Will Rollins for Congress
Will Rollins, center, is a former federal prosecutor and Democratic candidate in California’s 41st Congressional District.
One of the more interesting House races in the midterms is happening in Riverside County, California. The longest-serving Republican in the state congressional delegation, Ken Calvert, was redistricted into the 41st Congressional District, a swing seat that includes his hometown of Corona but also the more liberal desert cities to the east. That includes Palm Springs, a liberal bastion and the only city in America with an all-LGBT city council. Calvert only won 48 percent of the vote in the all-party primary, and Republicans outpolled Democrats by just 53 percent to 47 percent.
Calvert has a long history as an opponent of gay rights; until this year, he sported a perfect zero percent score from the Human Rights Campaign. His first re-election campaign in 1994 against Mark Takano, now a congressman in the western part of the county, was notable for the hot pink and lavender mailers Calvert sent, intimating a “secret agenda” and wondering whether Takano would represent “Riverside … or San Francisco.” Takano was outed as gay by a Calvert ally during that race, and critics have called the mailers homophobic.
Anticipating the political liability, Calvert was one of 47 Republicans who voted to codify same-sex marriage in July, and has said he harbors no ill will toward gay and lesbian people. This November, he will be facing Will Rollins, an openly gay former federal prosecutor who campaigns with his partner at his side. The race has gotten notice in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, mostly on the theme of gay rights.
Given all this, when I visited Rollins at his campaign office in downtown Palm Springs (where I live part-time), I expected to hear a lot about social issues. And to be sure, Rollins did highlight some more extreme parts of Calvert’s record: voting against “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” against the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill, against the Equality Act (which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, and other public accommodations) as recently as last year, before the redistricting.
Rollins also said that reproductive rights was a unifying message for the district. The day we talked, Lindsey Graham had introduced a federal 15-week abortion ban, and though California has strong abortion protections, Rollins said that the federal bill shows how vulnerable state residents are to the stripping of their rights. Calvert has also been on the far right on the abortion issue, including voting for a bill that allows doctors to be prosecuted for performing abortions, and another that would allow child predators to sue their victims to prevent an abortion.
But Rollins was also quick to stress that his message for the general election in this ideologically diverse district is just as rooted in speaking out against what he terms Calvert’s official corruption. “In this race in particular, this isn’t the generic ‘All politicians are corrupt,’” Rollins told me. “Regardless of party, nobody wants to see our tax dollars used to line the pockets of a politician.”
Across the country, candidates in tight races are highlighting corporate power as a way to talk about inflation.
The signature case Rollins made for his corruption charge goes back to the mid-2000s, when Calvert and a business partner quietly purchased a parcel of land south of the decommissioned March Air Reserve Base for $550,000. Calvert then inserted an earmark into an appropriations bill granting $1.5 million for improvements to support commercialization near the airfield, as well as $8 million to improve an I-15 freeway interchange 16 miles from the property. Calvert and his partner then sold the land for nearly $1 million, earning a 79 percent profit in less than a year.
Rollins anticipated how the Calvert campaign would respond to this allegation. Calvert has posted on his official House site a news item from the Riverside Press-Enterprise showing that his initial accuser, a constituent named Art Cassel, got the name of the freeway wrong (Cassel said the 215, not the 15). But the Los Angeles Times correctly reported the freeway name. Calvert has also maintained that he was cleared by the House Ethics Committee in 2007 about an earmark regarding a bus station in Corona near another property he owned. That didn’t violate ethics rules, the committee maintained. But that was a separate issue from the four-acre parcel near the airfield. “The whole problem with this transaction is he bought it before earmarking, and didn’t tell anybody he owned it and knew he would earmark it,” Rollins said.
When I reached out to the Calvert campaign for comment, spokesperson Jason Gagnon stated that the Los Angeles Times got several facts wrong (they did issue a correction that the interchange project was an improvement project rather than a new interchange) and that Calvert sought those earmarks on behalf of other local government agencies. “These projects are 16 miles and 4 miles away, respectively, from the land Rep. Calvert and his partners sold.” The campaign’s statement also referenced the Press-Enterprise article.
An outside anti-Calvert PAC ad has highlighted the land deal, along with another land deal termed “illegal” that triggered an FBI investigation, and a notorious episode where Calvert was allegedly caught with a prostitute. “Ken Calvert says he’s tough on crime,” the ad says, “except when he’s breaking the law.”
Beyond the allegations of Calvert’s self-enrichment, Rollins also connected the dots between votes Calvert made against measures that could lower costs for constituents—from cracking down on price-gouging in oil and gas to capping the out-of-pocket costs of insulin—and support Calvert has received from businesses that would see their profits lowered if those bills passed. “He is doing exactly what the money is telling him to do,” Rollins said.
Rollins also connected Calvert’s pro-corporatism to concentration within the economy, and the need for stronger antitrust enforcement. It’s part of a trend that we’re seeing across the country: candidates in tight races highlighting corporate power as a way to talk about inflation. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been testing messaging on this with respect to the oil and gas price-gouging vote, mirroring Rollins’s message to a T.
“What I noticed resonating with voters was talking about the profit margins of oil companies when gas was high. And the record profit that Shell posted, $9 billion quarterly with a 20 percent margin,” Rollins said. “The reason they’re able to not cut into their margins is because the markets aren’t competitive. That’s the reason Warren Buffett invests in those companies: that have big moats.”
Anti-corruption concerns and the consequences of special-interest contributions always play some role in political races. But seeing it up front in swing seats, where Democrats have often opted to highlight unity and bipartisanship or neutral issues like bringing down the national debt, is a bit new, and it does reflect the priority the Biden administration has placed more generally on corporate power.
Republicans don’t seem to have a great rebuttal to these points. Rollins said to me that he was talking about price-gouging in oil and gas at an editorial board forum recently, and Calvert was given the opportunity to respond, which he did by saying that there are a lot of mom-and-pop gas stations. “Guess who’s squeezing them?” Rollins asked. “The handful of independent gas operators left are peons in this massive market dominated by these large corporations.”
Rollins has called for more resources for the antitrust authorities and more lawsuits against companies violating the competition laws. But he also said this is one more reason to enact campaign finance reform. “I’ve outraised this guy from human beings,” he said. “Corporate PAC money had kept him ahead in all but the last quarter.” Rollins wants to see a ban on corporate contributions and dark money, and a strengthening of disclosure rules. “How do you confront the modern Gilded Age? You can’t do it unless you get the money out of politics.”
A Columbia Law graduate who wanted to work in national security after 9/11, Rollins clerked for federal judges before working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California. He said his impetus for running was the January 6th attacks, after helping to prosecute some cases against Southern California residents who participated in storming the Capitol. Calvert, meanwhile, voted to reject the election results.
Rollins talks a lot about countering misinformation, so I asked him about the need to balance security and liberty. Rollins acknowledged it was a tough question. “My dad was a journalist, my mom was a public defender,” he said. “I was taught from a young age how important it is that we have free speech. The government can never dictate what content is disseminated. But it’s more about how do we create a system where the public still has a right to be informed.”
And in talking about free speech and whether the government should dictate what people get to hear, he turned back to his concern about corporate power. “I think right now the role has been left to a handful of billionaires.”
