Tulare gas above $6 a gallon, lost Pell grants, and a 70,000-coverage fight
California’s 22nd congressional district is one of the poorest and, this year, most competitive in the country. Anchored by Tulare County, which voted 59% to 38% for President Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024, it is a majority-Latino, working-class region whose population shifted markedly to the right in the hope of seeing their economic fortunes improve. Both parties are now courting voters there aggressively. Democrats in California have also redrawn the electoral map to tilt more in their direction. A poll taken earlier in 2026 showed Trump’s approval rating in the district underwater by 15 percentage points. That does not necessarily spell defeat for Rep. David Valadao, the Republican incumbent, who has overcome a Democratic registration advantage in six of his last seven elections.
California’s 22nd has the highest percentage of Medicaid recipients of any congressional district in the country — close to two-thirds — and clinics report being inundated with appointment requests from residents unsure whether they will keep their coverage in the coming months. That coverage sits squarely in play. Valadao cast one of the decisive votes for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the $1.1 trillion package that paired tax cuts with steep reductions to government healthcare and other public-assistance programs. At a crowded rally in Bakersfield the weekend before publication, where Villegas shared a stage with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the candidate put a number on the local stakes: “There’s nothing moderate about ripping health insurance from 70,000 of his constituents,” Villegas said. “There’s nothing moderate about voting six times to approve the war in Iran. There’s nothing moderate about tripling ICE’s budget.”
Valadao, the incumbent, does not dispute that costs have climbed. He conceded at a candidates’ debate that the war in Iran has caused what he described as a temporary, painful spike in prices, starting with gas, which in Tulare now averages more than $6 a gallon. He suggested the war would be over soon and argued that the surest path to relief was the deregulatory measures he and his fellow Republicans favor to increase the supply of food, oil and gas. In framing his candidacy, Valadao portrays himself as “a proud native son of the valley and an even-tempered pragmatist” who works collegially with both parties to bring federal dollars home.
Villegas, a community-college professor who started out in his family’s car-repair shop in Bakersfield, the district’s biggest city, offers a different diagnosis. “The entire political system is corrupted by corporate money,” he says, “and will never deliver for the agricultural, heavily working-class Central valley unless it is reformed from the ground up.” “The valley has been left behind by both parties, in Sacramento and in Washington DC,” Villegas says. “We deserve better than the scraps these politicians give us.” He frames his own bid in matching terms: “I’m running on the power of the many against the power of their money. The Democrats should be the party of the working class. And the only way we transform that is by electing leaders who stand up for the working class and for working people.” He refuses corporate political action committee money and relies on individual donations averaging about $50. He was not the candidate of the Democratic establishment: Jasmeet Bains, a more conventionally centrist figure championed by party leadership in Washington, lost the primary to Villegas and has yet to endorse him. Villegas defines himself as a populist.
Valadao’s campaign has portrayed Villegas as a candidate out of step with local sensibilities. When House Speaker Mike Johnson swung through the district on Sept. 30, he declared: “The Marxists are on the march to our institutions. And now the institution they have in their crosshairs is the United States Congress.” Such rhetoric works with Republican partisans, an outspoken and significant segment of the district electorate. “Villegas will tax you dry,” warns a homemade sign stapled to an electricity pole in Hanford, the town where Valadao grew up as a dairy farmer and still lives.
Voters describe the pressure in concrete terms. Vanessa Martinez, 26, lives in Tulare County, where she works three jobs — cutting hair, picking up bodies for a funeral home and lining up subcontractors for a building firm. Forced to fend for herself from age 18 with no family money to fall back on, Martinez put herself through cosmetology school to become a hairdresser and is studying again to qualify as a funeral director. Still, it is not enough, because the federal student grants she thought she could rely on have dried up and her government health insurance coverage is in danger of disappearing too. “I’m making the most I’ve ever made, and I’m probably the brokest I’ve ever been,” she said.
