Who will win control of the House of Representatives in 2024? California may hold the key.

As Democrats look to wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November, their fight will begin in full force with Tuesday’s primaries in California.

And their immediate problem is not the Republicans. It’s the Democrats themselves.

In the Republican-held Central Valley district stretching from Bakersfield to Fresno, where President Biden would have had a 13 percentage point advantage in 2020, a battle between two Democrats has become so personal that some in the party fear they could could split votes, leaving the incumbent Rep. David Valadao competing in November against another Republican running to his right, Chris Mathys.

With so few truly contested seats to fight over this year, the prospect of an early elimination in California — where the top two winners, regardless of party affiliation, compete in the general election — has brought out some strong players, including Dolores Huerta, the 93-year-old Prime Minister. year-old labor and civil rights leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in 1962. She is once again running on behalf of former California lawmaker Rudy Salas, the institutional Democrats’ top choice. That includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who will rally voters for Salas on Sunday in an effort to sideline the other Democratic candidate, Sen. Melissa Hurtado.

“I am scared,” Ms. Huerta said Thursday from the modest office of her foundation, based in Bakersfield. “We still have a lot more work to do.”

Control of Congress could be at stake. Of the 16 House districts won by Biden but currently in Republican hands, five are in California, making the state a linchpin in the party’s hopes of retaking the House, where Republicans currently hold a three-seat majority .

“It’s going to come down to these fights, and Democrats would have to win about two-thirds of them to get the majority,” said Erin Covey, a House analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Only two of the 16 districts Democrats are targeting — in Virginia’s Tidewater region and in Omaha — are in states with Republican governors.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of Republicans in the House of Representatives, calculates that two-thirds of the battle for control of the House of Representatives will take place in states largely unaffected by the presidential election. Without support from the president’s efforts to organize the elections and get out the vote, NRCC officials have set up 24 field offices — the largest number ever — under the assumption that they will be on their own to challenge the Republican Party’s razor-thin majority. to defend.

Republicans have made it clear they are eager to pursue their case in blue territory. Conservatives have made gains in such states — especially in Southern California and on Long Island and other areas on the outskirts of New York City — by tackling crime, the high cost of living and the influx of migrants. One key motivating issue for Democrats, abortion, has not had as much impact in states where voters view abortion rights as protected.

But Democrats will be playing on their home turf, with strong state-level organizations and weak Republican Party structures. And they insist they are playing with a strong hand: the threat posed to abortion rights and other freedoms, including in Democratic states, by an all-Republican administration with Mr. Trump at the helm. The possibility of a Trump White House and a Republican Senate could make the House a lone bulwark against full Republican Party control in Washington.

Democratic candidates say they understand they must fight Republicans on issues like immigration. Will Rollins, a 39-year-old former federal prosecutor and Justice Department official who is running to flip the seat of Rep. Ken Calvert, California Republican, said the Republican Party had given his party a “gift” when Republicans, at Trump’s behest, rejected a painstakingly negotiated, bipartisan border security deal drafted in part by members of their own party.

“Our job is to make these arguments and tackle issues that Republicans think they care about: the border, inflation and crime,” said Mr. Rollins, who serves in the same district, around Palm Springs, two was active years ago. . He lost to Mr Calvert, 70, by four points.

Mr Calvert expressed confidence that nothing would change this time. “Voters didn’t buy what Rollins sold last time,” he said, “and they certainly aren’t interested in his radical, soft-on-crime policies this time.”

Overall, Democrats start with a slight numerical disadvantage when it comes to taking back the House of Representatives. Gerrymandering and the natural sorting of voters between dense urban areas that are strongly Democratic and vast rural districts that are strongly Republican have left few voters in play.

The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia has rated only ten Republican seats as tossups, nine of which are in states with Democratic governors. Democrats have only nine seats that are considered tossups, and only one in a state with a Republican governor.

Democrats would need five seats to gain control of the House of Representatives, and their main targets in California are the districts of Mr. Valadao and Reps. John Duarte, Mike Garcia and Michelle Steel.

