San Diego’s gerrymandered CA-48 could decide control of the House. Will Democrats blow it?

Paul Mitchell, a veteran redistricting specialist at a California voter data firm, was in the middle of packing for a European trip when he got the call: Time to draw the map. It was late July 2025 and, after weeks of will-he-or-won’t-he speculation, Gov. Gavin Newsom was moving ahead with his plans to reconfigure California’s congressional districts — and Mitchell was the person with the expertise to do it.

With a new California map getting the green light, Mitchell’s other maps — “I’m a cyclist, so we had planned it, and I had purposefully put all the nice little rides that I wanted to do,” he told me recently — got shelved. He drove his wife and daughter to the airport and, instead of exploring London, Paris, Switzerland and Italy, he spent the next two weeks studying towns like Fallbrook, San Marcos and Temecula. His mandate: Counter the redistricting that could lead to five additional GOP House seats in Texas by creating five new Democratic seats in California.

As soon as he got back from the airport, the calls began. Could Democratic Rep. Mike Levin on the coast of northern San Diego County and southern Orange County spare a few votes? Would Palm Springs Democrats be OK with getting attached to northeastern San Diego County? Would incumbent Republican Reps. Young Kim and Ken Calvert — who represented different districts in Riverside County — tear themselves apart in an unexpected primary?

“I was just working on Zooms every day from like 5 in the morning till midnight,” he told me. He was running on adrenaline, Diet Coke and chicken nuggets. “And at some point I ran out of Diet Coke.” When he went to pick up his family two weeks later, the Tesla battery was dead. He hadn’t left the house.

After he finally got the battery charged, he passed the redistricting baton to his wife, Jodi Hicks, who, as CEO of the Planned Parenthood affiliates in California, would join Newsom in promoting the redistricting effort over the next couple of months. “My job was done,” he says. “And her job started.”

Mitchell was hired for explicitly partisan purposes, yet he did not, he says, want to “rip the state to pieces.” And even his opponents conceded he could have gone further. Amy Thoma Tan, who served as a spokesperson for the anti-redistricting group Protect Voters First — funded by the wealthy Republican Charles Munger Jr. — recalled that she and her allies thought they’d get more of a reach from Mitchell.

“We were greatly anticipating the maps … and when we got the maps, we opened them and were like, ‘Hmm, not ideal, but there’s nothing crazy in these maps. There’s still a partisan gerrymander, but it’s not so absurd that we can have some crazy press conference and say: Look at this horrible thing that he did,’” she said during a February panel featuring Mitchell and some of his critics at the University of Southern California, months after voters had approved the new maps. Mitchell, she said, had drawn the maps “with integrity.” (“That’s the best compliment that I’ve received on the redistricting plans to date,” he told me.)

Now the question will be whether Mitchell had too much integrity or just the right amount. Did he do enough to deliver Democrats the five seats they want to gain? Or did he cut things too close?

The answers, and perhaps even the balance of power in the entire U.S. House, could boil down to the results in California’s 48th Congressional District, one of the swingiest of the districts that Mitchell aimed to flip to the Democrats. The old version of this southern California district was represented by longtime Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who won reelection by nearly 20 percentage points in 2024. Trump carried the district that year by more than 10 points. When Mitchell redrew the lines, he cut off Republican-leaning cities east of San Diego and looped in heavily Democratic Palm Springs, creating a district that would have voted in favor of Kamala Harris by 3 points in 2024. Fifty-six percent of the new district favored the redistricting plan when it went before California voters in the fall.

Issa decided — on March 6, the last day of the filing period — not to seek reelection, but even on his way out, he insisted that the district remained winnable for Republicans. “Our polling was unmistakable: we would win this race,” he said in his retirement statement. (Messages to Issa’s communications manager and former campaign manager went unreturned.) His assertion was far from implausible: Though the district would have gone narrowly for Harris at the presidential level, Newsom would have lost here by about 2 percentage points in 2022, according to Mitchell’s firm, Political Data Inc.

After Issa dropped out, The Cook Political Report changed its designation of the district from “toss up” to “lean Democrat.” Before Issa bailed, Erin Covey — The Cook Political Report’s lead House expert — told me she considered the seat “one of the Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities in the country, but, you know, it’s certainly not a given.” Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, told me, “This is still a district where a well-funded Republican with name recognition has a fighter’s chance.”

Today, with less than a week to go before primary ballots are counted, the district feels unsettled. After dropping out, Issa endorsed Jim Desmond, a San Diego County supervisor and a former mayor of San Marcos. The most plausible Democratic contenders are Ammar Campa-Najjar, 37, a serial local candidate who is the boyfriend of neighboring Rep. Sara Jacobs and is zero for three in his campaigns; Marni von Wilpert, 43, a San Diego City Council member; and Brandon Riker, 39, an economist and investor based in Palm Springs. None received enough support from state party delegates to win the party’s endorsement, and they are currently splitting the vote with a half-dozen other Democrats. That’s a problem, because in California’s nonpartisan primary system, it would be possible for two Republicans to finish first and second on June 2 and lock all the Democrats out of the general election — exactly the scenario raised by a (surprising) mid-April poll from The San Diego Union-Tribune and a local TV station, which found Desmond leading and another Republican, Kevin O’Neil, in second place.

Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, the head of the San Diego County Democratic Party, told me earlier this year that the party would push lagging Democrats to drop out and throw their support behind one or two of the strongest contenders. But that mostly hasn’t happened. (Only one has dropped out.) 

The district, in short, looks to be up for grabs. It’s a reminder that for all the national stakes of the 2026 election, control of the U.S. House could ultimately come down to a set of highly local, even random, factors: quirky state election rules, the strengths and weaknesses of a collection of imperfect candidates, and the chaos and uncertainty that follows in the wake of rapid-fire redistricting — conditions that can defy the intentions of even the best mapmakers and the politicians whose interests they serve.

***

For Democrats, it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Even before the redistricting, the area was undergoing a transformation. High home prices on the coast — part of Levin’s district — were pushing Democratic-leaning voters 50 miles east into an area that used to be marked by cows, vineyards and old white folks who went to church on Sunday. Now there are miles of affordable-for-SoCal housing developments. As one Temecula lifer, Bryan Giardinelli — a graphic designer and photographer who works for a tour company that brings visitors to wine tastings — put it to me recently, “I consider this area now a better place to be because there are more people who aren’t just like the ones who grew up here.”

Still, before the prospect of redistricting, no Democrat who was serious about winning was going to challenge Issa. Campa-Najjar was not actively on the scene after a surprising loss in a local mayor’s race. Von Wilpert was plotting a California state Senate run. Riker was planning to challenge Calvert in Palm Springs’ old district, the 41st. By the time the new maps passed, the primary was only seven months away. 

Dan Schnur, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and veteran California public policy expert, told me that, ideally, the local Democratic party and campaign consultants would “spend a great deal of time in advance, meeting with candidates, identifying the strongest alternative [to the incumbent] and discouraging the others. … Given the speed of the redistricting process, they didn’t have that luxury.” (When asked about the strength of the candidates, neither the San Diego County Democratic Party nor the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee expressed concern.)

If the Union-Tribune poll is right, then the leading Democrat — trailing O’Neil by one point — is Campa-Najjar. He is known here among engaged Democrats as a candidate who, in recent years, had either the guts or bad sense to try to win unwinnable congressional elections. He challenged then-Rep. Duncan Hunter in a congressional race in 2018, losing by about 3.4 percentage points in a conservative district. Two years later, he ran for the same seat again — this time losing to Issa, who had left Congress, then moved districts after Hunter was convicted of stealing campaign funds for personal use. Not all of his races have been long shots, however: In 2022, he ran for mayor of Chula Vista, a city in southern San Diego County where Democrats enjoy a massive advantage in registered voters. He still lost to a Republican, this time by about 4 percentage points.

One problem for Campa-Najjar is that, in the past, he has taken a number of conservative positions, calling himself a “maverick” among Democrats. In 2020, for instance, he hedged about whether he would vote for Biden or Trump. He also said, “I don’t believe in banning so-called ‘assault weapons,’” adding, “That’s a term that was coined by liberals who know nothing about guns.” 

This time, Campa-Najjar is running as a much more conventional Democrat. When I spoke to him in mid-March, he defended the way his views have evolved. “When you’re trying to be a representative,” he said, “you have to represent the community you’re seeking to represent as honestly as possible and be a vessel for what the hopes and dreams and fears of that community is. And my campaigns have always been built on three phases — listening, learning and meeting. And, you know, building the broadest coalition.” He continued, “My values have always been the same. Maybe the approach has varied based on the district.” The creation of a new 48th District, he said, permitted him to run without any tension. “I told myself I would only run if it was possible for me to be fully myself.”

To Campa-Najjar, his previous congressional campaigns are an asset, not a drawback. He said he “put this district in play when no one believed it,” adding, “There’s only one candidate running for Congress on our side who’s gotten a single [congressional] vote in this district.”

I asked him to talk about what he’s learned as Jacobs, his girlfriend, has navigated her first term in Congress; what are their conversations like at the end of a hectic week of campaigning and lawmaking? He declined, saying, “I think this [would] make for interesting reading, but I don’t think it’s even in the top 10 issues that voters care about.”

Despite Campa-Najjar’s relationship with a sitting member of Congress, von Wilpert is the preferred candidate of much of the Democratic establishment, having captured 18 of 33 votes at the party’s state endorsing conference — a statement of strength, though still short of the 60% required to gain an endorsement. A former deputy city attorney, she touts her work on the city council, her advocacy for labor, her support for LGBTQ+ rights and her push for a new terminal at the San Diego International Airport via her position on the Airport Authority board.

