Northern California Conservatives Are Frustrated They Could Get a Democratic Representative

A dozen rice farmers ate chili and munched on sandwiches on a recent afternoon at the Richvale Cafe, a lunch spot that was bustling by local standards and brought more people face to face in one sitting than each might see in an entire week.

Richvale, population 234, has a cluster of ranch-style homes surrounded by a flat expanse of furrowed plots and flooded rice fields. It sits hundreds of miles north from the tech hubs and balmy beaches that many Americans envision when they think of California.

The almond growers and cattle ranchers here take turns volunteering as firefighters and make sure to remember their neighbors’ birthdays. (If they forget, a whiteboard next to the cafe’s kitchen offers a handy reminder.)

For decades, residents in the rural north have longed for a political earthquake that would cleave their region out of California and allow them to create their own fabled “State of Jefferson” with conservatives in Southern Oregon. They have increasingly felt underappreciated and misunderstood by the liberal Democrats who run California and dominate the congressional delegation — who, in their telling, siphon away their water and prioritize environmental regulations that undercut farmers’ livelihoods.

Now, they not only lack a conservative State of Jefferson, but their entire region is also likely to lose its Republican congressman and have him replaced by a Democrat after next year’s midterm elections. On a recent December day, they were still coming to terms with the fact that California voters, at the urging of Gov. Gavin Newsom, had just approved an aggressive gerrymander designed to turn five Republican seats Democratic.

“People in the cities don’t have a clue what it takes to survive out here,” said Terry Williams, a 75-year-old rice and walnut farmer who moved to Richvale in 1974. “I don’t think people that were born and raised in the cities can represent us to the same extent.”