Gearing up for the 2026 Midterm election: Battle over healthcare cuts becomes partisan
At a townhall at Bakersfield's IBEW Local 428 union hall Thursday night, Democratics discussed possible pathways to future victory, following major local and national losses in 2024.
Kern County Republicans face their own troubles — especially Congressman David Valadao.
Two days in a row, constituents rallied outside his Bakersfield district office to protest potential cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
KCSO lieutenant caused 2 crashes on Sunday, allegedly driving under the influence
'Show me what America looks like, this is what America looks like,' protesters chanted Wednesday evening.
And on Thursday morning, nurses with Bakersfield's Memorial Hospital chanted, 'When our healthcare is under attack, stand up and fight back.'
'[We're here] to demand that he votes no on the current federal budget in the House of Representatives. And votes no to any cuts to Medicaid…' said Noe Garcia, policy coordinator with the Dolores Huerta Foundation.
These concerns stem from House Republicans' budget blueprint approved in February, for which Valadao voted.
In this blueprint, Republicans say they want to cut $880 billion from programs managed by Congress' Energy and Commerce Committee.
But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said such a massive cut likely cannot happen without cutting Medicaid, Medicare and other programs.
These cuts are up in the air.
Nothing is finalized, and Congress and President Trump just passed a temporary spending bill to keep the government open and funded through the end of September.
But again, voters are concerned that in the future when budget conversations pick up again, there is an opportunity for those entitlement cuts.
'We need people to be able to get their insulin, to take care of their chronic illnesses and see their doctors on a regular basis,' said Sandy Reding, a nurse at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital.
Reding added, 'It's oftentimes the working poor, the disabled, the children [that are affected].'
'Valadao, you represent the largest number of people in California that are on Medicaid, food stamps, disability programs, education programs,' said local activist Dolores Huerta.
Medicare provides health care to seniors. Medicaid assists low-income and disabled people.
Valadao has declined all interview requests since early this month but said in a statement: 'I know how important Medicaid is to Central Valley families, and I remain committed to ensuring they have access to affordable healthcare,' said Congressman Valadao. 'There has been a lot of political rhetoric about cuts to Medicaid, but the reality is no such cuts have been made. As Congress continues to work through the budget process, I have been clear with House Leadership that I will only support a final package that protects critical programs like Medicaid and meets the needs of our community. My priority remains standing up for Central Valley families and making sure they can get the care they need.'
Huerta added, 'Republicans, independent voters, Democrats, people that don't vote, everybody's going to be impacted by these tax cuts.'
So, what are political implications as the 2026 Midterm — and yet another reelection bid for Valadao — fast approaches?
'He's in a tough spot. He's always in a tough spot, though,' said Central Valley political analyst Tracy Leach. 'Throughout his tenure, he is a Republican in a very Democrat district.'
17 News also spoke to Central Valley political strategist Tal Eslick.
17 News' Jenny Huh: 'Do you think that can actually threaten his reelection bid?
Tal Eslick: 'So, when voters ultimately make the decision as to whether or not they're going to reward an elected official with reelection, it's usually not one specific thing. Maybe it's a couple of things [that impact their vote]… Valadao is probably the only Republican that can consistently win in this particular seat.'
The five-term congressman has walked a fine line as a moderate Republican, winning in the majority Latino, largely Democratic district, beating Latino candidates like former California Assemblyman Rudy Salas.
Never miss a story: Make KGET.com your homepage
His 22nd Congressional District is a competitive purple district — Democrats and Republicans have a fair shot.
'But healthcare is an Achilles for him,' Leach noted. 'In the past, it was healthcare, arguably, that was his undoing in 2018 to repeal and replace Obamacare. He voted for that.'
That was the one year thus far Valadao lost his reelection bid.
Constituents encouraged Valadao if wants reelection in 2026.'Under those pressures of Washington D.C. and the current Administration, stand firm, stand strong,' stated Grace Huerta, co-director of Kern Exceptional Family Center.
'Valadao's district, two thirds of the people are on Medicaid, the residents,' Leach remarked. 'That is a huge number. So, he has to somehow navigate that with his party in D.C. but not let down his own constituents here in the Central Valley.'
Strategist Eslick noted, 'The specificity of these cuts does not exist yet, right? So, everything that we're talking about so far is mostly rhetoric… Congressional Democrats are using this as a bludgeon against anyone in a competitive seat.'
