Who’s in the House?

LaMalfa has the edge, but Logue lags

There are two races for U.S. Congress that affect CN&R readers, depending on where they live. Both are intriguing, but for different reasons.

One is the race for District 3, which stretches from the Highway 80 corridor in the south, including Davis, Dixon and Fairfield, to Glenn County in the north. The incumbent is Democrat John Garamendi, 69, long a major player in state politics. He is being challenged by local Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue, 63, who is being termed out of office.

The other race, in District 1, includes all of the counties in northeastern California, from Butte and Nevada in the south to Siskiyou and Modoc in the north, and includes the cities of Chico, Paradise, Red Bluff and Redding. The incumbent is Republican Doug LaMalfa, 53, a Richvale rice farmer who is completing his first term in office, having succeeded 12-term Rep. Wally Herger.

LaMalfa is being challenged by three people: Democrat Heidi Hall, 53, of Grass Valley, who’s a program manager for the state Department of Water Resources; Democrat Dan Levine, of Chico, a medical-marijuana farmer and activist running under the slogan “Cannabis for Congress”; and Republican Gregory Cheadle, 57, of Redding, an attorney interning in the Shasta County Public Defender’s Office.

This race is interesting for a number of reasons. One, obviously, is the presence of Levine, whose shoestring candidacy may indicate how many pot growers there are in the district—or at least how many of them vote. Another is that Cheadle is also an unusual candidate, an African-American Republican. And then there is Hall, an unabashed liberal running in a district where the voter registration split between Republicans and Democrats is about 60-40.

As the incumbent and someone who served in both the state Assembly and Senate, LaMalfa, a bedrock conservative who wants to repeal Obamacare and denies that humans are causing climate change, is in a strong position here. The only question is: Who will survive the primary to run against him in November, Cheadle, Hall or Levine? If it’s Cheadle, look for some conservative hair-splitting. If Hall moves on, voters will have a clear choice in November. And if Levine prevails—well, no telling what may happen.

Readers may remember that in 2012, following then-Assemblyman Jim Nielsen’s decision to seek the District 4 State Senate seat vacated by LaMalfa, Logue also threw his hat in that ring, while continuing to run for re-election to the Assembly. Four weeks before the November election, however, he dropped out of the Senate race, citing health issues. (He and Nielsen both won their races.)

With Nielsen and LaMalfa ensconced in their seats, and facing term limits in the Assembly at the end of this year, Logue had only one option for continuing his political career: challenging Garamendi, an iconic figure who has previously served as state insurance commissioner, lieutenant governor, assemblyman and senator.

In 2012, competing for the first time in a newly reshaped and more conservative district, Garamendi defeated Colusa County Supervisor Kim Vann, a Republican, with 54.2 percent of the vote to her 45.8 percent. Since then he has worked hard to win over conservative voters. Twice he’s joined forces with LaMalfa—in a widely published photo op supporting construction of the Sites Reservoir and co-writing a letter to the FDA that convinced the agency to back off a new regulation that would have made feeding spent brewery grain to cattle—a practice Chico’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. embraces—prohibitively expensive.

Logue is of course known to CN&R readers as our conservative three-term assemblyman. He is more widely known as the man behind the failed Proposition 23 on the November 2010 ballot, which would have overturned the state’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. He’s also known for his opposition to state regulations and his series of hearings up and down the state—and even in Nevada—about California’s alleged hostility to business.

This is the first time Logue has faced a strong Democratic opponent in a district where Democrats have a voter-registration advantage. If turnout is low on June 3 and Democrats stay home, Logue could win. Under California’s new “top-two primary” law, however, both men will advance to the November general election, and Garamendi will almost certainly have the edge then.