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Our verdict

we endorse David Valadao — flaws named, eyes open

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026. California mailed every active registered voter a ballot in early October, and vote centers open for early in-person voting in Voter's Choice Act counties on October 24. This is the whole race — the platforms, the records, the worst claims against each man, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses David Valadao — with his flaws named in full below, because the alternative is the socialist program itself. Read the research, and hold the man we endorse to it.

How CA-22 got here

California's 22nd District runs through the southern Central Valley — parts of Kings, Tulare, and Kern counties, Bakersfield to Visalia — farm country that feeds the nation and votes nothing like the California of the national imagination.

The incumbent is Rep. David Valadao (R), a Hanford dairy farmer first elected in 2012. He lost this seat in the 2018 Democratic wave, won it back in 2020, and has won six of his seven congressional elections in a district where Democrats have held a double-digit registration advantage the entire time. The Democratic nominee is Randy Villegas, a political science professor at College of the Sequoias, a trustee of the Visalia Unified School District board, and the son of Mexican immigrants who grew up in Bakersfield and helps run his family's auto shop.

This race is being run on new lines. California voters approved Proposition 50 in November 2025, the Democratic legislature's mid-decade redraw, and the new 22nd is harder ground for Valadao than the old one: on these lines, Donald Trump carried the district by about 2 points in 2024, down from about 6 on the old map. The June 2 top-two primary told the same story from the other direction — Valadao took just 40.7% while the two leading Democrats, Villegas and Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains, combined for 59.3%. No California Republican has overcome a primary deficit like that since the state adopted the top-two system in 2012.

The raters: Cook Political Report says Toss Up. Inside Elections moved the race to Toss-up on October 1. Sabato's Crystal Ball moved it further, to Leans Democratic, in July. One partisan poll is public: Tulchin Research for House Majority PAC, the Democratic super PAC, surveyed the district June 15–21 and found Villegas ahead 48–44. Treat that for what it is — a Democratic firm's poll released by a Democratic PAC — but no public poll showing Valadao ahead has surfaced to answer it.

Why does one Valley seat matter this much? Because the House is that close: 218 Republicans, 214 Democrats, one independent (California's Kevin Kiley, who left the GOP and still caucuses with Republicans), and two vacancies. Democrats need a net gain of three seats to take the chamber. Each party's allies had booked more than $16 million in advertising in this district alone through Election Day, according to AdImpact data reported by KFF Health News. Speaker Mike Johnson came to Bakersfield to rally for Valadao on September 30. Sen. Bernie Sanders came to Bakersfield to rally for Villegas on October 4. Both parties understand what this seat is: one of the three.

An honesty note before we start, because it applies to this whole piece: House races get thin national coverage, and this one is no exception. No PolitiFact or FactCheck.org ruling on the central claims in CA-22 turned up in our research. What follows is built from Ballotpedia, KFF Health News' on-the-ground reporting, the candidates' own statements, and the campaigns' claims — each labeled as what it is.

The story of the seat: the survivor

David Valadao's defining fact is one his own party cannot forgive and his district keeps rewarding. On January 13, 2021, he was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over the January 6 Capitol riot, saying he had to "go with my gut and vote my conscience." Of those ten, only two survived the 2022 elections — Valadao and Dan Newhouse of Washington. Newhouse is not running again. That makes Valadao, in the words KFF Health News and Sabato's Crystal Ball both use, the last remaining House Republican who voted to impeach Trump and is seeking reelection.

He survived the way Valley incumbents survive: water, agriculture, and distance from Washington fights. He cites $540 million secured for water storage and conveyance and more than $49 million in federal funding for district projects. He is, as his House office notes, the sole dairyman in Congress, and he has made farm labor his signature bipartisan cause — reintroducing the Farm Workforce Modernization Act in successive Congresses and co-sponsoring the Dignity Act, both of which would give undocumented farmworkers a path to legal status, alongside the Securing Agriculture's Workforce Act to modernize the H-2A visa program for year-round operations like dairies.

That record — pro-agriculture, pro-water, willing to break with his party on immigration and once on impeachment — is the whole reason a Republican holds a Democratic-registration district. It is also why the next section exists. Because in 2025, on the biggest vote of the Congress, the independent streak stopped.

