Christy Smith: CA25’s perfect candidate (unless you lie for the GOP)
If some non-partisan political strategist were to design the perfect candidate for California’s 25th U.S. House district, they’d probably come up with someone who looks a whole lot like Christy Smith, the current Democratic candidate for that seat.
Christy’s running in one of California’s most purple of purple districts — the last House district in either Los Angeles or Ventura County (both of which have territory within 25’s boundaries) to be represented by a Republican. Its voter registration is plurality “blue,” with 39.41% of its voters identifying as Democrats, 31.87% Republican, 3.36% American Independent, 0.29% Green, and the remaining 25.07% no-party-preference or other minor parties.
In terms of both her own personal history and her approach to politics and legislating, Christy’s portrait is a nearly seamless mixture of blue and bipartisan purple.
The daughter of a U.S. Army officer, Christy was born on a military base in Europe. Soon after her birth, the family returned to the States and settled in the Santa Clarita Valley. Like many other local families, Christy’s lived paycheck to paycheck — and when Christy’s mom decided to flee the abusive marriage, she studied and became a nurse to support her children.
Christy attended local schools and the College of the Canyons before earning her bachelor’s degree in political science at UCLA and heading to Washington, D.C. There, she worked for a number of years as a policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Education.
When she and her husband returned to California, they came home to the Santa Clarita Valley. There, they raised two daughters. Christy became a “PTA mom,” founded the Valencia Valley Technological Education Foundation, and served for nine years on the Newhall School Board, before her election to the California Assembly’s 38th District in 2018. She flipped that previously-Republican seat at the same time that Katie Hill flipped CA25 blue — and the two women often hit the campaign trail together in that year’s record-breaking season of victories for woman candidates.
Long story short: Christy’s a product of CA25, and she’s spent the bulk of her educational policy and political career working for CA25. She’s what one might call a pragmatic progressive, with forward-focused views on many issues but a principled willingness to work with her Republican colleagues to pass legislation that benefits CA25 residents as a whole.
So why, you ask, did Christy not win the May 2020 special election runoff to fill the balance of Katie Hill’s 2019–20 term of office? And why is she locked in a seesaw battle with interim House Rep. Mike Garcia, an extreme right-wing Republican, for election to the 2021–22 term?
To put it simply: because Republicans keep lying about her.
They lie…about everything
As Winston Churchill once remarked, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” That seems to be the operating principle for Garcia — and the party that backs him — as they take on Christy. They’re throwing the proverbial kitchen sink’s worth of false accusations at her, in hopes that some of it will stick.
Garcia and the GOP have tried to peg Christy as “just another Sacramento Democrat” despite the fact that she stood up to her own party in 2019 when they tried to raise taxes on small businesses and families. She promises to fight in Congress to reinstate the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, which would lower taxes for California families by as much as $12,000; and advocates for tax reform to make the wealthiest Americans and major corporations pay their fair share.
Christy also wants big money out of politics. She supports ending the Citizens United decision and has refused donations to her House campaign from big pharma, big oil, the gun lobby, the tobacco industry and corporate PACs — unlike Garcia, who has accepted thousands from big pharma, oil & gas companies, and corporate lobbies. (He also kept taking his aerospace industry executive pay while on leave to run in the spring special election, after telling voters he was no longer receiving a salary.)
Garcia and the GOP claim that Christy’s support of AB5 was a “job killer” — despite the fact that the legislation protects workers by preventing businesses from misclassifying them to deny them employee benefits and job protections. She led efforts this year to amend the legislation to exclude self-employed workers in a number of industries where full-time employment isn’t the norm. And she’s promised to work with Democrats, Republicans and anyone in between to make colleges and trade schools more affordable, and to help people rebuild the small-business economy that has been devastated by the COVID19 crisis and the GOP’s incompetent response.
They also argue — falsely — that Christy “fired teachers” at the same time that she accepted a “big” pay raise for her work on the Newhall school board. The facts: Christy voted, as mandated, to authorize teacher layoffs during an economic downturn if the state budget failed to provide enough to pay all the teachers in her district. She then fought for the funding needed to save those jobs. And that big raise? It increased her $250 monthly stipend for her school board work…by $12.50 — and it happened years after the recession.
Then there’s the lie that “Christy gutted charter schools.” Nope. She did write and get legislation passed in Sacramento that ensures private charter schools in California are held to the same transparency and accountability standards as our public schools. But that’s not the reason some private charter schools in CA25 shut down: they failed because they were badly managed.
