In November, voters will decide whether to let the state legislature temporarily override California’s independent redistricting commission and replace its congressional maps with Democratic-drawn ones.
If they approve the measure, the redrawn 48th would no longer include Poway, Santee or Ramona, would pick up San Marcos and Vista and would reach deeper into Riverside County, dropping Murrieta but picking up Palm Springs and environs. With those new boundaries, Democrats would be handed a 4-percentage-point registration advantage over Republicans. The maps would be in place through the 2030 election.
Until redistricting, von Wilpert had been running for state Senate. Now, her entrance into the congressional race in turn has led at least three local Democrats — former San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, San Diego Unified school board trustee Sabrina Bazzo and East County water official Suzanne Till — to jump into that race.
If the new maps pass, Issa and a field crowded with Democrats would vie in an open June primary for one of two spots in the general election. Two Riverside County Democrats have also filed statements of intent to run, immigration lawyer Curtis Morrison and activist Brian Nash, and Nuview Union School Board member Abel Chavez and entrepreneur Brandon Riker have vowed to join the Democratic field if redistricting passes.
Issa has represented the San Diego area in Congress for more than two decades, making a name for himself as a relentless critic of President Barack Obama and, as chair of the House Oversight Committee, leading investigations into his administration, particularly on the 2012 attack on U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya.
His tenure hasn’t been uninterrupted — in 2018, facing a tougher race amid an expected “blue wave,” he declined to seek reelection before regaining his seat in 2020.
Last week, Issa’s spokesperson Jonathan Wilcox called the Democratic redistricting effort a “trashing of the state constitution that seeks to disenfranchise millions of voters.” Issa himself did not respond to requests for comment from The San Diego Union-Tribune.
“I’m not clinging to this job,” the congressman told the news organization NOTUS recently. “I can do other things, and it won’t bother me.”
But Barry Jantz, a Republican political analyst and former La Mesa City Council member, expects Issa to have a good shot at re-election even if the district is gerrymandered to favor Democrats.
East County voters who aren’t registered with a political party but lean conservative have long helped Republicans outperform their percentage-point registration advantage there, and could keep doing so, Jantz added.
“Anything within five points, I would say, is going to be competitive,” he said.
The field
On the Democratic side, factions are already being created ahead of next year’s primary for the now competitive seat.
Campa-Najjar has consolidated the support of most other local members of Congress, such as Reps. Scott Peters and Mike Levin. He is also in a long-term relationship with Rep. Sara Jacobs.
Von Wilpert, who flipped a long-Republican council district in 2020, has the backing of state lawmakers like Sens. Catherine Blakespear and Steve Padilla and the first labor union to endorse in the race, the region’s Operating Engineers local.
Campa-Najjar has twice run for and lost races for a similar congressional seat — first against Rep. Duncan Hunter in 2018, then against Issa in 2020. In 2022, he ran for mayor of Chula Vista, where Democrats hold a large registration advantage, and lost to Republican John McCann.
Since then, Campa-Najjar has been building his political resume, going to Navy Officer Candidate School in 2023 — he is now a junior Naval Reserves officer — and enrolling this fall in a graduate program in international conflict resolution at Georgetown University in Washington.
But redistricting quickly changed his priorities, and he says national Democratic leaders and supporters here urged him to run. Campa-Najjar, who grew up in San Diego County, says he’s had a base of support in what’s now the 48th district for nearly a decade. Despite coming up short before, he notes that in 2018 and 2020 he outperformed other Democrats on the ballot.
“You’ve got to be ready, and fortunately I am, because I’ve been here before and I could build on the momentum that we had,” Campa-Najjar said. “Ammar Campa-Najjar is a hard name to remember. But once you do, it’s hard to get out of your head.”
Redistricting also quickly changed the political path of von Wilpert, who had launched a run for state Senate before pivoting to a congressional bid.
Von Wilpert was first elected to the San Diego City Council in 2020 to represent communities like Rancho Bernardo, Scripps Ranch and Rancho Penasquitos and now faces term limits. Previously, she worked as a lawyer for the federal government and for the city of San Diego.
