Devin Nunes' Central Valley district (CA-22)-- stretching from Clovis and the suburbs north and east of Fresno through Dibuba and Visalia down to Tulare-- is fairly safe for a Republican-- R+6. But it hasn't been trending red. Two pretty worthless conservative Democrats with nothing to offer but "not Nunes, not Nunes." It didn't do the trick in 2018, when Andrew Janz, who raised $9,086,681, only got 47.3% of the vote, or last year when Phil Arballo, who raised $5,091,451, did even worse-- 45.8%. Arballo, a conservative Democrat from the Sinema-Manchin wing of the Democratic Party, is running again. This time, though, Arballo has a strong progressive opponent running in the jungle primary-- Lourin Hubbard.
Earlier this evening, Hubbard told me that he thinks "Nunes finally woke up to the fact that people in our district are facing real issues and his simple rhetoric wasnt going to be enough. There is a lot on the line for us. We are at a crossroads. We have had five years of extreme division, an attempted insurrection, and have faced a global pandemic that has killed over 700,000 of our friends, neighbors and fellow countrymen. We are faced with answering the fundamental question of who should the government work for? For me the answer is simple. A government made by the people, and made up of the people should work for the people. We need policies that speak to and uplift the working families in this district and in our country. We have to acknowledge the realities of the challenges we face and confront them head on. We have to confront climate change, affordable healthcare, and poverty, and at the end of the day Devin Nunes had no answers to address these issues."
The proposed and likely new map-- which scared Nunes into retiring (and begging Trump for a job) removed Clovis and part of northern Fresno from the district, very red areas, and put in some of southern Fresno and Sanger, Fowler and Selma, turning the seat to a D+7 solid blue bastion.
Nunes isn't even going to finish his current term. Instead he is resigning in a couple of weeks, triggering a special election to finish out the final months of his term-- a sign of a real jerk who never gave a damn about his constituents in the first place. Presumably, Putin doesn't need him any longer, although if the GOP wins back the House next year-- and if Nunes were reelected-- he would be in line to be Intelligence Committee chair again, a really frightening prospect fors omeone with such questionable loyalties.
So Trump threw him a bone-- a job and the still non-existent Trump Media & Technology Group, possibly as CEO starting January, although so far Trump Media & Technology Group is just one giant grift, which is already being investigated by the SEC and the the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for fraud.
This evening, Vanity Fair published a column by Bess Levin, Surprise: Trump's Secret $1 Billion Investment Sounds Shady As Hell... and Trump won't say which foreign country looking to buy influence is putting up the cash. "[L]like many a Trump venture that came before it, it appeared to be a classic Trump scam. Not because... it looked as though anything illegal had gone down but because of a plan to go public via special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), which would allow the ex-president to get rich by selling stock-- without actually having to build a profitable company or even launch the social network at all. Months later, the con appears to being continuing apace-- only now with fun new national security implications." Perfect for a slimy scammer like Nunes!