Modoc voters not keen to share Marin congressman

This ranching region with a libertarian streak might have more in common with Texas than the Bay Area.

But it’s not Texas. About five hours northeast of Sacramento, Modoc County and its roughly 8,500 residents are still — begrudgingly — in California.

And California is dominated by Democrats, who are embroiled in a tit-for-tat redistricting war with the Lone Star state that will likely force conservative Modoc County residents to share a representative in Congress with parts of the Bay Area.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to split up the solidly Republican 1st Congressional District covering 10 rural, inland counties as part of his plan to create five more Democratic seats to offset a GOP-led effort to gain five red seats in Texas.

That would mean Republican Doug LaMalfa, the Richvale rice farmer who represents the district, would likely lose his seat.

Modoc County and two neighboring red counties would be shifted into a redrawn district that stretches 200 miles west to the Pacific Coast and then south, to include wealthier and more liberal areas such as Marin County, represented by San Rafael Democrat Jared Huffman.

“It’s like a smack in the face,” said local rancher Amie Martinez. “How could you put Marin County with Modoc County? It’s just a different perspective.”

The proposal would even likely force Modoc residents to share a district with the governor, who moved back to Marin County last year and splits his time between there and Sacramento. Modoc County voted 78% in favor of recalling him, and voters asked about redistricting there view it as a publicity stunt for Newsom’s presidential ambitions.

The ballot measure known as Proposition 50, on voters’ ballots Nov. 4, has sparked outrage in the northern parts of the state. Yet for a region known for its rebellious spirit, residents are also resigned: They know they’re collateral damage in a partisan numbers game.

The map would dilute conservative voting power in one of the state’s traditional Republican strongholds. It would cut short the career growth of politicians from the state’s minority party and make room for the growing cadre of Democrats rising up from state and county seats, jockeying for bigger platforms.

But locals say they’re most concerned it’s a death-knell for rural representation. They worry their agricultural interests and their views on water, wildlife and forest management would be overshadowed in a district that includes Bay Area communities that have long championed environmental protection.

“They’ve taken every rural district and made it an urban district,” said Nadine Bailey, a former staffer for a Republican state senator who now advocates for agricultural water users and the rural north. “It just feels like an assault on rural California.”

Though Modoc County supervisors have declared their opposition to Prop. 50, there’s little else locals can do. Registered Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats statewide nearly two-to-one. Rural residents represent an even smaller share of the state’s electorate.

“It’ll be very hard to fight back,” said Tim Babcock, owner of a general store in Lassen County, a similar and neighboring community that’s proposed to be drawn into a different liberal-leaning congressional district. “Unless we split the state. And that’s never going to happen.”

Modoc County went for Trump by over 70% last fall. Its sheriff, Tex Dowdy, proudly refuses to fly the California flag over his station out of grievance with the state’s liberal governance. In 2013, Modoc made headlines for declaring its intent to secede from California and form the “State of Jefferson” with neighboring counties in the North State and southwest Oregon.

County Supervisor Geri Byrne said she knew it was a long shot — but thought, “When’s the last time the New York Times called someone in Modoc County?”

Byrne, who is also chair of the Rural County Representatives of California and of the upcoming National Sheepdog Finals, said the secession resolution was about sending a message.

“It wasn’t conservative-liberal,” she said. “It was the urban-rural divide, and that’s what this whole Prop. 50 is about.”

Even a Democratic resident running a produce pickup center in Alturas observed that her neighbors are “not that Trumpy.” Instead, there’s a pervasive general distrust of politics on any side of the aisle.

In particular, residents who live by swaths of national forests bemoan how successive federal administrations of both parties have flip-flopped on how to manage public lands, which they say have worsened the risk of wildfire and prioritized conservation over their livelihoods.

As California’s battlegrounds increasingly take shape in exurban and suburban districts, rural north state conservatives at times feel almost as out of touch with their fellow Republicans as they do with Democrats.

Few Republicans in the state and nation understand “public lands districts,” said Modoc County Supervisor Shane Starr, a Republican who used to work in LaMalfa’s office. “Doug’s the closest thing we’ve got.”

