Red, White and Blue Signs — Why I won’t give up on Rural 23.
You are very observant, David Pax. The miles-long barrage of conservative messaging along I-5 and Highway 99, spanning the southern end of the Central Valley, would lead you to believe that Trump’s militia has taken over and it is unsafe to stop at Harris Ranch and get a tri-tip sandwich. Maybe that’s why some rich farmers fly in for takeout.
Let’s break it down. Slightly over thirty percent, 145K voters in CA 23 live in unincorporated/rural areas. About half of them are Republicans. Those seventy thousand or so Rs do vote religiously and tend to be vocally ultra-conservative. They can tip the election in McCarthy’s favor. He knows this and goes out of his way to woo them, and their rich suburban counterparts, for donations and their votes. He basically locks almost everyone else out of his office and life.
I want to be the opposite of McCarthy by doing extensive outreach to ALL voters in the 23rd, whether they support me or not. I want them to know that even though our politics might not align, I'm going to work hard to improve peoples' lives, the economy, and our understanding of how Climate Change will ‘change’ our lives in the Central Valley.
With these folks, I will address the very wet elephant in the room: Water. Those red, white, and blue signs along the highway are put there by a few farmers that aren’t quite the billionaire, mega agricultural firms that have most of the antiquated water rights. They have been most effected, maybe affected, by decades of droughts and water restrictions. Remedies have been promised by several governors and a few federal senators, but to date, nothing has come of it. Their livelihoods are in suspense every year waiting to see how much rain we will have and what percentage of their allocated water will be delivered. It has to be scary, and they react.
The Republicans like to fuel this fire by pitting them against fish and the environment. McCarthy has never really done anything except complain about those fish, so I have been doing some research. Instead of fighting over the water that might or might not fall from the sky, we need to search for ways to deliver different sources of water.
Scientific American did an article in 2016 that featured Israel’s desalination program. They basically went from not having water because of a drought that was the worst in 900 years to having a surplus. They also instated the recapturing of water, also known as greywater, which is done in many communities in California already. Why not expand this in the Central Valley.
I don’t pretend to know all the scientific, engineering, economic and legal challenges associated with any of these programs, but I do know I will do my darndest to reach out to these voters and hear them out. My goal for this next year is to knock on as many doors as possible, hold Town Halls in every community of interest, and work to understand the concerns of ALL of the people in my congressional district, conservative fringe or not.
BTW, I need to pull approximately fifty thousand votes away from Kevin to win. I have a great campaign team that specializes in ‘ground’. We are taking a page from Stacy Abrams's playbook and will chip away at it, one voter at a time.
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