Democrats need to flip 23 seats to regain control of the House of Representatives. The largest single concentration of targets is the four Republican-held districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 that are partly or entirely on Orange County, California, the legendary birthplace of modern movement conservatism, as described in Lisa McGirr's 2001 book "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right."
It’s a striking turn of events, but the congressional races — buoyed by outside support from Swing Left and others — are only part of the story here. There’s another blue wave, possibly a more important one, swelling up at ground level.
“We’re seeing a blue wave at the local level of people running for office to serve in their school boards, to serve on city councils, all over Orange County. There's no safe area anymore,” said Rachel Potucek, communications director for the Democratic Party of Orange County. “We're running from the canyons to the coast.”
The number of candidates seeking endorsements has doubled since the last cycle, with more to come, and they reflect a diversity sharply at odds with OC’s past. “We have more women than ever, we have more people of color, we have more young people,” Potucek said. “This trend is shifting towards this more young active and engaged generation, the candidates running for office are really picking up that mantle and moving it forward. So that's been very exciting.”
Three things Potucek pointed to seemed particularly noteworthy: first, a field operation “based in deep listening,” run by veteran organizer Linda May and devoted to developing neighborhood-level leadership that May calls “an attempt to re-create civic engagement” as “a reaction to the digitization of campaigns.” Second, the dynamic of “a grassroots movement which is turning into an electoral work in response to the attacks on immigrants in Orange County,” and third, a South Orange County group, OC Students for City Council, which is running students as young as 18 in five different cities — the ultimate expression and encouragement of youth participation in politics.
Underlying all three developments is a common thread. “People are speaking up and starting to defend their communities, defend their neighbors, and protect our values at the local level,” Potucek said. “We are connecting the dots between what's happening with Donald Trump and what's happening in our own backyard with Orange County's Republican roots, and Democrats don't like it.”
Beatriz "Betty" Valencia, a doctoral student in leadership studies at Chapman University, is running to become just the second Democrat ever to be elected to the Orange City Council in its 130-year history. (Orange is a placid inland city of 140,000, close to the center of the county.) She decided to run for office after an April council vote not to comply with parts of the California State Sanctuary law, SB 54, and in effect to cooperate with ICE and other federal agencies in their attempt to identify and deport undocumented immigrants.
Orange was one of several cities in the county to pass such ordinances (including Los Alamitos, Huntington Beach and Aliso Viejo, but not Santa Ana) after Trump’s Justice Department sued the state of California in early March. Several other candidates are running for other offices as a direct or indirect result of this wave of city council actions, which even the Orange County Register reported was largely driven by an outside core of Trump supporters ("Sanctuary opponents travel from town to town, screaming an agenda").
In Orange, Valencia told Salon, it was largely outsiders on one side and the community on the other, including students and professors from Chapman, a local priest, etc. “We pleaded and we asked, ‘This isn’t what the community wants. We are an accepting community. We don't like what you're putting forth. This is another way of dividing us. This is targeting.'”
Because the issue was driven by outsiders to divide the community, most candidates choose to avoid it, focusing more on the passivity of elected officials and other problems they’ve failed to address. But Valencia is proud to tackle it head-on, even though she told Salon the seed had been planted well before that, “right after the [2016] election, the traumatic event that the election was especially for women, especially for women of color,” when “there was really nothing for me to do at that moment except to join into movements.”
In 2017, she began exploring the possibility of running for office, but was repeatedly encouraged, then rebuffed. People she met with “were very impressed,” she said, "They I think I'm capable, they think I'm qualified, I think I've got what it takes,” and then she was told, “wait your turn."
Wait her turn to do what? The Orange City Council's 3-2 vote provided the answer. “That was devastating,” she said. “We had endured so much. If you spoke, somebody was yelling some horrible things to you. … The whole purpose of that side was to bring about this chaos.” As the other side was celebrating, “I looked over at the city Council seat of the person who is the tiebreaker,” and unconsciously said out loud, “That's my seat you’re sitting in.”
The next day, “I grabbed my red shoes — that's kind of my thing these days, my red tennis shoes — and I went to City Hall and I said I'm here to file for city council,” she recalls. “The clerk handed me the papers and he laughed and he said, 'Good luck.' And I knew that I was doing the right thing, because this time I didn't hurt, this time it just fired me up a little bit more.”
Valencia been running (in her red tennis shoes) ever since. “Every day we knock on doors and every day we find people that are shocked their city council did that,” she said. She has also returned to the monthly council meetings every session since, calling on members to reopen the issue and rescind their action — a seemingly fruitless gesture, many on both sides believed.