With so few opportunities, an unforced error that would take Democrats out of the game in Valadao’s district could be big. In an interview, Salas did not discount the possibility of Republicans voting en masse during a presidential primary on Super Tuesday, where the stakes appear to be lower for Democrats.

“This could be a real scenario,” he said in an interview on Friday.

Ms. Hurtado was unapologetic in an interview last week about chile relleno at La Imperial Taqueria in Wasco, California, a city of 28,000 — if you count the prison population — currently surrounded by miles of blossoming almond trees.

“Clearly I wasn’t the chosen one,” she shrugged. “But I like being the underdog.”

Democrats have improved their standing in at least one California House of Representatives race. Garcia’s district in northern Los Angeles County, which was redrawn in 2022, would have favored Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by more than 12 percentage points. Yet voters in the district nominated the same Democratic candidate, Christy Smith, against Mr. Garcia three times, and in each election Mr. Garcia defeated her.

This time, Democrats have cleared the field for a new challenger, George Whitesides, a former NASA chief of staff and former CEO of the private space company Virgin Galactic. Mr. Whitesides has raised nearly $3.7 million, $271,000 of which was his own money. Mr. Garcia has raised $3.2 million.

In an interview, Mr. Whitesides took Mr. Garcia to task for selling as much as $50,000 worth of Boeing stock weeks before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure released its highly critical investigation into the company’s 737 Max plane, and spoke about his own record in aerospace. in a district that was dependent on industry.

“The fact that I’ve created about 700 jobs in the district also helps a lot,” he said.

But the infighting continues elsewhere. In a fierce battle for the Orange County seat vacated by Rep. Katie Porter, a Democrat, Sen. Dave Min has squared off with political activist Joanna Weiss. Ms. Weiss has the support of the pro-Israel United Democracy Project and Emily’s List, which works to elect female abortion rights candidates. Those external groups have done that pumped more than $4 million against Mr. Minsaid Ms. Covey, publishing accusations of drunk driving and racism against him, which will not make it easier for Democrats to keep the seat.

That only makes the match in Central Valley even more striking. When Democrats convinced Mr. Salas to run in 2022, he was considered a prized recruit, a popular state lawmaker who could have been the first Latino to represent the heavily Hispanic Central Valley.

That year the drama played out on the Republican side. The Democrats tried to interfere in the so-called jungle primaries by promoting Mr. Mathys, a staunch Trump supporter, in ads, hoping that a far-right candidate would be easier to defeat than Mr. Valadao, who is one of the only ten Republicans voted. to accuse Mr. Trump of inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It didn’t work. Mr. Valadao defeated Mr. Mathys by 1,220 votes for a distant second place behind Mr. Salas, then stormed back to the top Democrat by three points on Election Day.

Democrats were ready to give Salas another chance for this year’s presidential election, but Emily’s List convinced Ms. Hurtado to run as well. Her records showed that her vote totals in her Senate races exceeded Salas’s votes in his House campaign.

Then Washington took sides, fearing that Ms. Hurtado’s emergence would leave Mr. Valadao and Mr. Mathys as the top two finishers on Tuesday.

House Majority PAC, the super PAC of the House Democratic leadership, is broadcasting Spanish-language advertisements for promotion Mr. Salas’s record on health care, while Mr. Salas, with the encouragement of Washington Democrats, has appeared on the air with an advertisement depicting Ms. Hurtado as hostile to abortion rights, for withholding or missing votes on the issue in the Senate. That was a painful expense for a candidate who has raised less than $747,000.

Ms. Hurtado, who has endured more than $1 million in ads against her candidacy, has raised about a tenth of Mr. Salas’s total, $76,741. And Emily’s List doesn’t list her as an endorsed candidate. But with the name recognition of a senator whose district is 95 percent aligned with the U.S. House district, Democrats are sweating it out.

Ms. Hurtado does not, hoping that Mr. Salas’s negative ads will actually help her, especially with independents and Republican voters who have supported her in the past.

“If they had chosen a side, they should have been honest about it,” she said. “They could have said, ‘Step aside.’ They never did that.”