where he ultimately rose to vice president. “[Denham’s] running against some Bay Area liberal, and I don’t think that guy can win,” said Jim DeMartini, the chairman of the Republican Party of Stanislaus County, which is in Denham’s 10th district, and a member of the county’s board of supervisors.

Harder says he’s no carpetbagger. He was born and raised in Turlock, a city of 74,000 in the 10th district, and he says his family still lives there. He frequently starts campaign speeches by explaining how his great-great-grandfather stopped 50 miles short of the gold he came looking for in the 1840s, becoming a peach farmer in Manteca instead. Since Harder moved home to run for office, he’s been teaching business at Modesto Junior College.

In campaign emails, Denham has alsoor they may not have voted because they felt like outsiders who shouldn’t participate, said Julissa Ruiz Ramirez, a college student at California State University, Stanislaus in Turlock who came to the U.S. when she was 4 and became a U.S. citizen last year. That was the sense she got from family and friends growing up, but she has decided to take a different route, majoring in political science and spending her free time campaigning for immigrants’ rights. She’s also a volunteer for the Harder campaign.

California’s 10th district is one of seven in the state that voted for Clinton in 2016 but is currently represented by a Republican in Congress. Each district has its own local issues that animate it, but they all have one thing in common: