As she shares a salt-and-butter breakfast sandwich with her grandson at a Newhall bakery, Republican stalwart Jill Brown said former President Trump’s guilty verdict in a Manhattan courtroom will not affect her plans to vote for him in November’s presidential election. will get in the way.
The longtime Santa Clarita resident and retired teacher, who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, suspects Biden is also guilty of unspecified crimes and was confused as to why prosecutors focused on Trump’s actions.
“Hush money has been going on since the beginning of time. So I don’t know why they’re paying so much attention to it,” Brown, 69, said Friday.
In Santa Clarita, located in a hotly contested congressional district that is expected to help determine which party controls Congress next year, Trump’s guilty verdict did little to sway Brown and other hardcore Republicans.
But it could give moderate, swing voters a boost, and that could be crucial in determining the fate of Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita) this election.
Still, it remains to be seen whether the verdict — and the related smear on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — will have any impact on a congressional race in which the overheated national discourse has often taken a back seat to the issues that shape everyday life. influence the Republicans. Californians.
“Those who are trying to nationalize this race and make everything super partisan fundamentally misunderstand our district,” said Charles Hughes, an Antelope Valley resident and chairman of the local Republican Central Committee. Hughes didn’t think the verdict would have any impact on the race or support for Garcia.
Garcia hopes to fend off Democratic challenger George Whitesides in California’s closely divided 27th Congressional District, where voters have re-elected their Republican congressman twice — despite a double-digit Democratic voter registration advantage. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden defeated Trump in the district by 12 percentage points.
About an hour’s drive from the firmly liberal confines of downtown Los Angeles, the congressional district stretches from Santa Clarita into the folds and valleys of the San Gabriel Mountains and the high desert frontier of Lancaster and Palmdale.
Once a staunchly red area, this district has been on the front lines of partisan wars since a millennial Democrat dethroned the Republican incumbent in a nationally watched race in 2018. But her meteoric rise has had an equally meteoric decline, with Rep. Katie Hill resigned less than a year later amid a sex scandal. Garcia won the seat in a special election and has managed to retain it in two subsequent regular elections.
Read more: Six California House races that could help determine control of Congress
Kevin Mahan, 72, an independent voter, has not yet decided how he will vote in November’s congressional race. As a recent transplant from Glendale, he doesn’t know much about the politics of Santa Clarita or Garcia. But Mahan said he is unlikely to support Garcia, adding: “If anyone is in bed with Trump, I’m not going to vote for him.”
Trump’s historic criminal conviction was a sad day for America, Mahan said.
Beyond the money, busloads of volunteers and unabated national attention have poured in during each of these election cycles. 2024 will be no different: The race for the 27th remains one of the most competitive congressional contests in the country, and the results will undoubtedly help shape partisan control of the House. It is one of four races in California rated as a “toss-up” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
But Trump’s assessment and possible associations for Garcia — who has been endorsed by Trump in the past — could sway independent voters, who make up more than a fifth of the district’s electorate.
Views of the trial and verdict have been shaped by voters’ underlying political loyalties, with polls showing that Democrats overwhelmingly viewed the trial as fair, while only a small share of Republicans agreed with that sentiment. Independents were evenly divided on the relative fairness of the process.
Garcia has not yet commented on the verdict. Whitesides used it as an opportunity to highlight ties between the former president and the LA congressman, saying in a statement that “Garcia is focused on defending Trump, rather than serving us” and noting that his opponent was one of many California Republicans. who voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Read more: Most California Republicans in competitive congressional races are silent on Trump’s conviction
Democratic allies such as Andrew Taban, chairman and founder of the Santa Clarita Valley Democrats, and former Democratic candidate Christy Smith, who ran three unsuccessful campaigns against Garcia in the past, hoped the process could push independent voters toward Whitesides .
“The most important thing to remember about CA-27 is that while the largest voting bloc of registered voters is Democrats, the second largest bloc is independent voters, and independent voters in this district have consistently broken for President Biden,” Smith said. With “the right kind of exposure,” she suggested, Garcia’s ties to Trump could influence how those independents vote in November’s congressional race.
As his group canvasses Whitesides and other local Democratic candidates, Taban said he expected the verdict to come up in conversations with voters, especially as he and other club members plan to highlight the fact that Garcia is “definitely a Trump loyalist ” is.
But ultimately, voters in Congress will focus much more on economic issues such as gasoline and grocery prices, crime and the border, said Jon Fleischman, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the Republican Party.
“I’m not saying voters’ opinions of Trump don’t matter,” Fleischman said. “I just don’t think Thursday’s statements will change many people’s minds.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
