There are two kinds of elections happening this November, one of them quite strange.
The natural focus has been on whether Democrats can win back the House and Senate. That’s the one that matters for the direction of the country. But thanks to California’s primary system, which advances the top two candidates to the general election, eight U.S. House races feature two Democrats taking on one another. Some feature incumbents with nothing more than token opposition, but several follow the main storylines from primary season: whether incumbents have grown too old and disconnected from their constituents to get another term, whether left-wing challengers can usher in a new generation of leadership, and whether big money will dictate voter decisions.
Some of these races combine several of these features. In the Seventh District around Sacramento, Rep. Doris Matsui, who turned 82 on Friday and whose family (either her or her husband) has held her House seat since 1979, is in big trouble against Sacramento City Councilwoman Mai Vang, endorsed by the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats. Matsui lost the primary narrowly, and polling for the general election shows a similar spread. Matsui’s allies have formed a pop-up super PAC called Affordable California, which is in with an initial $400,000 ad buy and an attack website against Vang. That tilted the balance of outside spending toward Matsui, with about $600,000 in all compared to $470,000 on Vang’s behalf.
Rep. Aisha Wahab, who prevailed in a special election for disgraced congressman Eric Swalwell’s seat in the 14th District, after late money from AIPAC and others tried to catch progressives napping and install Melissa Hernandez in an August special election, faces Hernandez again in November, though outside money has yet to materialize.
And Rep. Mike Thompson, 75, is being challenged by a venture capitalist with $5.3 million in self-funding named Eric Jones for the Fourth District seat. The Republican who finished third in the primary endorsed Jones, and he is also benefiting from $1.2 million in outside spending through a pop-up super PAC called New Leadership Now, funded by a bunch of capital investors from Dragoneer Investment Group (Jones’s former firm), TPG Capital, Thrive, Tarrant Capital, Route One Investment, Greenoaks Capital, Lux Capital, Citadel, and more.
I visited two other California districts with House elections that exemplify the battle inside the Democratic Party, both taking place in the state’s major cities.
BOYLE HEIGHTS, LOS ANGELES
In the home of the Chicano Movement and student walkouts against the Vietnam War, Angela Gonzales-Torres tells me that activists like her have been trying to unseat Jimmy Gomez ever since he won a special election to replace Xavier Becerra in 2017. Kenneth Mejia, now the city controller, ran unsuccessfully twice against Gomez in the 34th Congressional District; David Kim failed three times but came pretty close, losing by only 51-48 in 2022. Money, name recognition, and establishment support came through for Gomez each time. But 2026 could be very different.
That’s because Gomez, a friend of Swalwell’s, is currently facing a sexual misconduct investigation in the House Ethics Committee. Gomez has admitted to a consensual affair, but the allegations reportedly involve House staffers, and one said that Gomez sexually assaulted and harassed her. The Ethics Committee investigation was announced the day before the primary, as Gomez took 46 percent of the vote to Gonzales-Torres’s 31 percent. Afterward, numerous delegates to the state party, including those in his congressional district, petitioned the party to rescind his formal endorsement.
A scandal-tinged race was what Gonzales-Torres, an academic counselor and affordable housing advocate, had prepared to run. Her initial impulse was frustration over Gomez’s failure to sign on to the Block the Bombs Act to prevent the sale of U.S. weapons to the Israeli military. Gomez was the only Democrat to benefit from AIPAC political spending in the 2024 general election, totaling nearly $3 million. For Gonzales-Torres, who attended the UCLA encampment in support of Gaza, that was unacceptable.
“His refusal was, I think, indicative of this pattern of bad judgment that we’ve seen,” Gonzales-Torres told me outside a happy hour event after a day of canvassing. She included in this his consistent support for crypto’s legislative priorities; the industry PAC Fairshake ran $500,000 in ads for Gomez in 2024. The AI industry–funded Leading the Future has endorsed Gomez as well.
The support suggests a comfort with big money that is alien to the voters in one of America’s poorest districts. Yet the latest allegations against Gomez have kept outside groups out thus far. Gomez has resorted to using official franking privileges to send taxpayer-funded mail to constituents, an advantage of incumbency. But the negative headlines have given Gonzales-Torres, a democratic socialist and DSA member, a real chance in this deep-blue district. Recent polling shows her in the lead and that industry support from AI is particularly toxic. Progressive organizations like the David Hogg–led Leaders We Deserve have jumped in.
The district includes downtown Los Angeles and the immigrant communities of Boyle Heights and East L.A., plus wealthier areas like Eagle Rock and the dense, renter-heavy Koreatown. “The wealth disparities are obvious, but the absence from our federal representative is obvious, too,” she said.
The local economy has been battered by continued slowdowns in Hollywood production and the aftereffects of last year’s ICE surge, which a UCLA study showed led to a collapse in small-business activity in Latino areas like the 34th District. Gonzales-Torres has firsthand experience of the latter; her father was deported when she was only 15, and the remaining family moved around from shelters to their own car in the aftermath.