Early April found von Wilpert standing at a podium at a Shell gas station in Escondido, flanked by oil barrels wrangled by campaign assistants and health-care workers who recently had their union ratified. Escondido is one of the population centers in northern San Diego County that is vital for Democrats. Von Wilpert discussed the high cost of commuting for nurses and medical assistants who work at hospitals in San Diego County — her slam-dunk voters. “Donald Trump can find money for bombs but not groceries,” she said. A gallon of regular was $5.79 that day. Pointing to the prices, she criticized Desmond for recent comments in which he had seemed to dismiss the spike in gas prices caused by the Iran war. As she spoke, passing cars honked their approval when they saw the “Marni von Wilpert — Take Back Congress” signs.

I talked to her on the sidewalk after her appearance, hoping to get a chance to see her in a less-scripted moment. A 20-minute phone call in March had elicited mainly campaign talking points. This day was not much better. 

“I am the only one running who’s won a major election and flipped the district red to blue,” von Wilpert said. (Her city council area was once conservative.) “My [Democratic] opponents have run multiple times and lost every election they’ve been in. We cannot bet on someone who’s never won before to be our racehorse against the Republican Party. I actually have results to stand on. I don’t have to promise people what I might do in the future. I can show them what I have done.”

“It’s all kind of a blur,” von Wilpert consultant Dan Rottenstreich told me during a phone call a couple weeks later, speaking about the campaign timeline that had unfolded after Mitchell released his maps. The strategist struggled to recall a story that could add some color to what so far has been a disciplined, but arguably bland, campaign. Indeed, those qualities could be von Wilpert’s greatest weakness or selling point, depending on how you look at it. “You want the least-risky choice, the Democrat with the broadest appeal,” longtime Democratic Rep. Mark Takano, whose 39th District borders the new 48th and who has endorsed von Wilpert, told me. “The 48th district is not a slam-dunk district. I think this guy, Supervisor Desmond, has shown himself to be able to win a local seat that leans Democratic. … He hails from a nonpartisan sort of level of government. And that kind of Republican could be formidable.”

As the campaign has entered its final stage, much of von Wilpert’s strategy has shifted away from countering Desmond. Instead, she and Rottenstreich are making sure voters and journalists know about Campa-Najjar’s inconsistencies. A recent campaign press release was titled, “Ammar Campa-Najjar will be whoever you want him to be,” and called out a “career-long pattern of deception.”

As is the case in other intra-Democratic fights around the country, Israel has become an issue. The national group Democratic Majority for Israel has endorsed von Wilpert and is spending $2 million running ads attacking Campa-Najjar, who is Palestinian on his father’s side.

Yet even with all the endorsements, von Wilpert was barely ahead of Palm Springs investor Riker in the Union-Tribune poll. Riker is the main donor to his own campaign, to the tune of nearly $900,000, and isn’t shy about discussing his family’s wealth. “I come from a family where both myself and my parents have rung the bell on the New York Stock Exchange,” he told me during an early spring call.

He touts his economics degree every chance he gets and says Congress has enough lawyers. He wants to cut payroll taxes on the first $50,000 of income and also pay for social programs by more aggressively taxing stock market gains made by the wealthy. When we spoke, he told a story about a Trump voter he met in 2024 while door-knocking for Harris. “I said, ‘Why?’” he recalled, “and she said, ‘It’s pretty simple. [The Democratic Party] is offering me hypothetical money, $25,000 — if I can buy a home, I get a tax credit. But I can’t afford my rent, so I’ll never buy a home. $5,000 for a childhood first year tax credit, but I have a son, he’s three, I can’t afford him, I’m not going to have another. And Donald Trump said, ‘No tax on tips.’” To Riker, the key for Democrats is to help working-class voters and “solve the economy that is so fundamentally broken.”

***

In mid-April, I attended the California Republican Party Convention at a San Diego Sheraton. By that point, I had been trying to get Desmond to talk to me for a month. I figured I would head over to the harborside hotel, in the hopes of talking a GOP communications operative into wrangling the candidate for me.

After I had parked in a lot across from the hotel, I was walking back to my spot to put my ticket on the dash — and who should I stumble upon but Jim Desmond. He was tucking his shirttail into the slacks of his suit while walking to the kiosk. Congressional candidates, they’re just like us: They have to fork over a little cash for parking. (At $5 for 12 hours, the parking rate was a steal in a city where rising parking costs are a major pain point.)

I asked Desmond if we could chat for five minutes while walking to the hotel. “I’m just waiting to find out who my opponent will be,” he said before saying “sorry” and walking back to put his receipt on the dashboard.