But as a local magazine recently reported, "The City of Orange is quietly backing away from its resolution to defy California’s Senate Bill 54." This past week, she went back to the council. “I read this to them. I said, not quietly, 'I would like for you to respectfully put this back on the agenda, revoke it and let the community know.'” They were happy to bring attention when they attacking SB 54, she argued, they should bring equal attention now.
The do-nothing, go-along-to-get-along political culture is hardly unique to Valencia's city. It’s seemingly ubiquitous throughout Orange County, which is part of what inspired the formation of OC Students for City Council. Co-founders Jake Rybczyk and Jackson Hinkle are running in San Clemente, while a third co-founder, Perry Meade, student body president at Saddleback College, oversees the campaigns.
All six candidates are avowedly progressive, but focused on issues specific to their cities. Common threads include affordable housing, reducing homelessness and sustainable environmental policies. Affordable housing is a pressing issue for Saddleback students, and is inextricably linked to homelessness, which can’t be addressed at less than a county-wide level. That was the major impetus for creating the group.
“We are looking towards moving more towards 100 percent renewable energy, solving the homelessness crisis, and building affordable housing in Orange County,” Rybczyk said. “We realize that can only happen – we can’t solve homelessness in each one of our cities, but if all of us are elected and all of us have progressive ideals we’ll be able to work together to solve it.”
Rybczyk traces his activism back to volunteer work on Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign, which partially illuminates the ease with which the group combines environmental and economic justice concerns. Hinkle has another explanation for how the two issues connect: “I just really tried to apply myself where I see injustices occurring,” he said.
Hinkle, a lifelong surfer, started his own environment group as a high school sophomore, starting with concerns about plastic pollution, and deepening and widening his interests ever since. “When I was in D.C. most recently, I like was fortunate enough to meet with Sen. Sanders twice," he said," "first on the issue of nuclear waste, and secondly on the issue of climate change,” Hinkle said. Unsafe nuclear waste at the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear power plant is a major environmental concern for the entire region.
Meade traces the origins of his activism to a student-led campaign in San Juan Capistrano, the famous 18t-century mission town in southern Orange County. School districts all overs the state had solar panels, but theirs didn’t, in one of the sunniest regions of the country. “That was a completely student-led grassroots campaign that I led, with other student leaders, to get our school districts to go solar,” he said. At Saddleback College, another problem presented itself: the lack of affordable housing for students.
“I’ve got friends and students telling me that they live 30 to 40 minutes away from campus while having to work 30 hours a week to pay rent on an apartment they share with three other people,” he said. “We think it's a responsibility of these institutions to provide affordable housing to students, because these are nonacademic barriers that students have to face — having to drive an excessive amount to get to class, having to work an excessive amount just to pay for your classes -- and then just to be able to live in Orange County, so you can go to class,” Meade explained.
The thing about this is that once someone enters politics and begins thinking in terms of fairness, equity, systemic problems and social responsibility, and rubbing shoulders with others who have overlapping concerns, the scope of one's engagement naturally expands. Affordable housing problems connect with homelessness — some Saddleback students actually are homeless, in one of the wealthiest regions of the country. To tackle the problem properly, the college can’t do it alone — cities and county government needed to be involved as well. And that recognition gave birth to OC Students for City Council.
While these young of candidates bring fresh energy, enthusiasm and new ideas to the table, there’s a lot they share in common with the larger progressive community in OC in today. Beyond just responding to the daily outrages from the White House, shared values of inclusion, transparency, future orientation and responsible stewardship do much more to unite Democrats there than our Beltway-centric punditocracy seems able to grasp. Perhaps most fundamentally, where conservatives have posited dichotomy and divisions, OC progressives see complementarity and synergy. Combine that with a focus on problem-solving and you’ve got a common framework that a wide range of people can share.
Ian Macdonald is another OC Students for City Council candidate. He’s a 20-year old student from “a family of working-class Panamanian immigrants, Irish sheet metal workers and Vietnamese refugees,” as he puts it. Macdonald is running for city council in Buena Park, a city of 80,000 on the northern boundary between Orange County and Los Angeles County. Hard work and helping those in need were fused in his outlook, as was charitable service and the role of government.
“I was taught the value of hard work and giving back to my community at a young age, and my family would always have us volunteer, whether it was feeding the homeless during the holidays or building shelters with Habitat for Humanity,” Macdonald told Salon. “That just inspired me to give back to my community, how important it was to do public service for the greater good.”
