Atypical campaign playbooks are being deployed in four House districts where the winners will have to vanquish members of their own party.
Washington state and California have “top two” systems that can make the fall campaigns feel a lot like primaries.
Decisions made in those same-party contests will mold the membership of the 119th Congress, with an especially stark choice approaching in central Washington’s strongly Republican 4th District.
There, voters will choose between five-term Rep. Dan Newhouse, who voted to impeach Donald Trump over his role in fomenting the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or Jerrod Sessler, a Navy veteran and former NASCAR driver who attended Trump’s rally that day and aligns with the ex-president seeking a return to the White House.
Sessler led Newhouse by 33% to 23% in the August primary, followed by another Republican and then the top Democratic candidate.
Newhouse “does not support President Trump and his actions sell out his intentions,” Sessler told Bloomberg Government in an e-mail. “He seeks to hold onto power for himself and he believes that being a bulwark for the establishment that he is doing a yeoman’s work while 100s of people sit in prison over their involvement in J6.”
Newhouse, who’s facing another Republican in the general election for the first time since 2016, could win votes from independents and Democrats who see him as more politically palatable than Sessler. In 2022, Newhouse led a splintered primary that included fourth-place Sessler before trouncing Democrat Doug White by 66%-31% in the general election.
Newhouse’s campaign touted an A+ rating from the National Shooting Sports Foundation for his defense of gun rights. A hops-growing farmer and former state agriculture director from a largely rural district, Newhouse sponsored a bill (H.R. 9456) the House passed last month to enhance oversight of agricultural land purchases by foreign countries including China.
Newhouse is “a third-generation Yakima Valley farmer who understands the issues facing Central Washington” while Sessler “supports a 30% national sales tax on everything we buy, believes the agricultural products we grow and raise here are killing Americans and wants to tax them into extinction, and advocated for defunding the Border Patrol at the height of the border crisis,” campaign manager Robert Bugner said in a statement.
A group called National Interest Action Inc. aired ads attacking Sessler for supporting a proposal that would replace federal income taxes with a 30% consumption tax on retail sales.
Democrat Cherissa Boyd is running as a write-in candidate.
Similar Matchups
Newhouse has a more competitive race than Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, whose only opponent Nov. 5 is Joshua Morott, a fellow Republican who’s not well-known.
Louisiana, which holds single-ballot, all-party primaries on the national election day and then December runoffs if needed, is switching to separate party primaries in 2026.
Outside of the Newhouse-Sessler contest, the top same-party general elections to watch are Democrat-vs-Democrat contests in California, a strongly Democratic state where such past matchups aren’t uncommon. For instance, in 2016, Kamala Harris was elected to the Senate over then-Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who ran as a more centrist Democrat.
California’s 12th District
Lateefah Simon, a civil rights advocate who worked under Harris when she was San Francisco’s district attorney, has party establishment backing and is favored against Jennifer Tran, an ethnic studies professor and president of the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce.
Simon, who was born legally blind, is a member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s board of directors. Her donors include the top two House Democrats, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and Minority Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.), and Higher Heights for America, which works to elect more Black women to political office.
Simon led the nine-candidate primary in March with 56% compared with 15% for runner-up Tran in an Oakland-Berkeley district that’s one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic districts in the nation. Rep. Barbara Lee (D) isn’t defending the seat after an unsuccessful Senate bid.
California’s 16th District
Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo faces state Rep. Evan Low in an upper-income, high-cost Silicon Valley district that includes Alphabet Inc.’s Google, LinkedIn, and other technology companies.
Liccardo led the 11-candidate primary with 21.1% compared with 16.6% for Low, who edged Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian by five votes after a recount.
Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg Government’s parent company, donated $500,000 to a super-PAC supporting Liccardo, who was a California co-chair of Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Low’s donors include the PACs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and groups seeking more LGBTQ+ representation in Congress.
The winner will succeed Rep. Anna Eshoo (D), who eschewed a re-election bid after more than three decades in office.
California’s 34th District
Rep. Jimmy Gomez is facing David Kim, a children’s court attorney, for the third consecutive election in a Hispanic-majority Los Angeles district that includes Koreatown, Lincoln Heights, and part of downtown. Gomez led Kim 51%-28% in the March primary, comparable to the incumbent’s vote share in the two previous primaries.
Gomez went on to beat Kim by 6 percentage points in the 2020 general election and by 2.5 points in the 2022 general election. The races were close in part because of robust turnout among Korean-American voters largely favoring Kim, a second-generation Korean-American.
The mostly lower-income district has a large percentage of renters, and Gomez’s campaign is telling voters about his work as the founder and chair of the Congressional Renters Caucus as constituents struggle with rising housing costs.
Kim is once again trying to campaign to the incumbent’s left as a “grassroots” candidate less well-funded than Gomez. Kim promised to hold monthly public constituent meetings and criticized Gomez’s donations from PACs including the political arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
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