PALM DESERT, California — The budding White House race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump is hardly the only campaign rematch worth watching heading into November.
The neck-and-neck fight for a House majority will play out in California’s 41st Congressional District, with its eastern edge about a two-hour drive east of Los Angeles, depending on traffic. The contest to represent the sprawling district, covering the southern Riverside suburbs to Palm Springs, is a rematch from 2022 between Democrat Will Rollins, a former federal prosecutor, and Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), first elected to the House in 1992. Before his current district was redrawn after the 2020 census by California’s independent redistricting commission, Calvert had represented a series of considerably more conservative Inland Empire constituencies.
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The House race will be decided on its own merits, with a veteran lawmaker touting his record facing a younger rival arguing for change. While Calvert won in 2022, this year’s reelection fight is sure to be influenced by the already acrimonious race between Biden and Trump — even before the former president has clinched the 2024 Republican nomination.
Rollins contends that’s a big advantage for him this time around.
“One thing that helps us is the pure math of a presidential election,” Rollins told Washington Examiner magazine in an interview. “Turnout can go up by as much as 50%.”
Calvert has usually cruised to reelection during his three decades-plus in Congress. But his district now includes more centrist and, in spots, liberal areas. The population is 43.99% white, 38.28% Latino, 7.77% Asian American, and 4.81% black, per the Almanac of American Politics 2024.
The 41st Congressional District now covers Palm Springs, a desert oasis that’s a magnet for celebrities, golf players, and retirees. It also contains a large gay community.
Rollins, who is gay, lost to Calvert in 2022 by a 47.7%-52.3% margin. Rollins, 39, announced in May 2023 that he would again challenge Calvert, who is 70.
The rematch is on the House Democratic campaign arm’s “Red to Blue” program, consisting of what the party considers the most competitive districts in November. And the district is a key part of its strategy to upend Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the 435-member chamber.
The GOP edge is likely to be so small in the coming months, due to a swath of lawmaker resignations and medical conditions plus a possible Democratic special pickup in New York’s northern Nassau County 3rd Congressional District on Feb. 13, that the battle for a majority after the November elections has become a political knife fight. Each House race takes on outsize importance since it could be the difference for lawmakers between spending the next two years in the ecstasy of the majority or the agony of the minority.
The presidential race is an unpredictable factor in the 41st Congressional District fight. After all, Trump already has to coordinate his campaign schedule with courtroom appearances to fend off a cumulative 91 criminal indictments. Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to draw attention to the alleged misdeeds of wayward, indicted presidential son Hunter Biden. The GOP message is also focused on arguing that Biden, who will turn 82 shortly after Election Day, is too old for a second term.
Like Rollins, Calvert expects a much higher turnout than in 2022 due to the looming presidential race. But the congressman argues that boosts his reelection chances. This is due in no small part to Biden’s unpopularity and sagging approval ratings amid still high prices for groceries and other everyday items, Calvert said in an interview with Washington Examiner magazine.
“This race is also going to be about Mr. Biden and his failed policies,” Calvert said. “What’s happened over the past four years, the so-called Biden economics, doesn’t work very well for the Inland Empire.”
California’s 41st District: Changing demographics, yes, but fast enough for a Democrat to win?
The 41st Congressional District stretches about 84 miles across dry, arid, and at times more mountainous terrain. The district on its west flank includes a significant chunk of Corona, with a population of more than 157,000, where Calvert grew up and still lives and anchors his political home base.
“This territory is now a place of upward mobility and ethnic and cultural diversity,” wrote the Almanac of American Politics 2024. “The new city of Menifee [incorporated in 2008], one of the three fastest-growing cities in California, grew by 20% from 2016 to 2021 to a total of 106,000.”
Heading east, the district takes in all of Palm Springs, with a population of about 45,000, and stretches further through Riverside County to the cities of Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage. They’re part of a region that’s a popular vacation destination due to dry heat and abundant golf courses. It’s a retirement haven for former professional athletes, plus some retired political types, such as the late Republican President Gerald Ford. Retired Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer lives there and is a vocal booster of Rollins’s campaign.
Rollins, a graduate of Dartmouth College and then Columbia Law School, was previously an assistant U.S. attorney in Southern California, tackling white-collar crime cases, among others. He later joined the Terrorism and Export Crimes Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Prosecution targets included rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Rollins is running in a House district that’s practically a political jump ball. In 2020, Trump would have won there narrowly with a 49.7% to 48.6% edge. But since then, voter party registration has moved in the Democrats’ direction, giving them a slight edge over Republicans, 36.71% to 36.11%, with “No Party Preference” at 19.49%, per the California secretary of state’s office.