A few weeks ago, Martinez lost a federal Pell grant that previously paid for her community-college classes. She is alarmed and demoralized by immigration enforcement raids that are breaking up families throughout the district — an issue with particular resonance, because her construction-worker father was caught without papers and deported to Mexico in 2015. Now she is afraid of being kicked off Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, and having to pay out of pocket for the chronic Type 2 diabetes she has lived with since age 15. Type 2 diabetes is widespread in the Central Valley, especially among working-class Latinos who often cannot afford the fresh fruit and vegetables grown in the region in abundance. She lost her mother to the disease at 62. Medi-Cal has hardly been a smooth ride — she likened it to being served cereal without milk — and she says she had to fight for two years before it would reimburse her for needles for her insulin shots; she continues to fight for test strips to monitor her blood sugar. Now that she is in danger of losing her coverage altogether, she is stocking up on medication and getting her lab work up to date.
As a funeral-industry worker who reviews death certificates, Martinez sees the toll directly. “I’m in the funeral industry, and I’ve seen the death certificates,” she says. “There’s a lot of cancer, especially among farm workers exposed to pesticides. And a significant number have diabetes. You see it again and again in box 14, which lists underlying conditions … It’s cheaper to go to McDonald’s and eat a $5 meal than to make a salad at home.”
Villegas has Martinez’s vote, but she worries what might happen if he ends up in Washington. Valadao, she remembered, also campaigned as someone who would fight hard for the valley’s interests, only to succumb to pressure from his party to approve the war in Iran, trade tariffs and other Trump policies linked to the sharply rising cost of living. “A lot of politicians get into this because they want to make a difference,” she said. “I don’t know what changes them.”
Her brother, who also works in the funeral business in Tulare, voted for Trump all three times he ran — a choice Martinez considers part of a broader misjudgment. “Voters who put their faith in Trump,” she said, especially Latinos, were “licking the boot that will stomp them” and paying the price now. Home ownership has come to feel entirely out of reach as coastal Californians, stung by high housing costs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, move inland and push prices higher in communities like hers. FRED data show the median sales price of houses sold nationwide stood at $410,700 as of mid-October, a benchmark that frames the affordability pressure inland communities now face. Martinez has settled on Villegas — and the framing of her expectations is characteristically direct. “I want someone who can at least fake that he cares about us,” she says, only half joking. “My friends and I know what’s at stake … I’m really hoping Randy Villegas is the change we want.”
The uncertainty extends beyond individual households, where doctors and health administrators say they have no idea who will stay covered. Villegas’s figure of 70,000 losing benefits is just one of many estimates. “There are a lot of unknowns,” said Raul Ayala, a medical director with the Adventist Health network of clinics. “These patients may be in cancer treatment or awaiting surgery … I’m pretty sure there are going to be exceptions, but I don’t know how that is going to turn out.” Ayala and other experts expect cuts to Medicaid to deter people from seeking mammograms, blood tests and other wellness checks in a district where doctors are already in short supply and preventive care is an area they have spent years fighting to improve. Hospitals now expect to see a lot more routine cases coming through their emergency rooms, which by law cannot turn away patients whether they have health insurance or not. “All of that puts a strain on patients, but also on the business side of healthcare,” said Jevon Price, who serves on the county healthcare board in Tulare. “We’re telling hospitals: prepare to not be funded for what we will be requiring you to do.”
Valadao, far from a natural public speaker, has not held an in-person town hall in over a decade and tends to favor closed-door meetings with constituents and donors. Villegas, by contrast, is an avid door-knocker who addresses hundreds of voters at once — a useful approach in a district where, the Guardian reported, it is “more common, in smaller towns, to see a Jesus placard than a lawn sign for a congressional candidate.” Jorge Contreras, state director of the Working Families Party, which is championing Villegas and four other progressive congressional candidates in California in November’s general election, called Villegas “the hardest-working candidate we have ever worked with.”
If Valadao does lose his seat, political observers told the Guardian, healthcare is likely to be the decisive issue in a year when Republicans are on the defensive across the map. Villegas, for his part, is pressing the case as hard as he can: “Nobody should have to fight cancer and their congressman at the same time,” he tells audiences.