All eyes are on Valadao — whether it be his constituents, or his party, with the potential President Trump can put up a Republican primary opponent against the congressman.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


USA Today
2 minutes ago
- USA Today
Midterms are more than a year away, but Trump is already challenging them
Trump's DOJ and Republicans are building the machine now to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections 15 months from now. The 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act came and went on Aug. 6 amid a massive mission shift within the U.S. Department of Justice. That agency spent six decades using the Civil Rights Movement law to protect the ability of all Americans to cast ballots in elections. Now, the people President Donald Trump put in charge at the DOJ have shifted that mission entirely to protecting him from election results he dislikes. The DOJ is out of the civil rights business. Now its officials making demands, with not-so-veiled threats, for data from state election administrators while regurgitating Trump's oldest lie about elections – that hoards of noncitizens cast ballots, changing who wins and loses. They're building the machine now to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections 15 months from now. And those machinations are built on two lessons learned from 2020: Attack the election with everything you have before it happens, and stock the Trump administration only with officials who will do exactly what he says on elections, no matter what the law says. Election denial and mistrust are baked into the Trump administration Trump's team of election deniers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, represent both of these lessons. The first they learned in 2020, when they failed while trying to help Trump overturn a free and fair election. It was all so careless and chaotic back then, a dizzying series of unsubstantiated claims and discombobulated news conferences punctuated by judge after judge tossing out Trump's challenges as meritless. I was reminded recently of a news conference I attended at Philadelphia's airport on the day after the 2020 election. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, then working as Trump's lawyer doing work that eventually got him disbarred, was the ringmaster for the election deniers that day. And Bondi was right by his side. I watched on Nov. 4, 2020, as Bondi started and ended her remarks by insisting twice that Trump had already won Pennsylvania … while everyone knew that the state's election officials were still counting the votes. Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020 when the race there was called three days later. The Trump team's takeaway from all that: Set up the infrastructure to destabilize the administration of elections at the state level well before Election Day, not just after the polls close. The second lesson was to purge the team of lawyers and officials who will follow the law, even if that means an election result that infuriates Trump. He had top aides who held the line during his first term, acknowledging his loss in 2020. They're all gone now, leaving only Trump's unquestioning sycophants in the second term. And that's exactly who has been bombarding state election administrators with letters for months, demanding copies of the voter rolls for those states, along with records from previous elections when Trump was on the ballot. This is the plodding setup that will eventually lead to Trump and his team making new – and still unsubstantiated – claims that they're trying to protect the 2026 midterm elections from looming fraud. Expect Trump to bully Republicans into interfering with elections Trump has already made clear he'll use any political power he has to influence who wins control of Congress in 2026, even if that means taking actions he has no legal authority to take as president. Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at The Brennan Center for Justice, told me that Trump and his team appear to be building a "pretext" on the false claim of rampant election fraud as justification for their potential meddling in the elections. They're systematically removing "the brakes" that protect democracy during the voting process, she said. "They're taking aim at all of the brakes that applied before. And they're starting earlier," Weiser said. "That just shows you he's laser-focused on interfering in elections here by any means necessary. Bend the rules. Throw out the playbook." David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation and Research, has been hosting monthly webinar meetings with hundreds of state election officials since March. Those officials – Republicans and Democrats – have plenty of questions and concerns about the "unprecedented level of federal interference in state election processes," he told me. "They're not sure where all this is leading," Becker said. "They hear the rhetoric coming out of the White House. They hear the continued false statements about past elections and election security in the United States." It's worth noting here, as Weiser told me, that presidents have no role in running or overseeing elections in America, except for enforcing voting laws passed by Congress. And Becker noted that Congress, now controlled by Trump's Republican allies, has not authorized the DOJ intrusions into state election systems. "This is not so much about election policy as it is about a completely radical rebalancing of the balance of power between the White House and the states," Becker said. "And the Constitution has said, with regards to elections in particular, that the balance of power is tilted toward the states." As with so many Trump scams in his second term, Democrats in the minority in Congress will howl but have no real power now to stop him. And Republicans in Congress have surrendered any real authority as a coequal branch of government. They just do what Trump tells them now. So it falls to election officials in the states, appointed or elected, Republican or Democrat, to engage with Trump's DOJ election deniers while insisting that everyone follows the law. These officials have faced an extraordinary increase of repulsive abuse from Trump's supporters that he egged on. That was Trump's objective, then and now, to intimidate them into submission. We can only hope they hold the line, like the Trump officials in his first term who refused to endorse his lies about the election. Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.


Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
End the gerrymandering wars by enlarging the US House
Meanwhile, national Democratic Party leaders are Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up There are no saints or villains in this saga. Republicans and Democrats are engaging in a bare-knuckled fight for power, and what each side condemns is Advertisement The cause of all this drama is not inherent Republican or Democratic perfidy. It is an institutional flaw: With only 435 seats, the US House is far too small — which means each congressional district is far too large. The average district now encompasses nearly 760,000 people. That is a constituency vastly greater than any member of Congress can effectively or fairly represent. And because congressional districts are so large, each one is a political prize well worth gerrymandering. When each district must corral so many people, a single line on the map has an outsize political impact. Under such circumstances, partisan cartography becomes irresistible — and bitter, recurring fights like the one in Texas are inevitable. Happily, there is a structural remedy that would dramatically curtail the constant court fights, political retaliation, and vicious maneuvering surrounding redistricting. Congress ought to expand the size of the House from the current 435 members to 1,500. No constitutional amendment would be needed — it would require only a simple statute to restore each House district to a more manageable size, and thereby make gerrymandering far less tempting. That would be a return to what the framers of the Constitution intended. The House of Representatives was conceived as Advertisement And there it froze. Congress didn't expand the House following the 1920 census, because of a political standoff. Many members resented the A House of 435 might have been workable during the Hoover administration. It makes no sense now. If the House were expanded to 1,500 members, the average congressional district would have about 225,000 people — still larger than its counterparts in many other modern democracies, but far more manageable than today's bloated mega-districts. Granted, that would require more chairs in the House chamber and perhaps smaller offices and staffs for each member. But the payoff would be enormous: Not only would the House be more representative, it would also be less susceptible to gerrymandering. Here's why: When each congressional district contains three-quarters of a million seats, a carefully crafted border can determine the balance of thousands of votes — enough to flip a seat. That makes each boundary line a powerful political weapon. But when districts are a third or a quarter of that size, no single line carries as much weight. Shifting a few neighborhoods or towns from one district to another would affect far fewer voters, making it harder for mapmakers to engineer outcomes with surgical precision. Smaller districts mean smaller levers — reducing the scope for mischief. Advertisement And the more districts there are, the less potent those engineering tactics become. Gerrymandering works best when the map has fewer, larger pieces — which makes it easier to 'pack' opposition voters into a handful of districts, and to 'crack' the rest among multiple other districts, thinning out their numbers to ensure that they lose everywhere else. But multiply the number of districts, and that strategy loses force. The cartographer's advantage fades as the map gets more granular. When each puzzle piece covers a smaller slice of territory, the lines become less predictable and harder to weaponize. Last but definitely not least, in a 1,500-member House, voters would be likelier to know their elected representative — and to be known in return. In districts limited to 225,000 constituents, there would be room for more local voices, more diversity of all kinds, more candidates who reflect the communities they serve. Much smaller districts means much less expensive campaigns — and lower barriers to entry for challengers. It also encourages lawmakers to stay grounded in the concerns of their neighbors rather than the noise of national partisanship. Congress blundered badly when it froze the House at 435 seats. The chaos emanating from Texas is only the latest consequence of that blunder. Advertisement It doesn't have to be this way. Enlarging the House to 1,500 members would end the gerrymandering wars. Better still, it would revive the ideal of a legislature that truly speaks for the people — restoring the people's House to its constitutional roots. Jeff Jacoby can be reached at


NBC News
an hour ago
- NBC News
Why U.S. politicians are up in arms about new internet rules in Britain
A growing number of U.S. politicians are condemning a new British law that requires some websites and apps — including some based in the United States — to check the ages of users across the pond. A bipartisan group of members of Congress visited London recently to meet counterparts and air their concerns about the U.K.'s Online Safety Act, which went into effect July 25. Vice President JD Vance has been criticizing the law for months, as have privacy advocates who argue that the law infringes on free expression and disproportionately hurts vulnerable groups. Vance criticized the U.K. again on Friday, this time in person at the start of a visit to the country. Sitting alongside British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and speaking to reporters, Vance warned the U.K. against going down a 'very dark path' of online 'censorship' that he said was trod earlier by the Biden administration. The U.K. Online Safety Act is aimed at preventing children from accessing potentially harmful material online, and internet companies are now asking British users to verify their ages in a variety of ways, including with photos of their IDs, through a credit card provider or with selfies analyzed via age-check software. But the sweeping nature of the law has caught some Britons by surprise. They're being asked to prove their age not only for pornography websites but also before they can listen to songs with explicit lyrics or access message boards to discuss sensitive subjects. Reddit, for example, is restricting access to various pages including r/stopsmoking, r/STD and r/aljazeera. Reddit said in a post about its enforcement of the law that for people in the U.K., it was now verifying ages before they can 'view certain mature content.' A spokesperson for the company said r/STD — a message board focused on questions of sexual health — is restricted because of explicit images. They said r/stopsmoking is restricted because it deals with harmful substances and that r/aljazeera — which is not affiliated with the news organization of the same name but deals with similar topics — is restricted because it depicts serious injury or violence. To get around the new law, the use of virtual private network software that can mask a person's location, also known as VPNs, has surged in the U.K. The primary argument of U.S. politicians who oppose the law is that they don't want American tech companies to have to comply, even if they're serving British customers. