North Bay voters already know that Mike McGuire, the former political prodigy from Healdsburg who became president of the California state Senate, is running for Congress.
Turns out he’s running a few months earlier than expected.
McGuire, who terms out of state office in December, announced last fall that he will run to represent the newly drawn 1st Congressional District — transformed by the statewide referendum Proposition 50 from a safe Republican seat into one that leans Democratic.
In an unexpected announcement Friday evening, Feb. 20, McGuire said he’s hurling himself into another, earlier fray — the Aug. 4 special election to decide who serves out the remainder of the term left by former District 1 Rep. Doug LaMalfa, the Butte County Republican who died suddenly on Jan. 6, in the middle of his seventh term, after holding that seat since 2013.
Prop 50, designed to carve out five new Democratic congressional seats, was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bare-knuckled response to a gerrymander executed earlier at the behest of President Donald Trump by the Texas Legislature.
That plan was complicated by the death of LaMalfa, which necessitated the special election.
Conventional wisdom held that McGuire, who will be favored in the Nov. 3 election for the full, two-year term, would take a pass on the special election, which will be contested on LaMalfa’s former turf, within the current, ruby red, pre-Prop 50 lines — not the Democrat-friendly new ones.
Asked what the upside is for him to enter a race where he’ll be an underdog to James Gallagher of Sutter County, the California Assembly member and LaMalfa protegee whose formidable array of Republican endorsements include one from President Donald Trump, McGuire replied: “Look, rural communities throughout the North State have incredible needs. Everyone deserves good schools. Every community deserves great and accessible hospitals, every individual deserves a representative fighting for them, not for Donald Trump and his millionaire buddies.”
McGuire hopes to become part of a national trend that has seen Democrats significantly overperforming in traditionally Republican-leaning districts.
Asked for comment on this development in the race, Gallagher’s campaign consultant, Dave Gilliard, replied in an email: “Mike McGuire is a self-serving politician who drew a district to benefit only one person, himself, undermining democracy. His votes in the Legislature have raised gas prices making California unaffordable for middle-income families. Voters in CD 1 will learn much more about Mike McGuire in the next three months.”
David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University, described the special election as “a warm-up race for McGuire,” who, he observed, has never lost an election.
But there’s always a first time, and “this one is a stretch” for McGuire, “who doesn’t have the base vote” in LaMalfa’s old district, said McCuan.
Before facing Gallagher in that August “special,” McGuire will have to get past fellow Democrat Audrey Denney in the primary — no sure thing.
The primaries for both contests, the special election and November’s regular election, will be held June 2. Denney and McGuire are likely to divide the Democratic vote — which bodes well for Gallagher. If one candidate gets over half the votes in the primary, they are automatically elected.
Like McGuire, Denney is also running for the regular, two-year term. Gallagher, whose MAGA bent would work against him in the reconfigured 1st District, hasn’t yet decided whether he’ll contest the second race, “but he is getting close,” Gilliard said.
Denney, an educator and nonprofit strategist who grew up on a ranch near Paso Robles and bartended to put herself through Chico State, knows every contour of the current 1st District, having twice run against LaMalfa. In 2018 she lost to the Richvale rice farmer by less than 10 points, in a district Trump carried by 20. Two years later, LaMalfa beat her by 14 points.
Denney and her supporters point out that since 2018, the first election after Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2016, Democratic women have frequently excelled in primaries.
McGuire, they’ve noted, is running his first federal race in a district where Denney — described by McCuan as “the X-factor” — already enjoys high name recognition and grassroots strength.
McGuire’s decision to run in a district he doesn’t live in “smacks of political opportunism, exploiting our rural communities for personal political gain,” wrote Alex Brown, who is Denney’s campaign manager, in an email.
Rather than choosing “a corporate Democrat carpetbagging into a district he has no connection to,” she said, “we can instead elect a woman who has never taken a dime of corporate PAC money and has spent decades advocating for our rural North State communities and working families who have been written off for far too long.”
McGuire has been hitting the road often to raise his profile in the North State.
“We’ve held 28 town halls over the last three months,” he said, “in Oroville, in Chico, in Susanville, the list goes on.
“Everywhere I go I hear the same thing: Folks are tired of Republican leadership, they’re tired of the false promises, they’re tired of their health care being taken away, and they’re ready to flip this seat.”
McGuire says he’s undaunted by the current district’s persistent Republican tilt.
“This is not about party registration,” he said. “It’s about the fact that prices are going up, hospitals are closing.
“People want change,” he said. “They want a representative who’s going to restore their health care, make life more affordable, build more houses and make sure their kids have good schools to attend.
“That’s why we’re running, and that’s why we’re going to every community in every county and earning every vote.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com.
