Gallagher leads 1st District special election, primary in early voting returns
Northern California voters appear poised to send James Gallagher, a longtime Republican stalwart and leader in the state Assembly, to Washington, D.C., to finish out the term of former U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who died suddenly in January.
As of 9:21 p.m., Gallagher had won 61.3% of the vote in the special election, compared to about 18.4% for Democrats state Sen. Mike McGuire of Healdsburg and 18.3% for Audrey Denney, who narrowly trailed behind.
If Gallagher secures enough votes to avoid an August runoff, the 50% plus one vote, he would immediately take his seat in Congress — welcome news for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been stuck with an even slimmer majority since LaMalfa’s death. He’ll serve there for the rest of this year.
The future representative of California’s 1st Congressional District is also leaning towards Gallagher. While the newly drawn version of the 1st Congressional District is more Democrat-leaning than the old version that voted in the special election, early voters appeared to narrowly favor Gallagher over McGuire.
With about 77.1% of votes counted as of 8:56p.m., Gallagher was leading with about 46.2% of the vote. Trailing behind were McGuire, with about 38.5% of the vote, and Denney, with 13.5%.
Denney, the director of civic engagement at Chico State, challenged McGuire from the left, but early results don’t suggest a two-Democrat runoff race. The post-Proposition 50 version of the district distinctly favors McGuire, having been extended west to take in his liberal-leaning political stronghold of Santa Rosa and swaths of Sonoma County.
Convoluted race shaped by tragedy
As the California Senate president last fall, McGuire helped California Democrats successfully engineer and secure passage of Proposition 50. Gallagher and LaMalfa were among its most vocal opponents. LaMalfa had represented the original district, which stretched to the Oregon-California border and included much of Republican-leaning and rural northeastern California, since 2013. The new lines appeared likely to cost him his seat or at least put him in serious jeopardy. McGuire, who is term limited from another legislative term, has been accused by critics of engineering Proposition 50 to create a pathway to Washington, D.C., for himself.
LaMalfa died Jan. 6 during emergency surgery.
Gallagher announced he would run in a special election shortly after to complete the term with an endorsement from LaMalfa’s wife, clearing the field of Republicans for that race. President Donald Trump is among many Republican leaders who have endorsed Gallagher.
Gov. Gavin Newsom had set a runoff date for Aug. 4, the last possible option, in order to potentially keep the seat open as long as possible if Gallagher hadn’t made the 50% plus one vote bar to avoid the runoff.
McGuire and Denney both also entered the special election, having already been registered for the race in the new district. Gallagher has projected confidence he would prevail by sufficient numbers in the June primary election to avoid a lengthy runoff.
Gallagher is politically in tune with the pre-Prop. 50 1st Congressional District. Close to LaMalfa both personally and politically, he’d served as a vocal foil to Democrats in Sacramento, with a particular passion for natural resource issues and strengthening the state’s wildfire fighting resources.
The Republican has sought to hang the state’s high cost of living, insurance and wildfire issues around McGuire’s neck, given the Democrat’s long and high profile role in California politics. McGuire, a relentlessly on-message campaigner, countered by pointing to his lengthy record of working on policies to address those very issues.
McGuire has long represented one of the largest and most geographically, economically and politically diverse state Senate districts. His Senate district runs from the Golden Gate Bridge’s northern end to the Oregon border, taking in Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte and Lake counties — some of the state’s most liberal and most conservative, politically, and its richest and poorest, economically.
The bulk of voters, however, live in its more liberal-leaning southern half. Still, McGuire has a reputation for bringing big chunks of state dollars back into his district, even, during his time as Senate president, to the grumbling of some of his colleagues.
After campaigning twice against LaMalfa in the more conservative old district, Denney took on the well-established McGuire in the new one. She has been an effective thorn in his side all year. She’s run on a pledge not to accept corporate campaign donations and has criticized McGuire’s fundraising, and in particular highlighted a Bee investigation that found McGuire spent heavily out of a campaign account for ballot measures on a trip to the Super Bowl in 2024, when the San Francisco 49ers lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in Las Vegas.
McGuire said the trip was part of a successful fundraising event. But Denney has used it to portray him as too close to the many special interests who work politicians for favorable policies in Sacramento, according to reporting in The Press Democrat.