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he raised his objections with U.K. government officials during meetings in London at the end of July. In a statement after his return, he said the law and other European regulations 'create a serious chilling effect on free expression and threaten the First Amendment rights of American citizens and companies.' 'We absolutely need to protect children and keep harmful, illegal content off these platforms — but when governments or bureaucracies suppress speech in the name of safety or regulation, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the core of Western democratic values,' Jordan said. The issue may come to a head in a couple of different venues. That could be the courts if any tech companies file lawsuits over the law, or it could come up in trade negotiations if President Donald Trump decides to press the issue with British politicians, although they say it's not open to debate in trade talks. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Meta board member with close ties to the Trump administration, recently called U.K. leaders to complain about the law, the Financial Times reported Friday. A spokesperson for Andreessen said the report was not true. The U.K.'s Online Safety Act is one of the most comprehensive national laws that any democracy has ever passed to try to curtail potentially harmful content online in the name of children. Parliament passed the law in 2023, and the government went through two years of writing detailed rules before putting the law into effect last month. The law is notable for a combination of reasons: the variety of content it applies to, the potential fines and the possible international reach. A wide array of content is at issue. While the 'primary' focus of the law is online material such as pornography and suicide, it also requires websites to age-gate content with bullying, serious violence, 'dangerous stunts' and 'exposure to harmful substances.' That has covered relatively mainstream services such as Spotify and Microsoft's Xbox gaming system. Companies that don't comply face potential fines of up to 10% of their global revenue, which for the biggest companies could be billions of dollars. The British regulator Ofcom, short for Office of Communications, says companies must use ' highly effective age assurance ' to restrict the riskiest types of content. And the U.K. has not been adamant that it won't allow international borders to stymie enforcement. Ofcom says it plans to apply the law to services with 'a significant number' of U.K. users, services where U.K. users 'are a target market' and services that are 'capable of being accessed' by U.K. users with a 'material risk of significant harm' to such users. The law appears to retain strong support among the British public. About 69% said they supported the new rules in a YouGov poll taken after implementation began, and 46% said they supported it 'strongly.' But 52% said they do not think the law will be very effective at preventing minors from accessing pornography. The law was passed during a previous, Conservative-led government and took effect under the current, Labour-led government. But the far-right party Reform U.K. is pushing for a repeal of the law. Party leader Nigel Farage, a former member of Parliament, has called it 'state suppression of genuine free speech,' and his party is running high in polls. 'Millions of people have noticed that what they're getting on their feeds is different to what it was,' Farage said at a recent news conference. Farage also met with visiting members of Congress last week, and the talks turned heated with Farage and Democrats exchanging insults, according to Politico, although the dispute appeared to be more about Trump's free speech restrictions than about the U.K. law. Most U.S.-based tech companies say they are complying with the new law. Microsoft said in a blog post that Xbox users in the U.K. would begin seeing notifications 'encouraging them to verify their age' as a 'one-time process,' with actual enforcement starting next year. If users don't comply, Microsoft warned, they'll lose access to social features of Xbox but will still be able to play games. Discord said it was implementing new default settings for all U.K. users, in effect treating everyone like a minor with heavy content filtering unless they verify that they're adults. Discord says users can choose to verify their age either with a face scan or an ID upload. Elon Musk's X has also restricted posts, including information about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, according to the BBC. X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. But a few services are not complying. The far-right social media site Gab, which allows white supremacist views and other extremist content, said in a notice on its website that it had received notices from Ofcom and, rather than comply, decided to block the entire U.K. from accessing its site. The company said in the notice: 'We refuse to comply with this tyranny.' Preston Byrne, a U.S. lawyer who specializes in technology issues, has said on X that he plans to file a lawsuit soon on behalf of an unnamed client seeking to quash possible enforcement of the British law within the United States. The subject has been simmering for months ahead of the law's implementation, and it came up in February when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House. In an Oval Office meeting, a reporter asked Trump what he thought of the U.K. approach to free speech, and Trump tossed the question to Vance, who expressed concern. 'We do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the U.K. and also with some of our European allies. But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British — of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them — but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens,' he said. Starmer defended his government's approach. 'We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time. Certainly, we wouldn't want to reach across U.S. systems and we don't, and that's absolutely right,' he said. British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy later said the U.K. would not make any changes to the Online Safety Act as part of trade negotiations with the Trump administration. American privacy advocates are watching the debate play out with alarm, concerned that similar age verification laws — like new state laws targeting the Apple and Google app stores — would upend the internet closer to home. 'Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible,' wrote Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy activist at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog post Tuesday.