“This whole thing with DEI and ‘woke culture’ and stuff,” he said, referring to the diversity and inclusion efforts under attack from the right, “it’s like, yeah, we had a kid who goes to the high school who dyed his hair a certain color. Cool, we don’t care. All of these things going on at the national stage are not based in our reality whatsoever.”

Martinez said she once ran into LaMalfa at a local barbecue fundraiser for firefighters and approached him about a proposal to designate parts of northwestern Nevada as protected federal wilderness. Her 700-person town of Cedarville in east Modoc County is 10 minutes from the state line.

Martinez worried about rules that prohibit driving motorized vehicles in wilderness, which she said would discourage the hunters who pass through during deer season and book lodging in town. Even though the proposal was in Nevada, LaMalfa sent staff, including Starr, to meetings to raise objections on behalf of the small town, she said.

“I know we won’t get that kind of representation from Marin County,” she said.

Huffman defends his qualifications to represent the area.

Adding Siskiyou, Shasta and Modoc counties would mean many more hours of travel to meet constituents, but Huffman pointed out his district is already huge, covering 350 miles of the North Coast. And it includes many conservative-leaning, forested areas in Trinity and Del Norte counties.

Huffman, a former attorney for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, is the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, where LaMalfa also sits.

Huffman said he would run for re-election in the district if voters approve its redrawing, and “would work my tail off to give them great representation.”

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats in the north are gearing up to support Prop. 50, even as parts of it make them uneasy.

Nancy Richardson, an office manager at the free weekly paper in Modoc County, said she doesn’t like that it will cost the state as much as $280 million to run the statewide election on redistricting.

But she thinks it has to be done.

“I don’t like that Texas is causing this problem,” she said.

In Siskiyou County’s liberal enclave of Mount Shasta, Greg Dinger said he supports the redistricting plan because he wants to fight back against the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants, erosion of democratic norms and a federal budget that is estimated to cut $28 billion from health care in California over the next 10 years.

The effects are expected to be particularly acute in struggling rural hospitals, which disproportionately rely on Medicare and Medicaid funding. LaMalfa voted for the budget bill.

Dinger, who owns a web development company, said normally he would only support bipartisan redistricting. But he was swayed by the fact that Trump had called for Republicans to draw more GOP seats in Texas.

“Under the circumstances, I don’t think there’s any option,” he said. “There’s the phrase that came from Michelle Obama, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Well, that doesn’t work anymore.”

LaMalfa says the impacts to rural hospitals were exaggerated. He blamed impending Medicaid cuts instead on California’s health care system being billions of dollars over budget this year, in part because of rising pharmaceutical costs and higher-than-expected enrollment of undocumented immigrants who recently became eligible. (California doesn’t use federal dollars to pay for undocumented immigrants’ coverage.)

“Basically what it boils down to is they want illegal immigrants to be getting these benefits,” he said in response to criticism of the spending bill. “Are the other 49 states supposed to pay for that?”

LaMalfa has criticized Prop. 50 and said no state should engage in partisan redistricting in the middle of the decade. But he stopped short of endorsing his Republican colleague Rep. Kevin Kiley’s bill in Congress to ban it nationwide, saying states should still retain their rights to run their own elections systems.

The proposed new maps would make Kiley’s Republican-leaning district blue. They would turn LaMalfa’s 1st District into a dramatically more liberal one that stretches into Santa Rosa.

But LaMalfa said he’s leaning toward running for re-election even if the maps pass, though he’s focused for now on campaigning against the proposition.

“I intend to give it my all no matter what the district is,” he said.

He would likely face Audrey Denney, a Chico State professor and two-time prior Democratic challenger who has already said she’d run again if the maps pass. Outgoing state Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Healdsburg Democrat who was instrumental in coming up with the proposed new maps, is also reportedly interested in the seat. McGuire’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In her renovated Queen Anne cottage in downtown Chico, Denney buzzed with excitement describing how the proposition has galvanized rural Democrats. She emphasized her own family’s roots as ranchers in the Central Coast region, and said she has bipartisan relationships across the North State.

“I have credibility in those spaces, growing up in rural America and spending my career advocating for rural America and real, actual, practical solutions for people,” she said.