David Valadao (Republican)

His platform: In his own framing, an independent member who will "stand up to the divisive partisanship in Washington D.C., get things done to grow our local economy, and deliver more water for our farmers and communities." Conservative on government: limit regulation, keep money with families, farmers, and small businesses, protect water infrastructure, and stand up for seniors and veterans. His campaign points to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's tax provisions — no tax on tips and overtime — as delivered relief for Valley workers.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He promised not to cut Medicaid, then cast the deciding vote to cut it. This is the Democratic case in one sentence, and most of it is documented. The district context first: roughly six in ten CA-22 residents are enrolled in Medicaid (Medi-Cal) — by the Villegas campaign's count, the highest share of any Republican-held district in the country, and by any count an extraordinary one. In April 2025, Valadao signed a letter to Republican leadership, quoted in the DCCC's research file, stating: "we cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations." In May 2025, he voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act anyway. The law reduces federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion through 2034, principally through stricter eligibility rules — work or community-engagement requirements and twice-a-year eligibility checks. Democrats call his the deciding vote; the House margin on the bill was a single vote, which is the factual basis for the phrase.

What the estimates say about his district: the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, estimates about 60,000 more district residents could be without coverage by 2034 — a figure that combines the bill with the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which is a separate policy choice and should not be laid entirely on this one vote. Democratic analyses of Congressional Budget Office data produce similar-order figures, in the high five figures. Valadao's defense, given at the October 6 debate, is that "there are no actual cuts" — that he helped negotiate the community-engagement provisions, and that requiring able-bodied adults to work, train, or volunteer is "not an unreasonable ask." Readers should hold both halves of that: the requirement itself is a defensible, mainstream conservative position. The letter is the problem. He did not merely vote for a bill with provisions he had questions about; he signed his name to "cannot and will not," in writing, five weeks before voting yes. When KFF Health News asked him about it at the September 30 event with Speaker Johnson, he declined to answer, saying the reporter was "distorting the truth."

Claim: He parrots false assurances while ICE terrorizes his own farmworkers. In early October, a pre-election enforcement surge hit the Valley: CalMatters reported, via advocates' counts, at least 100 people detained in three days, with vans arriving at the Fresno ICE office at many times the normal rate. On October 8, Valadao issued a statement saying hardworking farmworkers "should not have to live in fear," and relaying that the Department of Homeland Security had told him the operations focused on people with active warrants and criminal histories. The United Farm Workers — the union that represents the workers in his fields — answered that its members were being stopped on county roads without warrants or names, called his statement "insulting," and called the congressman a "coward." DHS itself would not confirm the targeted-enforcement description to reporters. So the sourced record is this: the assurance came from Valadao; the agency would not stand behind it publicly; the workers' own union says it is false. What is also true, and cuts the other way: no Republican in Congress has a longer, more specific record of trying to legalize the farm workforce than Valadao. His sin here is not hostility to farmworkers. It is repeating an administration assurance his own district's experience contradicted, instead of saying what he plainly believes — that the system is broken and these workers should be legal — at the moment it cost something to say it.

The flaw, plainly: Valadao's platform is the conservative platform, and much of his record — water, agriculture, farm labor, taxes — is genuinely the Valley's record. His flaw is the gap between the independence he campaigns on and the obedience he practices when the vote is close: a written promise on Medicaid broken in five weeks, and a borrowed assurance on ICE repeated while his own constituents were being detained. The risk with Valadao is not what he believes. It is whether, on the one vote that matters most, he represents the Valley — or the whip count.

Randy Villegas (Democratic)

His platform: Villegas runs, in his own words, as a fight "for the soul of the Democratic Party" — "Are we going to be a party for the billionaires, or are we going to be a party for the working class?" He refuses corporate PAC money. He would be, he says, "a day-one co-sponsor of Medicare for All, because healthcare is a human right." He calls for a progressive income tax so "millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share," repeal of the One Big Beautiful Bill's tax cuts for the wealthy (while keeping no tax on tips and overtime), a federal gas tax suspension for immediate relief at the pump, comprehensive immigration reform with protections for Dreamers and enforcement aimed at violent criminals, and stronger protections for farmworkers. He beat the national party's chosen candidate, Jasmeet Bains — backed by the DCCC in an unusual intervention in a contested primary — running as what the Associated Press called a "populist insurgent," with endorsements from Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Dolores Huerta, Ro Khanna, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He is a "socialist" and "Bernie Sanders' lap dog." The NRCC's language is attack-ad language, but the underlying affiliation is not invented, and Villegas does not run from it. He was a Sanders delegate and supporter in 2016, Sanders endorsed him and headlined his October 4 rally in Bakersfield, and his signature domestic proposal — Medicare for All, a single-payer system in which the federal government replaces private insurance — is Sanders' signature proposal too. Where the attack overreaches is the word "puppet": Villegas won this nomination against the Democratic establishment's active, funded opposition, which is not what puppets do. The accurate sentence is the simpler one: Villegas is a democratic socialist in the Sanders mold, running on that program openly. Voters do not need the NRCC's adjectives. They can read the platform.

