MERCED COUNTY, California — When Adam Gray ran for Congress in 2022 — a year when he lost by 564 votes — he thought he had done everything right.
Gray had represented Merced in the California state Legislature for 10 years. He was such a champion for the Central Valley’s water rights that he got kicked off two committees by his own party. And in an area defined by its doctor shortage, he secured the funds to give the University of California, Merced, a desperately needed medical school.
But more than what he accomplished, Gray thought he had the exact right attitude to succeed as a Democrat in the Central Valley, the literal birthplace of the Blue Dog Democrat.
He was running in a district Joe Biden won by 11 points in 2020, where the far left is as equally disdained as the far right, and where Democrats had a 14-point registration advantage. To top it all off, Gray was running for an open seat, freshly created by redistricting, facing an opponent with little name recognition and no record of elected public service.
Despite all of those advantages, Gray lost. And even though it was remarkably close — it took a month for the race to be called, in what became nearly the closest congressional race of the 2022 election — many Democrats were surprised Gray was even in a position where he could lose.
Republicans narrowly gained the House majority on the back of places like California’s 13th Congressional District — a district and region defined by its indifference toward and dissatisfaction with national politics. The area is full of ticket-splitters and independent voters that puzzle national pundits. It’s agricultural and working class and gritty. And even as the economy evolves — if the Central Valley were its own state, it would be poorer than any other state in the U.S. — it remains defined by its title as “the fruit basket of the nation.”
It’s a place carved out by waves of immigration across American history, from back East during the Gold Rush, from Oklahoma and the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, and from Mexico and beyond to this day. It’s a place where residency is defined not in decades but in generations.
I feel qualified to say all of this because it’s where I’m from. I was born and raised just up the road from where Adam Gray and his GOP opponent — the current congressman — John Duarte live.
In their rematch this November, Gray told me he’s expecting to win by at least 13,000 votes. He said the last cycle was a matter of turnout, which was low in 2022. That almost certainly won’t be the case in 2024. Gray said he has a better operation this time, with more enthusiasm on the ground and a better idea of how to win.
But Duarte also thinks he knows how to win, and as one of the most defiantly moderate Republicans in Congress, he thinks he’s perfectly suited for the district.
At its core, the race comes down to the quintessential “Valleycrat” versus a moderate Republican farmer. Both admitted to me that, deep down, on the issues, they’re pretty similar — even as the two parties grow further apart.
They think the race is about jobs. They think it’s about water. And they think it’s about immigration. Both men are doing all they can to keep the race tied to the issues locals care about and away from the battle at the top of the ticket.
But in an election year like 2024, it’s almost impossible to keep national politics out of a race that’s considered one of the very best pickup opportunities for Democrats, to ignore the national implications of a matchup that could decide control of the House.
Both candidates have to decide how much it makes sense to nationalize the contest — whether local issues really are more important than the battle for the White House — and whether it makes more sense politically to emphasize that question over, say, water rights.
***
By 8 a.m. on July 4, it was nearly 100 degrees. In a few hours, it would be 110. I was in Atwater, a town of about 30,000 that I’d driven through probably thousands of times in my childhood. Only this time, I was sitting in the back of a police car with Duarte, being personally escorted by the chief of police to the front of the parade line.
It didn’t take long before Duarte and Merced County Supervisor Daron McDaniel — who was also riding with us — began talking about Donald Trump.
“I’ve gotten a lot of CNN cameras in my face that were like, ‘Can you support a convicted felon for president?’” Duarte said.
Duarte’s response to CNN: “My district is full of very smart people with a firm grasp of reality. They can smell bullshit.”
“And they didn’t bleep it!” Duarte said in disbelief. “This was right in front of the Capitol. They didn’t cut it out before it hit the airwaves. Then I had a fundraiser at my house the other night, and some of the people at the fundraiser were like, ‘Oh, my God, we saw you say bullshit on TV!’”
Duarte and McDaniel laughed. But after a pause, McDaniel thought about it more.
“Maybe more people need to say ‘bullshit,’” McDaniel said.
Duarte, sensing what McDaniel meant, agreed. “That’s what it was,” he said. “Remember, I’m the guy that got prosecuted for planting wheat in a wheat field. I know there’s bullshit prosecutions,” he said.
Duarte would bring up the wheat field several more times over the days I spent with him, a story essential to understanding who he is and why voters gravitated to the political newcomer two years ago. But the story also seemed to be a sort of cheat code for Duarte — a man who represents a district where he can’t exactly side with Trump — when he’s pressed to side with Trump.
