How to take on the billionaires — and win

America's greatest organizer united with one of California's fastest-growing unions to flip the nation's closest House race.

After a pitch-dark night, the breaking news from California’s 13th congressional district arrived like a burst of orange creeping over the horizon.

On December 4, 2024, almost a month after an abysmal Election Day for anyone who believes in progress, the nation's last and closest congressional race was called for Democrat Adam Gray. It was a nail-biting result from a rematch of a race in 2022 that saw Gray lose by 564 votes to John Duarte, a wealthy farmer from a family of wealthy farmers. The margin of victory in this flip of a key swing district? Just 187 votes.

So how did it happen? How did Democrats in this Central California district, which includes Merced County, most of Madera, and slices of Stanislaus, Fresno, and San Joaquin, buck a trend that saw a Republican presidential candidate win the national popular vote for the first time in twenty years?

The answer hints at how democracy can make a comeback after a dismal 2024. Like many great California stories, it begins with some “Sí, se puede.” But that was followed by hard work at every step of the process. That kind of dedication can’t just be bought. It has to be earned. It requires good old-fashioned organizing and organizers.

As the 2024 cycle approached, Dolores Huerta knew that even at 94 years old she could not sit out. Since her rise to fame as a co-founder of the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, she used her international renown and intimacy with how change happens to help win power at the ballot box, where it can be directly applied to improve the lives of workers and women she’s spent her life championing.

“Our organization, the Dolores Huerta Action Fund, had targeted three congressional districts,” Dolores Huerta told me on a Zoom call last month. Those districts included Califonia’s 27th in Southern California, the 22th in Kern County and the 13th.

Dolores credited her friend Pablo Rodriguez with the tip that might have been decisive in cutting the MAGA majority in the US House down to the barest nub.

“He mentioned the fact that they had all these commuters—you know, people that, uh, that work in the Bay Area, but they live down there—in CD13. And that nobody's ever registered them to vote.”

That was the kind of information that America’s greatest living organizer wasn’t about to sit on. The Dolores Huerta Action Fund got in early. But it was a powerhouse alliance with LIUNA – the Laborers’ International Union of North America — that pushed the effort to another level.

“Once we hooked up with Josh and the Laborers’ Union, oh my goodness,” Huerta said. “I think that had a lot to do with it because when you have all of these families of the labor that live right there in the community. They were out there early on. I think that made a big difference also.”

Huerta’s team faced brutal conditions to try to find those voters who call the 13th home but work elsewhere.

“Global warming was not on our side,” Ricardo Chavez, a key member of the Dolores Huerta Action Fund team, told me. “The climate was so hot here in the Central Valley of California.”

Huerta noted in miserable conditions like a August afternoon in Modesto, there’s nothing that can beat the effort from the people who live in that heat.

We first covered the collaboration between Huerta and LIUNA last summer. We wondered if one labor action—featuring more a hundred LIUNA members in their trademark bright orange shirts calling on union members to get out the votes of the their friends and family—could swing the tightest House district in the nation.

Huerta told me that this alliance of workers and one of the greatest organizers of workers ever to live faced the same problem Democrats everywhere faced: Waking voters up. Her answer to this conundrum is engaging voters where they are at, something local organizers and community members are uniquely suited to do.

While the people power summoned by the Dolores Huerta Action Fund and LIUNA gave Adam Gray what might have been a decisive advantage, Huerta notes that the GOP’s efforts to win over Latino voters have been effective—thanks in large part to churches.

What could help counteract the GOP’s successful effort to draw Latinos from the Democratic Party or keep them from voting? The 13th could offer a model from resisting the lure of far right churches with the power of organized labor.

Dolores and her team organized an army of paid canvassers and volunteers, including CD-13 resident members of LIUNA Local 1130, to first register and then mobilize voters in key areas, such as Patterson.

Joshua Arce, a Special Assistant for LIUNA’s Northern California District Council of Laborers, spoke about what LIUNA learned by helping turn a more than 500-vote deficit in 2022 to a nearly 200-vote advantage.

The honest truth is when the margins are this close, any little thing can make the difference, even spoiled ballots.

That’s why when the votes began to be counted on November 5th and the race was a close as everyone expected but with Duarte showing a slight lead, Chavez went into another gear, spending weeks driving across California’s great valley tracking down one vote at a time.

Chavez noted that Elon Musk’s big money didn’t sway the 13th in the end. But it might have. The babbling billionaire who seems to have bought himself a president could have bought the 13th, if he understood the process a little better.

The truth is guys like Elon Musk can buy the legwork and even the knowledge of how the process works. But what they can’t buy is what Chavez thinks will make the biggest difference in swing districts like the 13th all over the country. That’s a real connection to the community.