Jared Huffman

The wolf is decidedly not at the door for Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, the seven-term incumbent whose campaign coffers are flush and whose frontrunner status appears solid going into the June 2 primary election for California’s 2nd Congressional District.

Yet, the North American gray wolf has been on Huffman’s mind of late — especially during trips to the northern reaches of his recently redrawn, 13,800-square-mile district, a kind of vertical Nike swoosh spanning from the Pacific Ocean to the Nevada border, at the top of the state, then dropping south as it long has in a narrower strip along the coast, down to the Golden Gate.

Once eradicated in California, canis lupus is bouncing back in 2nd District’s northernmost counties — Shasta, Modoc, Siskiyou — so much so that the predation losses for livestock producers have become a campaign issue.

While many of those rural, right-leaning residents aren’t likely to ever see eye-to-eye with him on issues like gun rights, abortion and climate change, the former environmental attorney is optimistic about finding common ground on the wolf issue.

“They’re doing amazingly well,” Huffman said this week of the rebounding apex predators. “But the conflicts are real.”

While he’d rather see ranchers use nonlethal methods to protect their herds, “You can use lethal force if it’s protecting human life or property. And that has happened very recently in California.

“That’s basically the toolbox. And I support using the whole toolbox.”

Crowded field

In his quest for an eighth term, Huffman is facing seven challengers. The top two vote-getters on June 2 will advance to a November runoff.

The most formidable of those challengers is Nicolette Hahn Niman of Bolinas, an author, runner, former environmental lawyer and rancher who, along with her husband, Bill, earned renown for their pioneering, sustainable, organic and humane practices raising beef cattle.

Before moving to California, she lived in Manhattan and worked as an attorney for the international clean-water advocacy group Waterkeeper Alliance, co-founded and led by one Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Hahn Niman, who lists no party preference, has been a vocal opponent of the settlement that led to most private ranching being phased out at Point Reyes National Seashore, where she and her husband are one of two family ranches suing to unwind the historic shift.

Hahn Niman accuses Huffman, who helped set in motion the mediation that eventually led to the Point Reyes settlement, of espousing an “exclusive, absolutist kind of environmentalism.” She’s been working to depict him as out of touch with the issues affecting ranchers, farmers and rural Californians.

Gregory Burgess, the other independent in the race, is a Mill Valley resident who has worked as a special education teacher, mail carrier, school bus driver and clinical engineer training AI “to detect blood loss in surgery,” he shared in a Ballotpedia questionnaire.

He has a master’s degree in public health, according to the Marin Independent Journal, and believes the most important issue is food security.

“We are facing a rather drastic problem with our national herds,” he said. “Climate change is reducing our arable land.”

Rose Yee, a progressive Democrat from Redding, serves as chair of the Shasta County Democratic Central Committee, and co-founded a company that helps people grow their savings “through socially responsible investing.”

Raised under martial law in the Philippines, where her father was a human rights lawyer and her mother a journalist, she recounts in Ballotpedia, “I learned the power of grassroots democracy early on.”

Four of the challengers, all Republican, are from Shasta County.

Candidate Tim Geist feels called to rein in artificial intelligence, “which could become a potent weapon for truth or propaganda.” He has developed “legislative” measures “to inhibit vicious lies in Congress” – the kinds of untruths, he warns on Ballotpedia, “that led to the riots against the Capital on January 6, 2026 … I will never forget who said what to catalyze that mayhem.”

Robin Littau is a former Coast Guard diesel mechanic and single mother of four and “Christ-following Christian,” according to her Ballotpedia questionnaire, who owns and operates two small businesses and seeks to decrease “burdensome taxation,” while rooting out fraud and waste.

Paul Saulsbury is a father and mobile crisis clinician whose past jobs include EMT, group-home counselor and flight attendant. His priorities, listed on his campaign website, include “Public Safety & Mental Health, Affordable Living and Local Jobs, Wildfire Prevention and Forest Management, and Rural Healthcare Access.”

Angelita Valles is a former prison warden who went on to teach criminal justice at community colleges, then earned her master’s degree “in an international executive program,” her website says.

Valles spent part of her childhood in foster care, then had a baby when she was 16. She recalls, of those challenging early years, “There was no safety net. No shortcuts. Only work, faith, and perseverance.”

She is especially passionate about the need for reform of the state’s topsy-turvy insurance market.

Assigning blame

Returning a reporter’s call from her car during a recent swing through Shasta County — “I’m about to go into a very rural area, so I might lose service,” she said — Hahn Niman voiced her displeasure with Huffman’s role in orchestrating the confidential talks that led to the reportedly $30 million Nature Conservancy settlement.

That agreement resulted in the exodus of a dozen ranching and dairy families from Point Reyes seashore, on a windswept West Marin peninsula where many of those operations dated back decades, from before the park’s creation.

A decade earlier, she alleged, Huffman was “very involved” in the closure of the Drake’s Bay Oyster Company, whose 40-year lease in the national park ended in 2012, and wasn’t renewed by the U.S. Interior Department, creating a national stir.