Next on the “nope, that’s not true” list: “Christy doesn’t support our military.” That lie comes despite the fact that her dad was a career Army officer, and she has spent her career advocating for veterans and military members. In Sacramento, Christy pushed to make it easier for veterans to start small businesses and for needed improvements at the Veterans Administration, to ensure that our veterans receive the care and benefits they earned.
And then there’s the newly minted “Christy wants to defund the police” lie. Wrong again. While Christy supports the Black Lives Matter movement and the right to peaceful protest, she has pledged to work in Congress on reforms that would provide increased mental health support and job training for local residents, and for increased funding for public safety to reduce emergency response times and improve neighborhood security.
They don’t dare attack Christy on affordable health care, Social Security and Medicare — since Christy has pledged to work with any willing partner in Congress to make health coverage and prescription drugs both affordable and available, and to protect coverage for people with preexisting conditions. She’s also promised to defend Social Security and Medicare from those who seek to gut those earned benefit programs — while Garcia has declared that “Everyone should have to figure out how to fend for themselves.”
And they’re silent about the environment. One of Christy’s first actions after declaring her House candidacy last November following Katie Hill’s resignation was to sign the California Democratic Party Environmental Caucus’ no-fossil-fuel-money pledge. Christy looks at climate change through an economic lens, and will work to create good middle-class, green energy jobs in the district by focusing on environmental technology.
On the local environmental front, Christy has been active in the effort to shut down the methane-belching Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field; and to conduct aggressive oversight of the district’s two toxic waste clean-up sites, Santa Susana Field Laboratory and Whittaker Bermite, and its three landfills. Garcia has been MIA on all counts.
But the GOP didn’t hesitate to engage in a blatant disinformation campaign. It happily spread the word about a Lancaster, Penn., teacher, Christy L. Smith, convicted in 2012 for abusing one of her students. They clearly hoped that voters would think the perpetrator was the same Christy Smith now running in CA25 (which encompasses part of the city of Lancaster, Calif., in the Antelope Valley). The dirt seems not to have stuck.
Garcia brings to the Nov. 3 contest a brief but highly illustrative voting record from his three months in Congress: he’s voted with Donald Trump and the GOP more than 95% of the time. He’s been a rubber stamp for corporate lobbyists, the oil & gas, pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, and the gun lobby.
He voted against extending ACA protections during the pandemic. He voted against extending unemployment insurance under the CARES Act. He voted to allow major corporations to secretly take COVID relief loans meant for small businesses in Southern California. He voted NO on the Strength in Diversity Act, NO on the Equity and Inclusion Enforcement Act, and NO on HR908, which condemns all forms of anti-Asian sentiment related to the COVID19 crisis.
Following that vote, his field office staff told a constituent that they “cannot speak for him” when asked if he denounces white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Garcia himself has been mute.
The former Air Force fighter pilot has even stayed silent about Trump’s reported comments calling our military “losers” and suckers.”
But he did write his CA25 constituents to praise the House for voting to protect the US Postal Service from Louis DeJoy’s politically-motivated operating “improvements” — while failing to admit in that message (or any other) that he’d actually voted AGAINST the legislation.
Garcia is also known by the company he keeps. A local church that promotes itself with a photo of a Bible cut into the shape of a gun and hosts God & Guns men’s events, is sponsoring a Garcia get-out-the-vote rally on Nov. 1. In early October, Garcia attended an indoor, no-mask-required event at the same church, in violation of state and county mask requirements. He wore no mask.
And he’s refused to debate Christy since the May special election wrapped up.
The choice is clear
Commenting that “Congress has enough political extremists pounding away at the partisan wedge,” the Los Angeles Times recommended on Sept. 9 that CA25 voters elect Christy Smith. What Congress needs, the Times continued, “are more lawmakers like Smith who quietly work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to make government better.”
On Sept. 4, a Global Strategy Group poll gave Garcia a one-point, 46–45% lead over Smith. But subsequent Democratic Party polling from Sept. 21–23 put Smith ahead by 6 points, 51–45%.
Seems it’s anyone’s game. But it’s crystal clear which of the two candidates will work for the people of California’s 25th House district, and which will toe the Republican Party line — no matter who’s in the White House come January 20.
To learn more about Christy Smith and support her campaign, visit christyforcongress.org.