Duarte’s family has farmed in the Valley for four generations. Born in Modesto, he spent most of his youth in San Diego. But he returned to the Valley with his parents after graduating college to launch Duarte Nursery in 1989. Today, the operation spans 200 acres with some of the area’s most notable agricultural exports: wine grapes, walnuts, pistachios and, of course, almonds.
I grew up just north of Duarte, in the town of Ripon, otherwise known as “the almond capital of the world.” Are you familiar with Blue Diamond Almonds? It’s right up the road from my high school, which is surrounded by orchards.
So it was only fitting that he took me to an orchard to talk about his time in Congress and the race ahead.
We stood for an hour under the row of trees, picking almonds. The fuzzy, thick green skin is still rough in July, still a couple of months before harvest, and it’s impossible not to get the green hull stuck under your fingernails. But I’ve had years of experience in shelling almonds — generations, really. My grandparents grew almonds and walnuts, just like Duarte himself. We were both at home here.
Among farmers and conservatives, Duarte’s fight against the federal government has made him a symbol against overreach in agriculture. In 2012, the Justice Department accused Duarte of illegally destroying fragile wetlands on his 450-acre wheat field, facing a $2.8 million fine for violating the Clean Water Act.
In the end, Duarte Nursery agreed to a settlement in 2017: $330,000 as a penalty and the purchase of $770,000 worth of credits to restore natural wetlands in the area. But to Duarte, the ordeal remained at the forefront of his mind and became a catalyst for his political future.
Congressional redistricting in 2020 left an opening for Duarte. With no Democratic incumbent, in a midterm year with historically lower turnout, he set his sights on appealing to low-income and Hispanic voters in the district that had traditionally been viewed as Democratic by default.
Separate from his water crusade and agricultural roots, the other top issue for Duarte, and for the district, is immigration. And even among moderates in Congress, when it comes to the battle over immigration and the border, Duarte has practically stood alone.
He was one of two Republicans to vote against the GOP’s hard-line immigration and border bill H.R. 2, only joined by Rep. Thomas Massie, who had libertarian concerns over E-Verify.
Duarte said he knew the bill would pass along party lines — not a single Democrat voted for it — and he knew the bill would be dead on arrival in the Senate. He had been in office for just five months and suspected the ordeal would turn him into a conservative punching bag.
“I understand that my vote will not be popular among some of my fellow Republicans, but I am committed to upholding my promise to put working families ahead of Washington party politics,” he said in a statement following the vote. “I have never been afraid to stand up for our Valley, even if it means standing alone at times.”
Duarte supports DACA and a legal pathway to citizenship, two provisions not included in H.R. 2. His main issue with the measure centered around E-Verify, which he said would have destabilized food producers and communities in the Valley. He wants to see a bill that addresses DACA and E-Verify with bipartisan support.
He may have stood nearly alone on H.R. 2, but over his nearly two years in Congress, he’s felt a shift. When I asked about the biggest accomplishments of his first term, he noted an ever-so-slight shift in the conversation among Republicans on immigration away from messaging and toward “common sense.”
In June, 14 House Republicans, including Duarte, voted against a GOP amendment from Rep. Chip Roy that would have prohibited the Biden administration from allowing undocumented immigrants to marry citizens to stay in the U.S. while applying for lawful permanent residency.
“It’s that shift from two in May of last year to now 14 that gives me hope,” Duarte said.
Immigration is a deeply personal issue for the Valley, but also personal to Duarte, whose wife is from Australia and got her green card through their marriage.
The potential Duarte voters back in Atwater at the parade would have no clue about a little-reported amendment that went nowhere in the House. But Duarte was going to make sure they knew.
“Chip Roy, God bless him, comes out with a bill that says we need to deport wives of citizens, or moms of citizens, or husbands of citizens. My wife was an immigrant who got a green card, got her green card by marrying me,” Duarte told a group of voters along the parade line.
“Me and I think 13 others voted against it. And now we’re just horrible people in the right-wing media, but we’ve got to fix it,” he added.
Duarte has the endorsements of several Hispanic leaders in the community. He’s the first Republican to ever be backed by the Central Valley Leadership Round Table, a coalition of Latino leaders on the west side of the Valley.
He also has the support of Javier Lopez, mayor of Ceres, a town just outside Modesto with a majority Hispanic population.
Lopez, who is also chair of the Stanislaus Council of Governments, was with Duarte on July 4 night at the El Rematito Flea Market, where thousands in the community gathered for dancing, a drone fireworks display and to hear from local candidates.