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What set Macdonald apart was his love of history. “I was always fascinated reading about FDR and the New Deal, and all the programs to help people get back to work. ... I began to see what kind of good politics can serve to help people, so I started volunteering on campaign locally, and state and congressional elections.” He started walking door-to-door for others, now he’s doing it for his own campaign.
He’s almost finished walking his entire district and it's been a "great experience." He says he plans to walk it a second time before Election Day. One person told him, “I’ve lived here 40 or 50 years, and you're the first person it's actually come to my door to speak to me,” which he found shocking. “We are there to represent the community, so I plan to continue walking door to door when I get elected to the city council as well,” he said.
The role of interactive engagement to identify, understand, and begin to solve problems is a theme that crops up repeatedly. Organizer Linda May’s training is geared toward to “people who are interested in becoming leaders within their own neighborhoods or precincts,” she said. It starts with canvassing and phone banking, and then with reaching out to friends and neighbors to recruit them as well. “The goal is for them to be the spokesperson for the Democratic Party in their own precincts,” May said. But that also entails listening. “We can go to our neighborhood organizers and say, ‘Take the temperature; find out what's going on; what do they think about this or that?’”
Mahmoud El-Farra is another Saddleback student and OC Students for City Council candidate. He’s running in Mission Viejo, a planned suburban community of 100,000 in south central Orange County. “What got me motivated to run was following the Parkland shooting in Florida," he said, "and having the students there get so motivated because they wanted to have change. Ever since I saw that, I wanted to do something. I looked at my community, I saw the institutions and I wanted to be a leader,” he said.
Parkland was a key spark for Rybczyk, too. He drafted a letter calling for a town hall with Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and gathered more than 100 signatures in just two days. “I went up to his office, and his staff, it was evident that they didn't even want to talk to me, and it was there that I realized I had to step up,” he said. It was a seminal moment for their whole movement. (Given the prevailing political winds, Issa decided not to run for re-election in 2018. His district is one of Democrats' likeliest targets.)
El-Farra had long been passionately interested in politics, but “I was always a rah-rah figure rather than someone trying to compromise,” he said. “I knew I needed to change and I wanted to change so that I can create progress in my city.”
There, in a nutshell, is the difference between what’s happening on the ground in OC and much of the Beltway debate. El-Farra sees compromise as a path forward. It doesn’t mean he’s willing to compromise for the sake of compromise. But he’s looking to solve the problems that are there in front of him.
“I want to move towards 100 percent renewable energy, mainly for environmental and economic benefits,” he said. The path he sees is what's known as community choice aggregation, or CCA, "where people can opt in or opt out depending on the consumer. … The city gives the consumers choice, control and protection over the utilities and they get their energy and electricity from 100 percent renewable energy utility companies. And it also reduces their electricity rates.”
Hinkle, one of the two candidates in the beach city of San Clemente -- once the home of Richard Nixon's "winter White House," has a more flamboyant style. “I think it's very important that we strike upon these issues, with bold ideas, bold solutions. I try to explain my ideas and have the public understand what were pushing for, because I think the vast majority of people agree on these issues.” He thinks Orange County has seen a form of machine politics for decades, and "people don't realize the amount of positive change that could take place if we start looking at other candidates, other parties, other ideas.”
I promised to take you beneath the surface of the blue wave in Orange County, but in fact I’ve failed. I’ve only just scratched the surface. There’s an amazing richness of connections being forged in this once solidly Republican suburban region, which is now a web of diverse and complex communities.
In her book “Suburban Warriors,” McGirr described how federal spending — starting in World War II and continued in the Cold War — was the unacknowledged driver of Orange County’s booming economy, hidden behind a frontier-era mythos of rugged individualism. The local dominance of unfettered private development produced an impoverished public sphere, a vacuum that was filled by conservative churches and political activism as racial and class homogeneity nurtured a bubble of comforting conformity, consciously on the defense against outside threats, so that libertarian and social conservatives rarely confronted their differences. In short, it was Disneyland’s logical home.
But more recently, a similarly complex combination of forces, still unfolding, has reshaped the county since the end of the Cold War, eroding the foundations of fantasies past and bringing new realities into focus. It’s the combination of embracing reality on one hand and retaining idealism on the other, that characterizes the surge of progressive activism spreading in Orange County today. It doesn’t easily fit into the readily available political boxes -- and that, perhaps, is the secret of its potential success.
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