California’s mid-cycle redistricting redrew the geographic boundary lines of the 40th Congressional District — but it also created one of the most expensive and volatile U.S. House of Representatives races in the 2026 midterms.
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The negativity in the race has abounded, since redistricting pitted two incumbents against one another: Rep. Ken Calvert, a Corona Republican who has served in Congress since 1993, and Rep. Young Kim, an Anaheim Hills Republican who defeated a sitting Democrat in 2020 to first join the House.
Both candidates — through their own campaigns and with outside groups and independent expenditures — have aggressively hammered one another throughout the primary with negative and personal ads.
And at the center of it all is President Donald Trump.
Calvert, 72, and Kim, 63, say they have had the president’s back the most. Both accuse each other of being secretly liberal or not MAGA enough.
It’s a tricky and volatile campaign strategy, political experts say.
After redistricting, California’s 40th Congressional District is one of only a handful with a majority of registered Republican voters: Nearly 208,500 (39.97%) are registered Republicans, while another 162,400 (31.14%) are registered Democrats and nearly 110,000 (21.08%) are no party preference.
Trump — who has praised both Calvert and Kim at times — has not yet endorsed in this race, as of midday Tuesday.
So it makes sense then that both Republicans, in the absence of an endorsement, would seek to align themselves the most with the GOP’s de facto leader, said Marcia Godwin, an expert in politics and elections who teaches at the University of La Verne.
What’s striking, though, to Godwin and other election observers, is just how negative and volatile the race has become.
“Putting two incumbents of the same party in the same district is like putting two scorpions in a bottle,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political messaging at USC and UC Berkeley. “Only one of them can survive.
“And the fight for survival is going to be incredibly intense.”
Getting personal
A nearly colorless image of Kim appears on the screen. A voiceover accuses the congresswoman of being a RINO — a pejorative that means someone is “Republican in name only,” or not a true member of the party — and having “threatened” Trump.
“I’ll whip his butt,” Kim says in the short clip, gesturing with her left hand.
That clip is from a 2020 event where Kim praised Trump’s leadership style but said she would not let her daughters date or marry “somebody like Donald Trump.”
“Stop liberal Young Kim before she stops Trump,” a female voice in the ad states.
That’s the latest 15-second spot dropped by the Calvert campaign on Tuesday.
Not to be outdone, Kim’s campaign — which launched a $3.7 million ad buy last month — dropped a recent ad calling Calvert “sleazy,” projecting headlines related to Calvert being found with a prostitute in his car in the 1990s. He was never charged with a crime, but he did admit to having sex with the person during a time when he was “feeling intensely lonely.”
“Screwing us, servicing himself, sabotaging Trump. Ken Calvert, what a sleazebag,” a voice in the 30-second spot says.
And those are just the ads from the candidates.
So far, more than $17 million has been raised by the candidates in the race, the bulk of that coming from Kim (about $7.5 million) and Calvert (about $5.1 million), according to data from OpenSecrets, the nonprofit that tracks campaign finance.
Esther Kim-Varet, one of the Democrats in the contest, has raised more than $2.7 million.
That doesn’t include the millions poured into the race from PACs and independent expenditures that advocate for or against candidates.
As Punchbowl reported Tuesday, Americans 4 Security PAC, funded by defense contractors, has poured nearly $3 million into the race on anti-Kim ads.
“It’s as contentious as you’d expect,” said Matt Lesenyie, an expert in political psychology and California politics who teaches at Cal State Long Beach.
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“There will be blood,” Lesenyie said.
The race, particularly the rush to align with Trump at all costs, Lesenyie said, underscores why so few congressional Republicans defect from the president — even on the more mundane issues.
“You look at this race, and they are going back to the history books and say, ‘This one time, you told Trump to go to sleep, and that’s not MAGA enough.’ You see why these guys are so stuck with him. You see, they are saving it up, they are banking for a contentious primary,” he said.
“It’s, in a way, kind of crazy because it suggests you’re not really electing me to represent you and what I know about Riverside and Orange counties, but you’re electing me because I’m going to defer to this New Yorker who is probably never going to come here again. My argument to you in this expensive campaign is whatever Trump wants and whoever he wants it for is good for Orange County and Riverside.”
“It’s a shame, because both of those candidates know the area well, and what’s good for the individual district isn’t necessarily what’s good for national politics or the president,” Lesenyie said.
Picking another lane
Despite what the airwaves may lead you to believe, six other candidates are running in the 40th Congressional District race: five Democrats and one independent.
Kim-Varet, one of the Democrats, has pointed to the simultaneous race for California governor as a potential indicator of what could happen in the 40th.
For several weeks, none of the several Democrats vying for California governor has been able to break through as a true frontrunner. That’s led to concerns among those in the Democratic Party that two top-polling Republicans, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, could advance through the primary, locking out Democrats in the general. (In California’s jungle primary system, the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of political party.)
In a recent social media post, Kim-Varet said she has seen polling that suggests she’s close to Calvert and Kim, but “every % of fragmentation on our side makes it that much harder to land a place in the top two.”
“For CA’s top-two primaries, happening on June 2 in our beautifully blue state, the math is flashing code red that Republicans could very possibly lock in these elections. No rematch. No general election recovery,” said Kim-Varet.
Other candidates include retired firefighter captain Joe Kerr, who unsuccessfully challenged Kim in 2024; lawyer Lisa Ramirez, who represented the Tustin father of three U.S. Marines who was detained by federal immigration authorities last year; and Nina Linh, a nonprofit executive who decided to run as an independent in the race.
Attorney Francis Xavier Hoffman and retired Army officer Claude Keissieh are also running as Democrats.
The thing about negative ads, experts said, is that they are effective — in getting voters to stay home.
“They are not designed to change a voter’s opinion and move them from Candidate A to Candidate B,” said Schnur. “In a primary, the goal is to get your opponent’s supporters to say, ‘What’s the use? Why bother?’”
And there are voters in the district who are not familiar with either Calvert or Kim, who could end up canceling each other out, said Lesenyie. There are enough malleable voters, and enough uncertainty over who Republican voters will ultimately choose, that one of the other six candidates could eek their way through, he said.
In other words, a door is still open for someone to make it through the primary who might not end up winning come November.
It just depends on who actually votes. After all, it’s a midterm election primary, which tends to bring out fewer voters than in presidential election years. Couple that with the negative ads, and there isn’t a whole lot of optimism among political observers that many people will participate in the election.
“Add up all of these factors, and the only reliable prediction to make for June 2 is an extremely low level of voter turnout,” said Schnur.
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