“Unfortunately, Central Valley is sometimes the forgotten child of California,” Lopez said.
He gave me the same advice he gave to Duarte: Don’t put Latino voters in a box and assume they’ll only vote for a Democrat.
“Sometimes people get discouraged and won’t vote because they don’t see what they’ve been wanting to see for the last 20 years,” Lopez said. “But it doesn’t matter if you have a group of Latino Democrats or a group of Latino Republicans. You have to make sure that your message is clear because you’ll see people sway.”
Perhaps, as Duarte pointed out, the greater issue is that fewer and fewer districts look like his, where ticket-splitters and independent voters force you to fight. Duarte’s biggest threat of losing his seat isn’t some GOP primary like many of his colleagues in reliably Republican districts; it’s the general election race against a Democrat who thinks he’s every bit as moderate and practical as Duarte.
***
Within five minutes of first meeting Adam Gray, we were talking about Jim Jordan.
“John Duarte voted for and or supported publicly Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson, and then comes home and talks about how he’s a moderate. If I were in Congress, I wouldn’t vote for AOC to be speaker,” he said.
Gray’s message is clear. Yes, Duarte has voted against his party. Yes, they may agree on some issues. But even the most moderate of Republicans isn’t all that moderate in Congress. Voters in the middle would be better served by him, the self-described “most conservative Democrat in California.”
After college, Gray forged his political identity as a staffer to former Rep. Gary Condit. Condit’s legacy still looms large among the Central Valley political community despite the national scandal over his affair and the disappearance of Chandra Levy. (Condit is also Gray’s former father-in-law.)
“Of course it all crashed at the end, but Condit’s claim to fame was independence,” said Mike Lynch, a longtime Central Valley Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to both Condit in Congress and Gray in the state Legislature.
Lynch sees Gray as cut from the same political cloth. Condit started the Blue Dog Coalition in Congress, and Gray founded the Problem Solvers Caucus in the California state Legislature.
“He’s totally independent, and the Democrats hate that. They hate it,” Lynch said.
One of the quintessential elements of a “Valleycrat,” Lynch said, is standing against your own party just as much as Republicans across the aisle.
“You’ve got to talk differently in this area to be successful as a politician and recognize that there is this disconnect, even with your base. ‘Trust me, I’m the government.’ That’s not going to cut it. And neither is ‘Trust me, I’m Trump,’ and neither is ‘Trust me, I’m Biden,’” Lynch said.
“Because we get screwed by Democratic governors and Republican governors. We get screwed by Democratic presidents and Republican presidents,” he continued. “We will always be screwed.”
Gray was stripped from two committee assignments in the California State Assembly over Central Valley water rights.
Just like the lawsuit brought against Duarte over his wheat field, Gray wears the committee removals like a badge of pride.
“Being a radical centrist or moderate, I spent a lot of time in office being criticized by the far right and the far left,” Gray said.
Results show that works for the district; Gray has beaten every top-of-the-ticket Democrat his entire political career.
“He’s actually been pretty good at getting stuff for the district, even though leadership hates him, just because he works differently; UC Merced is an example of that,” Lynch said. “When all is said and done, it’s not a bad legacy to have UC Merced.”
Gray secured hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a medical school at the University of California, Merced, where the first class of students to receive a full education in the Valley started last fall. But he wants to expand, which inspired him to first run for Congress in 2022.
“I’ve got the state money, but we need the federal money to get it over the finish line,” Gray said. “It’s a matching piece of the bigger picture. So to me, it felt like a great opportunity in 2022 to go to Congress and try to work on this issue.”
Then the election happened, and there were 564 votes separating him from Congress.
“When things are that close, there’s 1,000 factors,” Lynch said. “Did he spend enough time in Ceres versus some other place? Would another trip to Patterson have made the difference? I don’t know the answer to that.”
Lynch does know this: “It would have been a lot easier to live with losing by 5% than losing by 560 votes. A lot easier.”
Gray officially jumped back into the race a year ago, without hesitation. Turnout will be different in a presidential year, and he’s banking that those who sat out last time are predominantly Democrats.
“You have the pundits and the political class who try to pretend that they’re smart enough to know why, but who cares why, they just don’t vote,” Gray said. “It has nothing to do with this race, it has nothing to do with me and John. There’s just a large swath of infrequent voters here who come out in fairly large numbers in presidential elections.”
Both candidates have generations-long roots to the Valley. They embody the essential elements of what it takes to win here. But as Lynch said, the race will likely come down to a “coin-toss difference.”
“In this particular election, the factors are beyond anybody’s control,” he said.