This GOP Spoiler May Have Just Foiled Dems' Calif. Strategy

Michael Stansfield, a 50-year-old tech support worker, decided to run as a Republican in his congressional district in the suburbs of California's capital to make a statement about the need for peace in the Middle East. The ex-seminary student and father of two took out a loan against his home to pay for the $17,000 cost of filing the various forms to run for the seat. He received no other donations and had no visible campaign or staff. Yet on Wednesday, the day after California's primary, Stansfield had done well enough with voters to be holding on to second place, potentially locking Democrats out of the November general in a US House race the party had put at the center of its national redistricting strategy, per the AP.

"I wanted to show Christianity and Judaism a God from the Bible who loves Muslims," says Stansfield, who's married to a Muslim. "I wasn't necessarily going after it to win a race." It's too soon to know which two candidates will advance in the 6th Congressional District, but the early results are already serving as a cautionary tale about the assumptions both major parties make when they gerrymander political boundaries to expand their power. California Dems won voter approval last year to redraw the state's congressional map as a way to counter GOP moves elsewhere before this year's midterms, and they'd planned on gaining five seats in the state; one was in the 6th District.

Democrats assumed that one of the top two finishers would be a member of their party, but Stansfield's showing is evidence that the best-laid partisan mapmaking plans can go awry when they run into the unpredictable reality of campaign politics. Kevin Kiley is the congressman whose conservative district was split in two and fused with a more Democratic area. Kiley, who left the Republican Party and filed to run as an independent, has nabbed the largest share of votes so far. That left Stansfield the only candidate on the ballot with an "R" next to his name, helping him land, for now, above the nine Democrats who split the majority of the votes recorded at this point.

Both Dem and GOP strategists expect heavily Democratic-leaning mail ballots that have yet to be counted to break for the party's candidates, making it likely one of them supplants Stansfield in the final tally. Stanfield has run for Congress before: In 2018, he sought an Oregon congressional seat as a Democrat, a party he joined after the Iraq War, though it was a race he lost badly. Stansfield, who says he's Jewish, said he left the Democratic Party after the Israel-Hamas war broke out during Democrat Joe Biden's presidency, over what he described as a genocide in Gaza. After moving to California, he decided to run in the congressional district before last year's redrawing and when it was reliably conservative, because he wanted his message to reach as many Republican voters as possible. More here.