The nation’s least-educated congressional district is California’s 21st Congressional District. This district covers most of the southern part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the nation’s most productive agricultural areas, though given its hot, dry weather, one that's heavily dependent on irrigation and complex water-allocation schemes. The 21st stretches from Fresno in the north to Bakersfield in the south, taking in the mostly Hispanic areas in and around these cities, but much of the district’s population lives in dusty towns like Hanford and Wasco that exist mostly to provide services to the ag industry. (The district is also dotted with a number of outposts of California’s sprawling prison system.)
The 21st has the lowest percentage of persons 25 or older who are college graduates or more: only 7.1 percent of the population. (There are various other ways to determine “least educated;” for instance, California’s 40th district, in the Los Angeles area, edges out the 21st if you switch over to lowest percentage of persons 25 or older who are high school graduates or more.) While the 21st isn’t the most Hispanic district in the country (that, again, is California’s 40th), or the district with the most persons of Mexican ancestry (that’s Texas’s 34th district), it is a district with a high percentage of people who’ve come here from Mexico to work in its fields; given the manual nature of the work, it’s easy to see why there aren’t a lot of college grads here.
The 21st also tops several other “Most District” categories that are closely related: it’s the district with the highest percentage of workers employed in agriculture (28.5 percent of workers). It’s also the most male district, with 52.5 percent of the population being male. That may not seem like a big disparity, but most places hew much more closely to 50-50; the most male districts tend to be ones that have a large resource-extraction industry or large military presence (like Alaska’s at-large district, in both instances), but the 21st still edges out Alaska based on how many men have ventured here from Mexico, either who didn’t have families or who left their families behind.
There are still, however, many Hispanic families in the 21st as well; given that the Hispanic population tends to be younger and have a higher birth rate, it’s also the nation’s district with the highest percentage of families with children (in other words, 46 percent of all family households, i.e. households with more than one person living there, have children living in them).
Politically, the 21st is swingy terrain, but in a way that’s very frustrating for Democrats. Given the district’s large Hispanic population (72 percent overall), it seems like it should be a naturally strongly Democratic district. However, many of its residents aren’t citizens, many of the ones who are citizens are too young to vote, and many who are eligible to vote don’t bother to turn out anyway, while the district’s small white population is pretty conservative. While the district does put up tolerable presidential numbers … Barack Obama won here by a 55 to 44 margin in 2012, and a 52 to 46 margin in 2008 … that doesn’t translate into success downballot, especially during midterm years.
The representative in the 21st, since redistricting in 2012, has been Republican David Valadao. Valadao, previously a state assemblyman, benefited from a recruitment failure by the Democrats in 2012 (slothful Democratic Rep. Jim Costa, who previously represented most of this district in the ‘00s, decided to run in a safer district further north, and the nominee they accidentally wound up with, John Hernandez, ran a disorganized, shoestring campaign), and then poor midterm turnout when the Democrats got a better candidate (Amanda Renteria) in 2014. While several more poorly funded candidates have checked into (and out of) the race for 2016, local Dems are hoping that attorney Emilio Huerta, the son of United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, may work out for them this time.
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.