CA-25: Katie Hill Is a New Kind of California Democrat. Can She Help Flip the House?
In the spring of 2017, the Republican congressman from California’s Twenty-fifth District, Steve Knight, held a town-hall meeting in Simi Valley, a conservative, largely Caucasian bedroom community of Los Angeles, where Ronald Reagan is buried and where many Los Angeles Police Department officers sleep at night. Knight, who served eighteen years on the force, including some time on the controversial crash (Communities Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit, is running for a third term, a bid that may be complicated by the fact that he has consistently voted with President Trump. Hillary Clinton won the Twenty-fifth—a large district with a rising Hispanic population and a lot of independent voters, which straddles parts of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties—by 6.7 points, in 2016. Knight won his last election, against a Democrat, by 6.2 per cent. The national Democratic Party, in its effort to regain the House, has targeted Knight’s seat as one to flip.
During a Q.?&?A. at the town hall, a young woman stood up. Speaking into a microphone held by one of Knight’s aides, she introduced herself, and people in the room began to whoop. “Last month, your party tried to overhaul the Affordable Care Act with the A.H.C.A.,” she said, referring to the American Health Care Act, the proposed “Trumpcare” plan, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would render twenty-three million people uninsured over the next decade. “And I think your constituents made it very clear how they felt about the A.H.C.A., as people here can attest.” (Hundreds of residents of the Twenty-fifth District had protested outside of Knight’s office.) “As your constituent, I’d like to know,” she added, “why you didn’t stand up to Paul Ryan and the rest of your party to protect us from that horrible piece of legislation?”
Knight, pacing at the front of the room, muttered something about people in the fifty-to-sixty-four-year-old age bracket and asked, “I’m sorry, what’s your first name?” The audience guffawed.
“Katie,” the woman said.
If Knight’s ignorance was sincere—and clearly the crowd wasn’t buying it, at least not those sitting near in the vicinity of whoever posted video of the exchange online—it was the last possible moment that the posture would be remotely plausible. Katie Hill, who is thirty and a Democrat, had declared her run for Knight’s seat a few weeks earlier, on International Women’s Day, part of a wave of young women seeking elective office. (Margaret Talbot wrote about these candidates here in April.) Soon, with support from Emily’s List and endorsements from celebrities like Kristen Bell (“My girl Katie is running for Congress”), Hill was giving speeches at “retirement parties” for Knight and pushing out the hashtag #FlipItBlue. Hill and her staff—“the most millennial campaign ever”—were featured in a two-part documentary on Vice News Tonight on HBO. In the run-up to the primary, held last Tuesday, Hill outraised Knight. Now, having defeated the better-known Democrat, a former corporate lawyer named Bryan Caforio, she will face off against Knight on the November ballot.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/katie-hill-is-a-new-kind-of-california-democrat-can-she-help-flip-the-house
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Katie Hill in District #25 in California!
Thanks, RSF!