Huffman pushed back forcefully against both accusations, pointing out that he was a state Assemblyman in 2012, when the decision was made not to renew the oyster company’s lease.

Once he took office, and while the oyster company’s appeal of the decision played out in the courts, he recalled, “I was straight down the middle, neutral the whole way through, and frankly avoided the issue. I did not take a side.

“If she thinks that somehow pushed (the company) out, I think it’s delusional to make that argument,” he said.

Turning to her contention that he’d been meeting with ranchers and encouraging them to accept buyouts long before he “brought in” The Nature Conservancy, Huffman corrected:

“I did not ‘bring’ The Nature Conservancy in, but I did help bring a mediator in. So that was my role, basically urging everybody to try to work something out. They seemed to want to do that. It unfolded from there.

“The idea that, long before that, I was in there urging people to accept buyouts — that, too, is false. I didn’t know if there would be buyouts. I had no money to offer anyone buyouts, I didn’t have the Park Service funded to give buyouts.

“I have no idea where she gets that. It’s just categorically wrong.”

The main point he sought to make, Huffman said, was that in “in my 20 years of supporting the seashore ranchers, in state and federal office, going to town halls and community meetings and Seashore Ranchers Association meetings, she was never in any of them.

“So I’m not going to yield any ground when it comes to supporting seashore ranchers,” he said.

‘Lethal intervention’

Huffman is equally determined to “get ahead of” the wolf issue.

He recently spent half a day with researchers from the Berkeley-based California Wolf Project, whose field work — and scat analysis — revealed that some packs “are dining on beef, almost exclusively.”

Long-term solutions include habitat restoration and wildlife corridors, to “bring back thriving deer and elk and antelope herds, so that the wolves will have something else to eat.”

Nonlethal options include surveillance — some wolves have been collared by researchers — “hazing,” and compensating ranchers after losses. “But that’s not ideal,” he said. You’d like to prevent the losses.”

To do that, Huffman added, “We’re going to have to experiment, we’re going to have to innovate. And in the case of problem wolves that just get locked in on cattle and can’t be deterred, we’re going to have to do some lethal intervention.”

It was a notable reply, coming from the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources and one of the most ardent conservationists in Congress. It was only two years ago, after all, during a House floor debate on the removal of wolves from the Endangered Species list, that he criticized Republicans for once again being “ready to rev-up the wolf-killing machine.”

While he remains opposed to delisting the species, Huffman’s evolved stance on how to handle “problem wolves” illustrates one of the challenges of running for office in a bipolar district with deep blue, progressive Marin County at one end and a good chunk of the proposed State of Jefferson at the other. (That secessionist fever dream would form a 51st state made up of rural, conservative counties in Northern California and Southern Oregon.)

Unfamiliar turf

In response to a gerrymandered political map released by the Texas Legislature last August, Californians passed Prop. 50, authorizing the state to carve out five new Democratic seats.

To siphon off sufficient Democratic voters to create a new, safe blue district in Northern California’s 1st District — which takes in Santa Rosa and is being contested by, among others, Audrey Denney and state Sen. Mike McGuire, both Democrats, and the Republican James Gallagher — mapmakers recast the districts of Huffman and fellow North Bay incumbent Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, who now find themselves campaigning across less familiar turf.

As Sonoma State political science professor David McCuan put it, Huffman and Thompson “are taking a hit for team California — for the congressional Democrats.”

Those five likely California pick-ups loom especially large for Democrats in the wake of recent, major reversals in the national redistricting arms race.

Paul Mitchell, the Sacramento-based consultant who designed the state’s post-Prop. 50 districts, said that without California’s new maps, “Republican gains in the redistricting might have been insurmountable.”

It seems “more and more likely,” he said, “that if Democrats win the House, it’s only going to be by a few seats,” with California as the “deciding factor.”

Moving up?

A Democratic takeover in the House would propel Huffman to the chairmanship of the Natural Resources committee, a role he has long coveted, and which would broaden his ability to fight back against Trump administration rollbacks on environmental and public lands policies.

In recent years, McCuan noted, Huffman’s role in the party has started to transcend “just being a leader on the environment.”

Huffman sounded an early alarm against Project 2025, forming a task force to combat that ultra-right Heritage Foundation document, which Trump has since used as a roadmap in his second term. And Huffman’s was one of the first voices, among congressional Democrats, urging President Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign following his disastrous debate against Trump in June 2024.

This August, W.W. Norton & Company will release his first book, “No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism.”

“He’s become a highly visible activist for Democrats,” McCuan said, “and that has elevated him beyond just keeping things green.”

Hahn Niman, for her part, is working to tie Huffman to the sadness and anger still felt by many over the Point Reyes seashore settlement.

“It’s kind of laughable that he’s attempting to distance himself from it,” she said, “because everybody in the Point Reyes area, or in the ranching community, knows very well how deeply he was involved.”

Huffman shot back: “She’s claiming some things that have zero evidence.

“To make those kinds of claims, I would think she would at least be able to cite a source, like some rancher that told her this.

“Frankly, I don’t think she can, because a lot of those ranchers are supporting me.”

You can reach Austin Murphy at [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @AusMurph88.