On a recent Sunday evening, Katie Hill, 30, whose father is a Los Angeles police lieutenant in Beverly Hills, boarded a red-eye flight to Washington for frenetic fundraising and networking. She must really want to get into the House of Representatives. If she does, she will have defeated a two-term incumbent, Rep. Steve Knight, 51, who was an L.A. police officer for 18 years and is the last Republican in a district containing a significant portion of Los Angeles County.
California’s 25th District includes Simi Valley, which is famous as the home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the trial of police officers charged with brutality against Rodney King. It is home to many of the Los Angeles police officers who helped quell the city rioting after the accused officers’ acquittal. Hill’s father-in-law, too, is a cop. Her husband’s uncle was an officer killed in the line of duty; his death is currently Orange County’s only unsolved police murder. In the June 5 primary, Hill will be the first Democrat to receive her father’s vote.
The 25th is at the top of the list of seven (of 14) Republican-held California seats that Democrats hope to capture because Hillary Clinton carried them. The seven are almost one-third of the 23 such districts nationwide. Joe Trippi, the Democratic consultant who was media adviser to Doug Jones’ successful Alabama U.S. Senate campaign, says Jones got votes from Republicans who still support the president but want no more chaos. But referring to California Democrats, he warns that “our own enthusiasm might get in the way.”
This is because in 2012, Democrats — who run this almost monochrome blue state — ignored the axiom that improvements often make things worse. They instituted a primary system under which the top two vote-getters for an office are on the November ballots, even if both are from the same party. This year, Democrats, fueled by fury against the president, might produce such a profusion of candidates that the Democratic vote will be fragmented, putting weak general-election Democrats, or no Democrats, on some November ballots.
