Doctor, lawyer, vet: If Kermit Jones can’t beat California Rep. Tom McClintock, who can?
California Democrats can’t seem to shake Republican Rep. Tom McClintock. The longtime incumbent, who has represented most of Placer and a swath of the Sierra Nevada in Congress since 2009, has managed to defeat every Democratic challenger despite his tendency to abide by an inverted proverb: Don’t just do something, stand there.
Since the pandemic began, McClintock has voted against COVID aid; investments in infrastructure and jobs; funds to prevent domestic violence; voting rights; environmental protections; workplace discrimination protections; and addressing the Jan. 6 insurrection. He even voted against legislation to combat anti-Asian American hate crimes.
McClintock has spent his career jumping from one public office to the next, subsisting on the very government dollars he refuses to allocate to his constituents. To the extent that the Republican congressman has accomplished little more than getting elected, his latest Democratic challenger is the anti-McClintock.
Dr. Kermit Jones, who is running in next year’s midterm election to represent the Fourth District, is a practicing physician, former Navy flight surgeon, lawyer and onetime White House fellow under President Barack Obama. He’s a husband and a father of two young boys. And he would be the first Black man to represent California in Congress in 20 years.
“This guy is like a Black superhero,” said Kevin Olasanoye, political director at the Collective PAC, which aims to engage Black voters and has endorsed Jones. “That’s the résumé a guy running for president has.”
Already intimately familiar with cracks in the American health care system from his work as a physician, Jones was further dismayed by a glimpse from a patient’s perspective. After Jones’ mother, a longtime home health nurse, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, she was repeatedly denied specialized care and faced a daunting financial burden due to medical bills.
“Unless you have someone who strongly advocates for your care, you can get lost,” Jones said. “We need more than just someone in Washington advocating for health-care-related things; we need the ability to take better care of ourselves.”
Jones is a good congressional candidate, but is he good for the Fourth District?
He’s not a longtime resident, having moved here in 2017. But he is, unlike McClintock, a resident.
Despite having well over a decade to establish residence in his district, McClintock has lived in Elk Grove, in the Seventh Congressional District, since 2008. McClintock’s out-of-district residence has provided ample political fuel for his critics and prior Democratic challengers.
Although neither McClintock nor Jones was born in California, Jones’ upbringing bears similarities to life in Northern California’s rural communities. Born in Michigan, he was raised baling hay, chopping wood and caring for animals on his family’s small farm. He first came to California when he was stationed at Camp Pendleton for three years.
Jones is a vocal advocate of COVID vaccination in a district where anti-vax misinformation has been embraced by some local elected officials. He believes in curbing misinformation and says that his job as a health care professional is to provide the best available data to his patients and let them make their own informed decisions.
He is also a person of color running to represent a part of California where Black people make up less than 2% of the population. McClintock, who recently said “there’s only one race — the American race,” also called reparations “evil” and voted against legislation that would make Juneteenth a federal holiday.
Jones believes he can prove himself a viable candidate to the residents of the district. For him, he said, it’s less about partisan politics than the issues — and he thinks voters feel the same way.
Jones is nevertheless a Democrat in a firmly Republican district. So does he have a shot at beating McClintock?
Unless the district’s lines are redrawn in a way that gives Democrats a fighting chance, McClintock is all but guaranteed another term, said Democratic strategist Garry South.
“2022 is not looking good for Democrats, and the Democratic strategy ... has got to be simply retaining the seats they have,” South said. “They’re not going to take a flier on a district like CA-04. It doesn’t make any fiscal or economic sense.”
Based on the first official maps released by the California independent redistricting commission, the Fourth District would lose much of rural southern Placer County, including areas in and around Yosemite National Park. That could be good news for Jones, but it’s not clear that it would be good enough, and redistricting has yet to be finalized.
Despite the odds stacked against him, and despite McClintock’s apparent grip on his seat, Jones has convinced himself — and others in the district — that he has a real shot at winning.
“McClintock is tired and lazy, and people want people who fight for them,” Jones said. “He spends more time in Texas railing at the border (than in his district). We deserve better — we deserve someone who actually cares.
“I’m a fresh start. I have a very long record of serving my country, and I want to do the same thing in serving this district.”
If elected, Jones wants to increase access to doctors in the area, specifically for rural parts of the district like Mariposa County, where hospitals have been overwhelmed by COVID patients.
Jones also wants to tackle the burdensome cost of health care and outlines how he would do so in a detailed nine-page plan. The document, which takes on issues from improving access to care to reducing hospital, drug, and health insurance costs, sets a goal of “decreasing overall health care costs by 20% over a decade — at least $800 billion.”
His other goals include spending more to protect California from wildfires and mitigate climate change; making college and trade schools more affordable; increasing taxes on big corporations; and ending gerrymandering.
Jones plans to do something if he is elected. That’s more than voters can count on from our current representative.