California — 1st District

Rep. James Gallagher found himself fighting on two fronts at the nighttime candidate forum Tuesday, Oct. 6, at the Ukiah Civic Center.

The Republican from Yuba City engaged in 50 minutes of often feisty exchanges with state Sen. Mike McGuire, his Democratic opponent in the race to represent California’s reshaped 1st Congressional District.

Gallagher also tangled frequently with moderator Michelle Hutchins, an elementary school teacher and educational consultant who chastised him repeatedly for “personal attacks” on McGuire that ran askance of the event’s ground rules. Both candidates had signed forms from the Mendocino Women’s Political Coalition, a sponsor of the event, agreeing “to engage in a respectful and civil manner,” and not traffic in “personal insults or attacks.”

“I hear Mike’s a really good auctioneer,” said Gallagher, who in June won a special election to serve out the remaining months of the term of Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who died in January.

“And that makes a lot of sense, because in Sacramento, he sells you out.”

That was one of two occasions where Hutchins, a former Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools, gave McGuire an extra 30 seconds to respond.

The Healdsburg Democrat, for his part, reminded the audience of his accomplishments in 12 years as a state senator – taking on insurance companies that balked at reimbursing fire survivors, doubling the number of state firefighters, fighting for healthcare, and “to raise wages, improve our public schools, and expand career training programs.”

His targets, when he did attack, were President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress, which he described as spineless, and of which Gallagher, since this summer, has been a member. Under GOP control, the federal government has pursued deeply unpopular policies, McGuire said, calling out Trump’s tariffs, the war with Iran, cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, food and cash aid, and subsidies for those who get their health insurance through marketplaces established under the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.

Trump, he said, “is shredding our democracy, dismantling the rule of law, stripping health care away from millions.”

In the wake of Prop. 50 last year, the 1st District was one of five districts reconfigured by the Legislature that McGuire helped lead to ensure California Democrats could pick up more seats in Washington, D.C., and to offset earlier GOP gerrymandering in Texas.

The reshaped 1st District now includes parts of Sonoma and Mendocino counties east of Highway 101 and all or most of Lake, Glenn, Tehama, Butte, Sierra, Plumas and Lassen counties.

Gallagher’s to-do list included reassuring voters of this redrawn and now solidly blue district that he is a moderate Republican not beholden to Trump — whose endorsement Gallagher scrubbed from his website sometime this summer.

He pointed to his work, during his 12 years in the state Assembly, on bills to streamline housing construction, and to help wildfire victims get full compensation from PG&E.

“I’ve worked across party lines to hold social media companies accountable, to hold Big Pharma accountable, and to ban ultra-processed food in our school-based programs,” he said.

Responding to McGuire’s criticism about the 119th Congress — the least productive in US history, McGuire claimed — Gallagher argued that he’d “done a lot” since his June 10 swearing in.

“We banned banned stock trading. We passed the Ratepayer Protection Act to stop data centers from stealing our power and raising our rates … We passed the ROAD To Housing bill, on a bipartisan basis.”

While the first two of those bills are still in the Senate, the ROAD to Housing Act was signed into law by Trump on July 11.

Gallagher pointed to his role, in the minority in California’s Assembly, in passing legislation advancing the Sites Reservoir in Colusa and Glenn counties, which, when completed, will be California’s largest new water supply project in at least a generation.

On the subject of water storage, he blamed McGuire for “going along” with PG&E’s plan to decommission a pair of aging Eel River dams.

“He’s doing nothing to stand up to PG&E and to all the powers that be that want to take your water away.”

McGuire reminded the audience that PG&E has owned the Potter Valley project for over 100 years, that the utility has been trying to sell it for 20 years, “and they’ve left us holding the bag.”

He expressed support for what he called a “four-basin solution” — a riff on the “Two Basin Solution” framework meant to guide post-dam water management, and a nod, especially, to Lake County, a vocal critic of dam removal, which opponents say would kill a recreational destination and jeopardize supplies for firefighting. Lake Pillsbury, the larger of the two affected reservoirs, sits in Lake County.

While tacking to the center, Gallagher also sought to diminish his opponent, going on the offensive seconds into his opening statement.

“Mike’s record is just not that good. In 12 years, he’s mostly followed Gavin Newsom’s lead, and during that time, your electricity prices have doubled, your housing prices have doubled, your gas has skyrocketed. He is not your guy if it’s about affordability. We need change.”

That Gallagher came in hot Tuesday night was not surprising. He’s at a distinct disadvantage in the redrawn district, which favors Democrats and is described by the Cook Political Report as “Solid D.”

In its recent list of the House’s 10 most “vulnerable” incumbents, going into the Nov. 3 election, Roll Call listed Gallagher at No. 1.

“Like Trump,” texted a McGuire campaign spokesperson after the Ukiah forum. Gallagher “doesn’t follow agreed-upon debate rules.

“But no matter how loud Gallagher yells, he can’t hide the fact that he supports taking health care away from millions, trillions in tax cuts for billionaires, and stripping voting rights away with the SAVE Act.”

Gallagher’s attempts to depict himself as the “change candidate” were complicated by the fact that his party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“There’s only one of us that’s in Congress right now,” said McGuire, following a lengthy Gallagher reply on the topic of high health insurance premiums and deductibles.

McGuire then pivoted to a withering critique of the Trump administration’s record.

“You want to talk about what the majority party’s done to each and every one of you? Let’s go. They cut your Medicaid,” he said, noting that 43% of 1st District residents rely on those benefits.

“It really upsets me. Makes me emotional. People are going to die because of the decisions” made by Trump and Congressional Republicans, he said.

Asked to address the federal deficit, Gallagher replied, “First thing, you don’t send people to Washington D.C. who can’t manage their finances here in the state of California.”

He spoke of the “need to get our fiscal house in order,” making mention of the “$40 trillion debt that we need to start tackling here.”

McGuire corrected him, noting that the national debt is $41 trillion. It’s “gone up faster, under this president, than any other time in modern history,” he added.

The biggest driver of that debt, McGuire said, is the “$2.2 trillion in tax cuts Republicans in Congress gave to billionaires.”

Another driver of the debt, he continued, is “the billion dollars a day” the US is spending on the war in Iran.

Gallagher, inching out onto a lonely limb, defended the war. “We need to be strong in the world,” he said. “We need to stand up to dictators. We need to stand up to terrorist regimes.”

To this point, he added, “We’ve decimated Iran’s leadership. We’ve destroyed their missile stockpile, and we’ve set back their nuclear program decades.”

Eager to engage on the topic, McGuire said, to anyone who thinks Trump “is doing a great job with the war in Iran: I got an iceberg to sell you.”

In fact, he said, 67% of Americans of Donald Trump’s handling of the Iran war.

“It’s a disaster. He promised us no forever wars, and now we’re in a war that just won’t quit.

“This is a disaster,” he repeated. “Our military service personnel are in harm’s way. Hundreds of billions of dollars in military equipment and bases have been destroyed, and we are all paying the price at the pump.”

In closing Gallagher urged voters, “If you don’t like what’s going on in California, don’t send the same politicians who’ve ruined this place to Washington D.C.”

McGuire hewed closer to the high road, repeating a theme he often cites: “There’s more that unites us than divides us.”

The people who attend his town halls, Republican and Democrat, want many of the same things, he said, “an affordable life. An end to the Iran war. They want to bring good jobs to the town they love.

“There’s a lot more common good than you’d think from watching cable news every night. And that gives me hope.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88.