Later, inside the convention, I met up with Desmond again. He was talking with Christian Martinez, a National Republican Congressional Committee press secretary who was shepherding him to a meeting. The candidate grumbled a bit about my approach in the parking lot and, in spite of Martinez’s encouragement, reiterated that he wasn’t interested in speaking with me.

This media aversion is of a piece with Desmond’s overall approach: He has run one of the most low-key campaigns imaginable for such a high-stakes seat. Maybe that strategy will backfire in the end, but right now, it looks like an expression of confidence: He has a “Complete and Total Endorsement” from President Trump and is basically guaranteed to make it through the first round of voting, so he seems content to sit back and watch the Democrats tear themselves apart.

Desmond, 70, retired from a 30-year career as a commercial airline pilot in 2020. At that point, he was already a year into his first term as a San Diego County supervisor and had served for 12 years in the part-time role of mayor of San Marcos, a city of 90,000 about 30 miles north of San Diego. It’s a place with many of the types of voters von Wilpert was trying to appeal to at her press conference — shift workers who commute to jobs closer to San Diego or north into Orange County.

After his time as mayor, Desmond moved about 20 minutes west, into a golf course community in the hills above Oceanside. Until this year, that home was in the 49th District, where he had been planning to challenge Levin. Mitchell’s map relocated him into the 48th — and when he switched races upon Issa’s retirement announcement, he wanted voters to know he wasn’t a carpetbagger. “Politicians in Sacramento redrew the lines and moved me into the new district,” he wrote. “But they can’t redraw my roots.”

Throughout March and into April, he kept up his county supervisor work — touting a proposal to make first-time home ownership more attainable, congratulating local volunteers on their good deeds. The only thing he gave Democrats to latch onto came in a March 9 interview with the streaming platform Real America’s Voice, in which he spoke about the Iran war: “No pain, no gain. It’s unfortunate the oil prices are going up, but I do believe this is a spike,” he said. “Oil prices will come down again.” 

Democratic candidates pounced. Campa-Najjar wrote, “Side with Trump and his warmongers all you want. You’re for them, I’m for the working people of #CA48.” Von Wilpert built her Shell station press conference around the statement. 

The gas slipup aside, Desmond seems to be centering his campaign on what he calls “kitchen table” issues — affordable housing, reducing inflation, lowering taxes, securing the border. He has more than $1 million in his war chest, an amount that places him on about the same footing as the other plausible candidates.

That list of plausible candidates appeared to include no Republicans besides Desmond — until, that is, the Union-Tribune poll found Republican Kevin O’Neil in second place with 13 percent. O’Neil, a tech entrepreneur, has received $0 in campaign contributions. 

When I spoke to him on the phone, O’Neil said he wasn’t prepared for the recent attention, but he is not surprised that his anti-establishment, anti-AI platform is resonating. He entered the race before Issa dropped out; his main reason for running is that he despises the congressman, whom he blames for failing to help his mother — a military spouse — receive her survivor benefits when his father died. He’s running as a Republican mostly because of his anti-abortion views. “I’m encouraged [about the polling] because most of the people I talked to who are part of the establishment said, ‘Don’t even bother,’” he recalled. “I basically said to them, ‘God’s in control and he’ll decide.”

According to his website, he wants to “lower the cost of living,” “restore accountability,” protect “digital liberty” and “support military families.” Christian Zionism also looms large on his site, where he proclaims his “support for Israel” while identifying himself as “a Christian who had the good news of Jesus shared with me by a member of the remnant of Israel.”

“If I get into Congress,” he told me, “I’m going to make sure that politicians and the government are held accountable for crimes.” His presence in second place is either an indication of a deeply flawed poll or a signal that the Democrats have messed up in a big way.

***

Ten months on from his map-making bender, Paul Mitchell believes the raw numbers in the district he drew will win out, and whichever Democrat advances to November will prevail. He describes the possibility of a Democratic lockout on June 2 as “a disaster,” but he thinks it’s unlikely.

Of course, he could have drawn things differently, but there were always going to be trade-offs. “Could you have made the district, you know, 3 points more Democratic?” he told me. “Yeah, you could have done that. But if you did that, would you be creating ripple effects that would cause other really gross things to happen around the state?”

Plus, mapmakers are not, in the end, all powerful — something perhaps worth remembering as politicians continue to redraw congressional boundaries across the country. Redistricting can create the conditions that favor one party or another, but it can’t control for the vagaries of actual campaigns. And in close districts, those factors can make all the difference. “This package we put together was a strong response to Texas,” Mitchell said, “but how these districts play out, it’s not up to me. There are theories as to which candidates might be best for any of these seats, and I’m absolutely 100% uninvolved.” He added, “I understand where my job ends. … I just let the chips fall, basically.”

Dan Friedell is a writer and producer in San Diego.