Two Republican U.S. House members from Southern California are waging an increasingly personal primary campaign against each other, each gambling that voters in the newly redrawn 41st Congressional District will reward the candidate who demonstrates the strongest loyalty to President Donald Trump.
The Associated Press reported that Rep. Ken Calvert, the longest-serving Republican in California’s House delegation, is running advertisements calling Rep. Young Kim a “traitor” to Trump and “a liberal and a liar.” The ads, according to the AP, resurface past video clips of Kim criticizing the president from earlier in her political career.
Kim, who previously emphasized her independence from the White House, has repositioned herself for the primary. The AP reported that she has adopted the label “Trump Republican” and is airing spots that accuse Calvert of “sabotaging President Trump’s agenda” and serving only himself. One of her ads claims Calvert has been in “lockstep with Nancy Pelosi,” the former Democratic House speaker widely reviled in Republican circles.
The mudslinging reflects the structural pressure redistricting has placed on both incumbents. California’s independent redistricting commission redrew the state’s House map, combining territory previously represented separately by Calvert and Kim into a single seat. With the district’s Republican-leaning electorate likely to decide the outcome in the primary, neither candidate can afford to cede ground on the question of who is more faithfully aligned with Trump.
Trump has not endorsed in the race, and each candidate’s claim to his mantle is being tested against the other’s record. Calvert, who was first elected to Congress in 1992, has a long voting history in Washington. Kim, first elected in 2020 after an earlier unsuccessful bid in 2018, occupies a more junior profile but has sought to frame Calvert as a creature of the Washington establishment whose longevity signals drift from the party’s Trump-era base.
The race is unfolding in a state where Trump lost the popular vote by wide margins in both 2016 and 2020, and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. The district itself, however, is drawn to be competitive in a general election while giving Republican primary voters outsized influence over the eventual nominee. That dynamic rewards rhetorical escalation on Trump loyalty even as it risks alienating the broader electorate in November.
The contest between Calvert and Kim is one of several incumbent-on-incumbent primaries triggered by redistricting across the country, and it echoes other Republican primaries where Trump’s endorsement — or the perception of it — has become a decisive factor.
MSI previously reported on the California governor’s race, where a crowded Democratic field has created a narrow opening for a Republican candidate in the state’s top-two primary system. The Calvert-Kim primary operates under similar structural rules: the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general election. In a district with two well-known Republican incumbents, a Democrat could be locked out of the November ballot entirely.