Young Kim and Republicans Aim to Fend Off Rival to Her Right in California House Race

After Representative Young Kim, a Republican, flipped an Orange County House seat in 2020, she was hailed as one of the new faces of the Republican Party: a 58-year-old Korean American politician who was able to win a seat even as Joe Biden carried the district at the top of the ticket.

After redistricting, the seat was drawn even more in her favor in 2022. Instead of having a Democratic tilt, analysts say, it now favors Republicans — and seemingly Kim.

And yet an expensive rescue mission on Kim’s behalf has been not so quietly underway in recent weeks ahead of California’s June 7 primary, which was supposed to have been a cakewalk for the incumbent Republican.

Why?

Because those favorable redrawn district lines, with nearly 80 percent of voters in the district new to Kim, mean that lots of voters know little about her — and a Trump-style Republican is running to her right. The result has been about $1 million in Republican television ads during what was supposed to be a sleepy primary.

Now, California has an unusual primary system. There aren’t separate ballots for the Republican and Democratic primaries. Instead, every candidate runs on a single ballot, with their titles and party affiliations detailed.

All voters choose their candidate from the list. The two candidates who receive the most votes progress to the general election. And there’s no guarantee that both major parties will have a candidate in the general election.

For many candidates — even incumbents like Kim — there is a real risk in getting lost in a list of names.

Notably, she isn’t just promoting herself. She is also attacking her Republican opponent, Greg Raths, a retired combat fighter pilot for the Marines who drives for Uber and recently issued an apology for comments that had been criticized as antisemitic.

Kim’s operation spliced Raths’ image together with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden in one television ad that her campaign has paid more than $570,000 to air — a huge sum for a single ad in a House primary.

Even more notable: The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that is aligned with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, and is devoted to making him speaker, has also jumped in, with even more ads attacking Raths.

The total anti-Raths spending is now around $1 million, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking service — a sign of the importance of the race, for which there has been scant public polling.

“Following redistricting, Young Kim has a largely new district and it’s important voters know that she’s the only credible conservative in the race,” said Calvin Moore, a spokesman for the Congressional Leadership Fund. “It’s a must-win race for November, and we’re going to do all we can to make sure a standout leader like Kim prevails.”

Orange County: A blue-red battleground

After years as a Republican stronghold, Orange County had already been shifting to the left before Donald Trump accelerated the change. In 2016, Kim lost her Orange County seat in the State Assembly to a Democrat.

In that campaign, she faced attacks comparing her to Trump, including an Auto-Tuned music video titled “Young Kim Is Like Donald Trump.” In 2018, she ran for Congress and fell short. That year, Democrats flipped all seven House seats in Orange County.

After the 2018 blue wave, however, Republicans recovered some of that lost ground. Kim and Michelle Steel, two of the first three Korean American women in Congress, were the only Republicans to flip Orange County seats in 2020.

“It says a lot about how the times have changed,” Kim, whose campaign declined to make her available for an interview, told The New York Times after she won her 2020 race. “Our Republican Party has been very aggressive in recruiting quality candidates who happen to be women.”

Democrats have made defeating both Kim and Steel top priorities in 2022, despite a national environment that favors Republicans.

Enter Greg Raths.

Unlike Kim, he hasn’t been a successful federal candidate. A member of the Mission Viejo City Council who has also served as mayor, he has lost three congressional elections since 2014.

Raths has called himself the “only conservative in this race,” and he recently tweeted a photo of himself, wearing a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, standing in front of Tom Cruise on a “Top Gun: Maverick” poster.

This campaign, Raths said in an interview, feels different — or, at least, it did until the huge spending against him began a few weeks ago.

Raths hasn’t had the resources to air ads in the expensive Los Angeles media market, but he said he had knocked on so many doors that he had probably lost 30 pounds. He also drives for Uber at night — in a Lexus hybrid because, he says, he is an “environmentalist” — and estimates that he has reached 2,000 voters alone by driving them around.

“How many candidates do you know who make money while they’re campaigning?” he asked.

On the stump, he reminds voters that Kim voted to censure Trump and to remove Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from congressional committees. Raths said he flew to an event at Mar-a-Lago in February to try to win over Trump’s support, but wasn’t successful.

Not just any Republican

The potential concern for national Republicans is that if Kim doesn’t make it past the primary, the seat could be in danger.

Raths isn’t concerned. He believes that any Republican who wins the primary will be strongly favored to win the general election over Asif Mahmood, the only Democrat on the ballot, and his $1.3 million war chest. When asked if he’d need to win over Biden voters in the general election, Raths pointed to his “worldly experience,” including working with the federal government as a colonel in the Marines, and his service on the Mission Viejo City Council, where he is a self-described “fiscal hawk.”

But there is another factor at play with the involvement of the McCarthy-linked Congressional Leadership Fund.

The super PAC wants more Republicans, of course. But it also wants more Republicans who will help the party — and McCarthy — govern effectively if the G.O.P. takes back the House. The goal is for Republicans to end up with a majority big enough to overpower some of the furthest-right members of the party, which will be crucial if McCarthy and a Republican-controlled House actually want to get anything done.

One of Kim’s strengths is that she is a “workhorse,” said Justin Wallin, a consultant in California who works with Republican candidates. She’s less interested in making it onto the news, which he said “makes her a terrific legislator but not that great of a candidate.”

Furthermore, the G.O.P. infighting, Wallin said, could hurt the party in the general election. “The Democrats emerge unscathed,” he said. “And the Republicans have beaten the snot out of each other in the primary.”

Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.

What to read

• Our colleague Emily Cochrane reports from Alaska, where four dozen candidates, including Sarah Palin and a man named Santa Claus, are competing for the state’s lone House seat, which opened up for the first time in half a century when Representative Don Young died in March.

• In a Supreme Court decision on Tuesday blocking a Texas law that would have forced large social media companies to publish all viewpoints, several justices seemed open to considering a question that could fundamentally change social media as we know it, Shira Ovide writes.

• Mayor Eric Adams of New York struggled with dyslexia as a child. Now he is reshaping New York City’s entire approach to reading to try to make sure children like him do not fall behind, Emma Fitzsimmons reports.

at issue

Why one Texas state senator is popping up all over the news

Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who is running for governor of Texas, garnered a great deal of attention among the state’s Democrats when he interrupted a news conference by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and challenged him to act after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde.

State Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents much of West Texas, including Uvalde, did the same two days later, urging Abbott to call a special session of the state’s Legislature to address gun violence.

Now Gutierrez is trying to maintain that pressure — even though Abbott and the other Republicans who control Texas are firmly opposed to new gun control measures.

“I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it. I’m tired,” Gutierrez said. “And I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to stop.”

Gutierrez was speaking from his car as he drove home from Uvalde, where he has traveled every day since the massacre, often staying late into the night.

In addition to visiting families, Gutierrez has also appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” MSNBC and CNN, recalling the horrible scenes he witnessed as parents waited to hear whether their children had survived. Gutierrez vowed to call a different news network every day to keep the pressure up.

His uphill legislative aims include raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle to 21, from 18. He has also proposed a 10-day waiting period to buy firearms and forming a state version of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“Whoever is going to listen, I’m going to yell, I’m going to scream, I’m going to shame these people,” he said. “I’m not playing games.”

On Wednesday, Abbott took some of his first concrete steps on the issue.

In a letter to fellow state Republican leaders that conspicuously avoided the word “guns,” Abbott called for special legislative committees to “reassess the twin issues of school safety and mass violence.”

After Abbott released the letter, Gutierrez criticized the legislative committees as amounting to another study of school violence, rather than real action.

“They are meaningless,” he said.

— Leah

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