This California district has been red for over 20 years. Katie Hill could change that.
Hill's campaign is running a highly effective ground game ahead of the midterms. And Rep. Stephen Knight is feeling the heat.
BLAIR BESS
JUL 24, 2018, 8:00 AM
SANTA CLARITA, CALIFORNIA — On a blisteringly hot Saturday morning in June, 10 days after 30-year-old Katie Hill emerged as the Democratic party’s candidate to unseat Republican Steve Knight for California’s 25th Congressional district, dozens of her supporters gathered at the campaign’s cramped headquarters in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita to prepare for a massive voter registration drive. This last remaining GOP bastion in Los Angeles County (the district also includes parts of Ventura County) is high up on the list of priorities for Democrats hoping to turn the district from red-to-blue in November.
Hill’s campaign had run an aggressive, highly effective ground game, bolstered by social media, in the weeks leading up to California’s “jungle primary,” with hundreds of volunteers canvassing the district and eventually knocking on 80,000 doors. As the campaign looks to the midterms, capitalizing on that momentum is crucial to unseat an incumbent who, Hill believes, is out of step with his constituents.
“I don’t believe Steve Knight is representing our values … He’s dependent entirely on the [Republican] party because he hasn’t been able to raise money on his own,” Hill told ThinkProgress.
Knight was first elected to Congress in 2014 and is the latest GOP representative in more than two decades of Republican leadership in the 25th district. The area was one of seven historically red districts in California that voted for Clinton in 2016, a reality that could tilt the scales in Hill’s favor. Though Knight was re-elected by a slim 6 percent margin in 2016, Hill and her team think the district’s growing Democratic population (Democrats now comprise 38 percent of the 25th’s registered voters) gives them a good chance of flipping the seat.
https://thinkprogress.org/california-25-district-katie-hill-stephen-knight/
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“I’m far more left-leaning than Katie but I would much rather have someone who is progressive and doesn’t agree with me on all the issues, but will be honest with me when we disagree,” Ryan Skolnick, a college student from Simi Valley and a delegate to the California Democratic party, told ThinkProgress.
“Not someone who will pander to me and betray me in Congress later.”
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough.............vote