Calvert narrowly won his first House election, against his now-House colleague Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA), who came to Congress two decades later and represents the Riverside and Moreno Valley 39th Congressional District. Calvert steadily rose through the House Republican ranks and has been part of three GOP majorities and three minorities. He now is chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, a position with a considerable say in how billions of taxpayer dollars get spent.
Calvert shares California pistachios with fellow lawmakers during a committee meeting in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2018. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
The Rollins-Calvert rematch offers a test of whether culture war issues will resonate in the 2024 cycle. Since Calvert’s district changed considerably ahead of the 2022 elections, he’s represented a constituency in which LGBT concerns are politically potent. They took center stage in the last campaign and are likely to do so again.
To that end, Rollins calls Calvert’s Appropriations Committee perch a wasted opportunity that the incumbent, rather than helping the fast-growing district, has instead used to wage mean-spirited cultural fights. Rollins decried Calvert’s votes this year, with fellow House Republicans, to strip funding from LGBT facilities in normally noncontroversial spending bills.
He’s referring to a vote by the panel before Congress’s 2023 summer recess, on a proposed fiscal 2024 House Appropriations Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee bill. House Republicans, holding a majority on the Appropriations Committee, struck three Democratic projects to provide services to the LGBT community. The three earmarks totaled $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The project proposals got scrubbed as part of a wider Republican amendment to advance a range of conservative cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings.
Rollins further pointed to Calvert’s support for House Republican efforts to restrict medication abortion pills. That includes a measure to do so in the proposed fiscal 2024 House Appropriations Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration Subcommittee bill, which Calvert voted for on Sept. 28.
Rollins also jabs Calvert over his July 21, 2022, vote against the Right to Contraception Act. The measure would have established a right in federal law for people to obtain and use contraceptives. It passed the then-Democratic majority House 228-195 but died in the Senate.
Rollins said those kinds of votes show Calvert isn’t in touch with his district.
“People are frustrated with a Congress that does nothing while their costs at the kitchen table are increasing. Calvert is symptomatic of that,” Rollins said. “Most people in Riverside County are focused on the economy. Calvert is concerned with the culture wars, and it’s fueled a lot of anger in the district.”
Calvert counters that members of both parties consistently have to vote for larger spending bills containing items with which they disagree for the sake of moving them through the legislative process. Appropriations bills still need to be negotiated with the Democratic majority Senate and be able to garner Biden’s signature to become law.
“There are always votes on these appropriations bills to get these bills out of committee to the House floor and also to get them over to the Senate,” Calvert said. “I’m sure Mr. Rollins doesn’t know very much about the appropriations process.”
As for LGBT issues, Calvert has moved somewhat leftward since he started representing the 41st Congressional District in January 2023. Calvert was one of just 31 House Republicans who voted for the LGBTQ Business Equal Credit Enforcement and Investment Act during the last Congress. He was also among the group of 39 House Republicans who voted for the Respect for Marriage Act codifying protections for same-sex and interracial marriage into federal law.
But Democrats call that too little, too late. During Calvert’s first 28 years in the House, they note, he voted a much more conservative line on LGBT policies. In the 116th Congress (2019-21), the election cycle before redistricting and Rollins’s first run against Calvert, the congressman received a zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s score card rating members of Congress on areas of interest to the LGBT community.
Both sides have strong political bases
Beyond public policy, Rollins’s biggest challenge is building name recognition.
“Our battle plan the second time around is just to make sure folks know me,” Rollins said. “We’ve been breaking fundraising records. And we’re getting more momentum and media due to how well we did in the midterms.”
Rollins raised over $1 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. He entered 2024 with $2.1 million in cash on hand and raised a total of $2.8 million in the off year. Then, in mid-January, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) held a fundraiser with Rollins in Southern California, a sign the 41st Congressional District race is a top priority for Democrats trying to claim the majority.
But Calvert has been no slouch in fundraising himself. He raised $780,000 in the last quarter of 2023, bringing his yearly haul to $3.5 million. Calvert has $2.5 million in cash on hand.
