There was a bogeyman at Republican Rep. Mike Garcia’s town hall in Santa Clarita this week: the state of California.
Onstage at the Performing Arts Center at College of the Canyons, Garcia spoke in front of a large screen projecting the red-lettered words: “My mission is to prevent the U.S. from adopting California’s extreme policies.”
Garcia blasted California’s gasoline prices, its homelessness crisis, housing costs that are about double the national average. And he blamed it all on the Democratic supermajority in Sacramento.
“I want to be very clear, because this has been misinterpreted in the past: I love California,” Garcia said. “It’s why I’m here. It’s where I’ve raised my family. It’s where I was raised. I have no intentions of leaving California, but, boy, does Sacramento make it hard to stay in California.”
Then, he added: “My job is to prevent the country from turning into what California has become.”
The packed auditorium burst into applause.
Decrying the cost of gas and housing in the Golden State is a potent message in Garcia’s sprawling district in northern Los Angeles County. Many residents here endure two-hour commutes to jobs in Los Angeles because they had to relocate to the high desert to find a home they could afford.
On Tuesday night, Garcia, a thrice-elected Republican running for reelection in one of the state’s most competitive congressional races, held court for more than three hours during his town hall. Because he was there in his official role as a congressman, Garcia did not speak directly about the election. His spokespeople have not responded to multiple requests from The Times to discuss the campaign.
In a lengthy question-and-answer session, constituents at the forum made their concerns clear: public safety, the cost of living, better health benefits for veterans, and the culture wars in California’s public schools, especially regarding gender identity issues.
Garcia, a former Navy pilot, is facing a tough reelection bid to represent the 27th Congressional District, where Democrats hold a significant advantage in voter registration.
The race between him and his Democratic opponent, George Whitesides, a former NASA chief of staff under President Obama, will be crucial in determining whether Republicans maintain their narrow majority in the U.S. House. The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election handicapper, calls this year’s race a toss-up.
“Some of you want me to be further right. Some of you want me to be further left. I am who I am, and I believe what I believe,” GOP Rep. Mike Garcia told a packed town hall in Santa Clarita.
(Hailey Branson-Potts / Los Angeles Times)
The once staunchly conservative district stretches from Santa Clarita to the Kern County line and includes Lancaster and Palmdale. With its proximity to Edwards Air Force Base, it has deep ties to the military and aerospace industry.
Just over 41% of registered voters are Democrats, and about 30% are Republicans. More than a fifth are independents
Garcia, 48, first won his seat during a 2020 special election to replace former Rep. Katie Hill, a young Democrat who resigned amid a sex scandal. It was the first time the GOP had flipped a California district from blue to red in more than 20 years.
Garcia retained the seat in two subsequent elections. And he won last spring’s three-way primary election with 55% of the vote, while Whitesides got 33%, setting the stage for the top two vote-getters to face off in the November runoff.
Whitesides, a former chief executive of Mojave-based Virgin Galactic, is a first-time candidate who has blasted Garcia’s vote against certifying the 2020 presidential election results after the Jan. 6 insurrection, and his 2021 co-sponsorship of the Life at Conception Act, which would have amounted to a nationwide abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest or threats to the mother’s health.
Onstage Tuesday, Garcia said, “In terms of party affiliation, I am in the minority — I understand that.
“Some of you want me to be further right. Some of you want me to be further left. I am who I am, and I believe what I believe,” he said.
Garcia is the son of a Mexican immigrant who moved to the U.S. in 1959. He said that his late father “came here legally” and “did it right” and that illegal immigration is one of the nation’s biggest threats. In Congress, he voted against creating a path to citizenship for so-called Dreamers who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Garcia called for higher pay and more leave time for members of the military — drawing cheers from a crowd filled with veterans.
“You’ve got to pay them better. You’ve got to lead them better, and you’ve got to invest in the military industrial complex that supports them and gives our war fighters the … advantage that they, frankly, deserve overseas and at home,” said Garcia, a former executive for defense contractor Raytheon.
“As people who have a heart for patriotism and a love of this country,” one woman asked Garcia, “what can we do to restore patriotism in our schools?”
Garcia, a father of two, said politics needed to stay out of public schools and blasted a new state law that bans schools from enacting policies that require teachers to notify parents about changes to a student’s gender identity — for example, if they ask to be called by a different name or pronoun.
“For every bill like this one in Sacramento, there’s an ugly twin sister in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “And my job is to make sure that twin does not get allowed to be signed into law and that California doesn’t effectively become the norm throughout the entire country.”
The evening did include one tense exchange. Garcia had told the crowd that he co-sponsored a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark 1994 law providing aid for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
“This is a big deal. Not very many Republicans are on this Violence Against Women Act, and I’m proud to be a co-sponsor,” Garcia said.
But in 2021, Garcia voted against another reauthorization measure, as conservatives protested provisions that expanded protections for LGBTQ+ people and tightened gun access for people convicted of abusing or stalking a dating partner.
Instead, Garcia co-sponsored a failed Republican-led alternative to renew the act for one year, minus the new provisions. He was not a co-sponsor of the compromise bill that passed the following year as part of a broader spending package.
Megan Johnson, an 18-year-old from Santa Clarita who will be voting for the first time this fall, called out the discrepancy.
“You voted against renewing the act. Is this the same act you talk about co-sponsoring in your slideshow?” she asked him.
Garcia said that he supported “a pure version” of the Violence Against Women Act, and that the version he voted against “ended up unintentionally depriving other people of their constitutional rights as a result of the protection of women who have been the victims of violence.”
Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, described Garcia’s representation of his vote as “a new low.”
“The truth Mike Garcia apparently can’t bear to admit is that he voted to block the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2021 — a move that risked gutting funding to improve criminal justice responses to sexual assault, domestic violence and stalking, and cutting the availability of services for victims and survivors across California,” Gottlieb said.
Outside the auditorium, Johnson, a registered Democrat, said that the congressman did not fully answer her question and that she would be voting for Whitesides.
In addition to women’s safety and reproductive rights, she said she cares most in this election about gun reform, an issue that hits close to home in Santa Clarita: In 2019, a student at Saugus High opened fire in a crowded quad, killing two classmates and injuring three others before killing himself.
“Growing up in the generation that had to do active training shootings … it’s caused, honestly, a lot of fear,” she said. “I have nightmares about mass shootings.”
As she left the auditorium, Trish Lester, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clarita Valley Republican Women, said she respected Garcia for explaining his vote to Johnson and liked everything he had to say.
Wearing a shirt that said, “My Governor is an Idiot,” Lester said she agreed with Garcia that California has become too extreme and too expensive.
Lester and her husband, an Army veteran, “supported his campaign from the very first day,” she added. “It was obvious that he was a class act, that this was a man who was a real patriot, with his military service and his business experience.
“I’m very pleased with Mike,” she said.