Finding As Wretched A Candidate As Jasmeet Bains Won't Be Easy For California Democrats

Last year, the Democrats elected 6 freshmen to the Senate. 3 have overall Progressive Punch Senate score of “A.” The two worst are Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Rubin Gallego (AZ). This cycle, Schumer and the Democratic establishment are pushing even more GOP-lite candidates, from Haley Stevens (MI), Chris Pappas (NH), Angie Craig (MN) to Colin Allred (TX). 

A level down in the public consciousness are numerous House races in which the Democratic establishment, is working to sabotage populists like Zohran Mamdani while opting for the exact kind of Democrat the party base doesn’t trust— characters like Rebecca Cooke (WI), Ryan Crosswell (PA), Jasmeet Bains (CA), Janelle Stelson (PA)…

We’ve focused in a lot of Central Valley conservative Democrat Jasmeet Bains and, alas, her race against grassroots progressive Randy Villegas hasn’t turned into the national backward cause it needs to be seen as. Yesterday, David Dayen brought her to even more peoples’ attention though and now American Prospect readers know  that the DCCC recruited a state assemblymember running in Congress, called an ad by her Democratic primary opponent Randy Villegas “political violence”— an astonishing claim given the ad simply highlighted her corporate donors.

Villegas’ original ad never even names Bains. It simply says, “My opponents, Democrat and Republican alike, have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same corporations that are ripping us off, making our health care, housing, and groceries more expensive.” As Dayen verified, both Bains and GOP incumbent David Valadao have indeed taken money from the same 53 corporations— including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Amazon, Pfizer, and Walmart. Bains has pocketed at least $258,600 from them during her disgraceful Assembly career.

Yet hours after the ad aired, Bains posted a Facebook message linking the ad to “political violence,” repeatedly calling Villegas’s criticism “lies” without specifying a single falsehood. She also claimed the attacks on her were “an attack on all healthcare providers.” It’s a cynical play straight out of Trump’s playbook— reframing documented facts as “violence” to shut down scrutiny. This isn’t some one-off donation quibble. Bains has been a consistent ally of corporate interests in Sacramento.

• She was the only Democrat to vote against an oil price-gouging law in 2023— then cashed a maximum donation from the Western States Petroleum Association PAC.

• She voted against stronger tenant protections and against limits on corporate landlords hoarding homes.

• She voted against disclosure of pesticides on pretreated seeds sold in California.

• She voted against giving the state attorney general authority to block private equity purchases of medical providers.

• She even skipped votes on bills like one barring ICE agents from wearing masks and another banning a cancer-causing chemical (PFAS) in consumer products.

This is the record Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Jacobson and the consultant-industrial complex call “electable.” This is the candidate the establishment wants to impose on a district with sky-high poverty, one of the largest Medicaid populations in the nation, and abysmal turnout because people have stopped believing Democrats stand with them.

Contrast that with Blue America-endorsed Villegas: the son of Mexican immigrants, raised working at swap meets and the family auto shop, now a community college professor. He’s raised $250,000 from over 4,000 small donors. He’s rejected corporate PAC money and is running explicitly on an economic populist message: fighting monopolized sectors like agriculture, standing with workers and residents over special interests, and giving people a reason to vote again. As Villegas puts it: “Tell me who you’re taking money from, and I’ll tell you who you support.” This is exactly the kind of candidate who can flip a district like CA-22— and exactly the kind of candidate the Democratic machine tries to crush.

Bains was touted as a “big recruitment win” when she jumped into the race in July, quickly scooping up endorsements from untrustworthy statewide officers like Eleni Kounalakis, and conservatives House members like Ami Bera, Adam Gray and Laura Friedman. But she’s not a “win” for working people— she’s a win for the same corporate interests funding David Valadao. CA-22 isn’t just another House race; it’s becoming a test of whether Democrats will keep running “safe,” corporate-backed centrists and wonder why working-class voters stay home— or whether they’ll finally stand with candidates like Randy Villegas, who reject corporate PACs and fight for ordinary people. Let’s keeping mind that calling out corporate donors isn’t “political violence;” it’s democracy. Dayen:

Hours after Villegas released the ad on September 18, Bains posted a message to Facebook that began: “As political violence increases in America, I myself have experienced a heightened level of it.” Bains then alleges that she, a woman of color, is being attacked because of her identity. (Villegas, incidentally, is Mexican American.) “What gave a man the permission to resort to spreading lies just because his campaign is going nowhere,” Bains wrote, using the word “lie” four times without articulating what the lie was. She was only referred to in the ad in the context of her political donations, which are public and documented.

Bains followed this up with two other Facebook posts expressing anger over being called out with what she claims are “lies,” while highlighting her own work providing health care and claiming that any attack on her is “an attack on all healthcare providers.” In one post, she writes, “Throwing punches at me makes you look ridiculously phony especially when you have nothing in your resume that could match up to half of what I’ve done.”

…Valadao’s opponents have largely resembled the kind of frontline challenger the Democratic Party is comfortable with: centrist and corporate-backed. This hasn’t exactly touched off a flood of engagement in politics: The district is marked by catastrophically low turnout, barely scratching past 100,000 votes in the last midterm election in 2022, with 113,000 in 2018 and only 79,000 in 2014.

… When he got in, Villegas didn’t know he would be thrown into a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. But the entry of Bains, a physician, has created that dynamic.

The corporate coziness doesn’t stop with Big Oil, even on issues of affordability that will likely dominate the campaign. Bains voted against a bill to limit corporate landlords from owning more than 1,000 single-family properties. She voted against stronger tenant protections. She voted against giving the state attorney general authority to block private equity purchases of medical providers. She voted against disclosure of pesticides on pretreated seeds sold in California. She voted against requiring employers to create a workplace violence plan. And separately, she recently voted against ACA 8, the bill that put Prop 50 on the ballot to rewrite congressional maps in reaction to the attempted Republican gerrymander in Texas and elsewhere. (The new CA-22 map would be slightly more friendly to a Democrat but still quite competitive.)

In addition, Bains chose not to vote at least 40 times, which in the California legislature is partially akin to a no vote. These skipped votes include a recently signed law barring ICE agents from wearing masks, a law requiring notification for pesticide use near school locations, and a law banning a type of cancer-causing chemical known as PFAS in consumer products (on this bill, she initially didn’t vote, but supported the bill on final passage). Villegas took particular umbrage at the lack of support for the ICE masking bill, considering that he has family members who are undocumented.

Money, like the 53 corporate PAC donations to Bains that mirror contributions to Valadao, sits behind these votes, Villegas argues. “Politicians like my opponents are bought and paid for,” he said.

Though the expectation is that the establishment has lined up for Bains, Villegas claims the situation is different on the ground. He touts the support of the three county central committee chairs in the district (Kings, Tulare, and Kern), and if Prop 50 passes and the district extends to Fresno County, he would have that party chair’s support as well. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has endorsed Villegas as well.

“We’re going to move working-class voters,” Villegas said. “We’re going to get young people to vote when they’re so disillusioned. It’s OK to have disagreements within the party. It’s OK to have different policy priorities. But we have to decide, are we going to be party of the working class or the party of billionaires?”