Matched nearly evenly with campaign money in the bank, the trick now for both sides is figuring out where in the district it makes the most sense to target voters. After his 2022 loss, Rollins said a campaign after-action report provided a road map to tell exactly where turnout in the district was low.
On the upside, Rollins added, he beat Calvert by about 20% in the Coachella Valley in the Greater Palm Springs area. There, television and radio are less expensive to advertise on than the pricy Los Angeles market that serves the western part of the district, where Calvert has long represented and is well known. Rollins noted that in 2022, he ran about 5 percentage points ahead of California’s top two Democratic elected officials, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Alex Padilla, both of whom won easily that year.
Still, Calvert is a 30-year-plus incumbent, which would make it difficult to beat him under almost any circumstances. Calvert said he has used his clout on Capitol Hill to steer federal funding toward regional transportation projects.
For instance, the proposed House version of the proposed fiscal 2024 Transportation-HUD appropriations bill, his office noted, includes $5 million for the Coachella Valley Rail Project. This is along with $4 million for the Ontario Avenue/Interstate 15 Multimodal Corridor Enhancement Project in Corona and $2.2 million for the Garbani Road/Interstate 215 Interchange Project in Menifee, among several others.
“I’ve done well by the district over the years, getting money back into the state in highway, water, and infrastructure projects,” Calvert said.
As for campaign strategy and voter turnout, Calvert said there’s plenty of room to grow the vote in his home territory, at the western end of the district — around Corona and neighboring communities where he’s a household name. Calvert added that Rollins is largely maxed out in the part of the district where he’s likely to attract the most support, the Coachella Valley.
“I feel good about the district. I’ve represented 80% of it, sometimes 85%, over the past 30 years,” Calvert said, adding that he’s a frequent presence in the eastern parts of the district that are newer to him. “I get out there virtually every week.”
That area has a strong population of seniors, whom Calvert said he’s sought to help for decades.
“We have a district office open in Palm Desert. We have a staff that’s working out there, particularly on Social Security and Medicare issues,” Calvert said. “We have a great constituent service office.”
Voter turnout cliche still holds true
Sitting by a well-manicured lagoon at the Palm Desert Civic Center Park, a quick walk from Calvert’s congressional district office and Palm Desert City Hall, Jean Harter said she’ll be voting for the congressman’s reelection in November — and Trump, assuming he’s the Republican nominee against Biden.
Watching a group of geese, ducks, and wren splash and bask in the mid-January desert sun, Harter, a 72-year-old retiree and self-described “religious conservative,” said she’s dismayed with the liberal tilt of the area.
“Taxes are high here. There are rainbow flags everywhere. It’s not America,” said Harter, adding she’s scouted out more politically conservative places to move to, such as Inman, South Carolina, in the Palmetto State’s strongly conservative upcountry. But she can’t move currently since her children and grandchildren are local in the Inland Empire.
Yet a couple of miles down Gerald Ford Drive, views on the looming 41st Congressional District race were starkly different.
After a baked lobster and freshwater eel roll meal at Joyce’s Sushi, in Rancho Mirage, Wendy Scharf said she couldn’t wait to vote against both Calvert and Trump. Calvert “does not represent the people here,” said Scharf, a 58-year-old small-business owner who volunteered that she’s “strongly pro-choice” on abortion and considers Trump an insurrectionist.
“A change is long overdue. I’m hoping to say, ‘Good riddance,’” added Scharf outside the Japanese restaurant in a well-maintained strip mall, with patrons heading from a nearby day spa, catty-corner from Gelson’s, an upscale Southern California supermarket chain with a store in the desert area.
The opposing views on the House race reflect the challenges and opportunities for each candidate in boosting turnout for their bids as the presidential race plays out across the nation, with Election Day on Nov. 5.
“It all comes down to turnout” is a tried-and-true campaign cliche, and it still holds.
Voter turnout will almost certainly be up in November from two years prior. The Trump era of politics has seen large leaps in voter participation, with passionate supporters and detractors participating in the electoral process.
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“About two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election — the highest rate for any national election since 1900,” found a Pew Research Center report released on July 12, 2023. “The 2018 election (49% turnout) had the highest rate for a midterm since 1914. Even the 2022 election’s turnout, with a slightly lower rate of 46%, exceeded that of all midterm elections since 1970.”
Republican Calvert and Democratic challenger Rollins can plausibly claim that the expected high turnout will help their sides. One of them will be right. The next nine months will test who that is.
David Mark is managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