Claim: On his school board, he hid child sexual-abuse settlements from the public. The documented core, from a Los Angeles Times investigation as reported by Fox News Digital: during Villegas' tenure on the Visalia Unified board, the district settled five sexual-abuse cases between February 2023 and March 2025, totaling nearly $14.4 million, with confidentiality provisions — in the one agreement reviewed in detail, the parties agreed to say only that "the matter has been resolved" and not to elaborate, and settling plaintiffs were barred from encouraging public-records requests about the settlements. Settlements of decades-old abuse claims are how school districts across California have handled liability under the state's revived-lookback law, and a settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing. But Villegas campaigned for the school board on transparency, and a board that settles abuse cases under language designed to keep the public from asking questions has a transparency problem regardless of which member raised a hand. Fox News Digital could confirm his presence at one unanimous approval — a $3 million settlement over alleged abuse by a kindergarten teacher in 1969–71; it could not confirm his presence at the other four votes, and neither can we. Report the claim at exactly that strength, no stronger.

The fabricated tier. The RNC goes further and says Villegas "hired" a known pedophile — campus supervisor Dejaun Jones, let go by the district in 2013 after inappropriate-message allegations, rehired in 2022, and later criminally charged over the alleged grooming and assault of a 15-year-old student in 2022–23, the case behind an $8 million settlement. The rehiring is documented and disgraceful — as the victim's attorney put it, "they did everything wrong when they brought him back." What is not documented anywhere we could find is that Randy Villegas personally hired Jones, or voted to hire him. Campus-supervisor hiring is a district personnel action, not a school-board vote, and no source we found puts Villegas's name on that decision. "Abuse-enabler" is an invention built on a real scandal. The real scandal is bad enough; the invented version tells you the people making it don't trust the real one to do the work.

The flaw, plainly: Villegas' problem is not secrecy and it isn't presentation. It is that his platform is the thing itself: a federal single-payer takeover of American health care, tax policy written as class policy, and a theory of government — stated proudly, in Sanders' own vocabulary, on Sanders' own stage — that runs against the values of the voters this publication serves: free markets, limited government, and personal responsibility. He is honest about all of it, which earns him a respect we do not extend to candidates who hide what they are. But honesty about a destination does not make the destination survivable. A voter can respect Villegas and still conclude that what he would vote for, faithfully and on day one, is a disqualification.

The verdict: we endorse David Valadao — flaws named, eyes open

Two men. Two different flaws. And under LiberalMind's standing rule, that difference decides the endorsement: when one option is an extremist by our values, we endorse the other, noting their flaws.

Valadao's flaw is fidelity: the right instincts for his district — water, farms, legal farm labor, lower taxes — carried by a man who signed "cannot and will not" on Medicaid and voted yes anyway, and who relayed an enforcement assurance his own fields were contradicting. When the vote is free, he represents the Valley. When the vote is close, he has shown you what happens. We name that flaw in full, in this piece, and we do not withdraw a word of it.

Villegas' flaw is values, and it is of a different kind: not a defect in how he would do the job, but in what he believes the job is for. Medicare for All as a day-one first principle — a federal single-payer replacement of American health care, tax policy written as class policy, Sanders' program carried by Sanders' own endorsed candidate — is not a lesser version of conservatism. It is the socialist program itself, offered sincerely. That is extremism by the standard this publication serves, and extremism is not a flaw you weigh against a broken letter. It is the line.

So: LiberalMind endorses David Valadao for California's 22nd District. Not because his record is clean — this article is the record, and it isn't — but because a flawed representative who must be watched can be corrected by his voters, his district, and the next election, while a representative faithfully executing the opposite program cannot. Flawed beats extremist. It is not close.

Vote early. Research your candidates. Choose the best moderates, whatever their party — no extremism from either side. And encourage your friends and family to do the same. Then send Valadao back to Washington with this article in his file: the Valley endorsed the man, not the whip count — and it will be reading his next close vote the way it read the last one.

The Valley deserves a representative who keeps his word. It has chosen, between the two on offer, the only one whose word is pointed in the right direction. Hold him to it.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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