte, reluctantly, because “you’re the guy we got.”

City Councilmember Manny Ramirez chimed in, saying his parents, immigrants from Mexico, never took a cent from the state. Ramirez, also a Republican, said that as a child he watched his parents get taken away by Border Patrol agents, and that he appreciated Duarte’s support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents.

Duarte, he said, had earned his vote.

“It’s not about Republicans or Democrats,” Ramirez said of District 13 voters. “We know what’s right, and we know what’s wrong.”