“I want to run to for Congress to fight back and stand up for the people here in my hometown,” von Wilpert said in an interview. “The federal government needs to do much more to address what we’re struggling with every day.”
Von Wilpert would bring to Congress a long record in the public sector, including in Washington.
There, she worked as a litigator for the National Labor Review Board during the Obama administration, and as a congressional staffer she helped develop proposed legislation to expand organized labor protections and weaken anti-union “right-to-work” laws at the state level.
In 2018, von Wilpert returned to San Diego and worked as a deputy city attorney before getting elected to the city council, where she’s passed measures to ban digital-only coupons in supermarkets and create a program that provides housing down-payment grants for teachers.
“I am the only candidate who’s won elections and the only candidate who’s flipped a district red to blue already,” von Wilpert said. “I am the only Democrat running who has the experience to run and win an election.”
To counter Campa-Najjar’s name recognition in much of the district, von Wilpert is looking to Palm Springs, where she’s campaigned for other elected officials before.
To Dan O’Donnell, a Vista City Council member who supports her, she needs to introduce herself to voters by focusing on local issues.
“You can throw out a lot of the things that divide us, but when you talk about local issues, the majority of people are in agreement on those,” he said. “We need a strong leader in this race, and that’s why I’ve supported her at the local level.”
Allison Gill is a liberal podcaster who’s backing Campa-Najjar and has been involved in anti-Trump protests and town halls around the county.
To win, she believes a candidate like Campa-Najjar needs to channel Democratic voters’ anxiety about the Trump administration, something she says Democrats who won other recent special elections have done.
Another competitive race
State Senate District 40 stretches from San Diego’s northern neighborhoods deep into the county’s backcountry, east past Mt. Laguna and north to Rainbow. It’s currently represented by Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, who faces term limits, but its electorate is evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans.
Now, Von Wilpert’s departure from the race to run for Congress has already prompted three other local Democrats to jump in.
Among them is Mara Elliott, who in her two recent terms as San Diego’s elected city attorney advised the city on handling the scandal over 101 Ash Street, helped clean up the legal fallout from the city’s overturned pension cuts and enacted tougher ethics oversight, among other efforts.
“I always had to go back to that north star, which is follow the law and keep the public’s interest first,” Elliot said.
On the campaign trail, she hopes to lean on her public safety record, especially as she gets to areas of the district beyond San Diego, like Ramona and Escondido. In Sacramento, she wants to better regulate independent living homes, improve conservatorship courts and fund the implementation of Proposition 36’s mandate of treatment for people with certain drug convictions.
“There is some name recognition that will go outside the city’s limits,” Elliott said. “I suspect that there is a common denominator with all of us, and it all comes down to affordability and crime.”
San Diego Unified school board trustee Sabrina Bazzo also joined the race after von Wilpert’s announcement.
Bazzo decided to run for state Senate after her school board colleague Richard Barrera — who is running for statewide office — encouraged her. She’s won a competitive seat before and believes she’s succeeded in overcoming political rhetoric to earn the trust of the communities she serves.
“We all want good schools, we all want a strong public education system for our students, regardless of what your politics are,” she said.
Another candidate, Suzanne Till, who sits on the Padre Dam Municipal Water District board, originally planned to challenge Issa. Now she supports von Wilpert and is instead running for state Senate, where she hopes to protect environmental sustainability and water resources — something she sees as an issue that can appeal to all voters.
“I’m very concerned that the Democratic Party is going to go with just blue in this race and not think purple,” Till said. “I’ve always been very nonpartisan, and sometimes I feel with the county party here they don’t understand that as an advantage.”
Before redistricting efforts prompted new Democrats to pile into the race, three Republicans had also already stated their intention to run — Escondido City Councilmember Joe Garcia, San Marcos City Councilmember Edward Musgrove and nonprofit founder Kristie Bruce-Lane, who has previously lost two races for the 76th Assembly District.
This piece was originally published at the San Diego Union Tribune.