The climate of fear makes reaching voters difficult. “Parts of our community are unrecognizable,” she said. “Even canvassing yesterday in East L.A., you can’t talk to a street vendor or a small-business owner without them expressing that they are afraid to leave their home.” Gonzales-Torres, who is running on Medicare for All, housing investment, tuition-free public college, and a pathway to citizenship, has been working with community partners to canvass voters in ways that outside volunteers might not be successful in doing, and has held “know your rights” sessions to educate community members who may encounter ICE.
Environmental injustices are also rampant in the district. A terrible fire at a Lineage cold-storage food facility in Boyle Heights this summer led to environmental hazards and evacuations while it raged for days. The fire began on June 17; Gomez’s first public statement on it came four days later, when he said his office was “closely monitoring” the situation.
“We were evacuating people, even our campaign staff, on day one,” Gonzales-Torres told me. “We were called into action by community leaders and Council District 14’s office in particular that we needed to jump into action, and our representative was absent.” Gonzales-Torres said the fire is just one of many environmental disasters in the district, from lead found in the baby teeth of children to an oil spill in East L.A. in May. “Calling for the closure of the Lineage warehouse is bare minimum,” Gonzales-Torres said. “Those bare minimum statements aren’t going to do it anymore.”
Gomez did not respond to questions about the Boyle Heights fire and other topics.
Though underfunded, Gonzales-Torres describes her campaign as grassroots and “student-led,” an echo of the history of youth activism in the area. College and even high school students are prominent canvassers and advocates, often coming with their parents to events. “I think our young people in particular are feeling the urgency of the moment,” she said, “and don’t want to see the things I’ve lived through, you know, my own family separation, happen to theirs and others.”
THE MISSION, SAN FRANCISCO
When I visited California’s 11th District, held for nearly 40 years by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, in the spring, it was a three-person race and tech industry veteran and progressive advocate Saikat Chakrabarti, who initially got in to challenge Pelosi, had the most money and an engaged set of volunteers (some of them paid). But he finished third in the primary, which is now down to county supervisor Connie Chan and state Sen. Scott Wiener.
Pelosi has taken a very personal interest in the race, endorsing Chan just before the primary, hosting fundraisers for her, and working behind the scenes for endorsements. Wiener has termed it a fit of political pique for him daring to enter the race before she chose not to seek re-election. Pelosi has said simply that Chan would make the best member of Congress.
Though Pelosi has a national reputation from her Speaker days for prioritizing frontline and often moderate members, her endorsee Chan is pitching herself as the progressive choice. “Scott Wiener is a corporate Democrat, but we are the labor Democrat. And in fact, I think Scott Wiener is the kind of Democrat that is why people are losing faith and losing hope in the Democratic Party,” she told me in her office in the Mission.
“They say they’re for holding the billionaires accountable or they want to tax them. But then when it comes down to it, it’s never the right time … they say that we need to regulate industries, be it real estate, or be it the AI industries or the tech industries. But when it comes down to it, it’s always a watered-down bill that the industry can accept.”
Wiener has gained national notice for persistent efforts to build more housing in California, and he has criticized Chan for being a voice against development. But the major story during the election thus far has been Wiener’s ill-advised release of an AI chatbot depicting Chan, which could be prompted to make fun of her upbringing. (Chan arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong when she was 13.) The chatbot said lines like “I’m afraid my San Francisco accent is so thick I can barely understand myself.” The Wiener campaign took down the chatbot amid criticism.
“I know that I’m not the only Chinese American woman experiencing that on a daily basis,” Chan told me. But she was also surprised by the ferocity of the pushback. “Both men and women alike, people picked up on it, whether they’re immigrants or not … It kind of makes you feel proud or feel good to be in San Francisco.” She put a policy lens to it as well, thinking about how much worse the experience would be for vulnerable communities who are not public figures.
The race has been caught up in the wave of anger over Gaza. PAL PAC, which has supported candidates opposing the genocide, announced a “six-figure” ad buy for Chan last week. That’s just a small piece of outside spending that has topped $2 million thus far. Organizations tied to the abundance movement like Abundant Future and Grow USA have spent over $1 million on Wiener’s behalf, while SF for All, a coalition of labor unions, has spent a little over $200,000 for Chan. SF Solidarity PAC, which Chakrabarti converted from his congressional campaign, is also supporting Chan with over $400,000.
“The reality is that we are still outspent,” Chan said. “People are like, ‘Where’s your TV ad?’ [Wiener’s] on TV all the time.”
Chan is relying, as she did in the primary, on grassroots and labor support; as I walked away from her office, I saw canvassers dropping door hangers around the neighborhood. Wiener, who took the most votes in the primary, has a legislative record that, while occasionally divisive, is something he has pointed to consistently. But Pelosi’s presence looms over the race.
In our conversation, Chan and I discussed artificial intelligence from the perspective of someone in the city where it is coming from (as supervisor, Chan has already voted to ban facial recognition use by the police, stop AI algorithms used by landlords to set prices, pause data centers, and more), how to fight Trump for the next two years (she gave me one word: “budget”), and what kind of oversight she would like to see (voter suppression, the power of the Justice Department, and wars: “There’s no doubt about the fact that these are illegal wars.”).
She wrapped up by saying that her focus is on much more than one race. “I think for us, if and when we win, we will change the trajectory of the Democratic Party.”
