The Efficacy of Representative Nanette Barragan’s Reelection Campaign Strategy

Karah Hughes

Dr. Lee Ann Banaszak

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 Representative Nanette Díaz Barragán was elected to the United States House of

Representatives on November 8th, 2016 and began serving during the 115th Congress. She has

spent most of her career working locally in Hermosa Beach, California but began her career in

civil service by working for the Clinton administration in the 1990s. She continued her years of

service working with the NAACP and focusing on healthcare topics influenced by race and

discrimination, before becoming a lawyer and then city council member, focusing on

environmental issues. These two issues have consistently been among Representative Barragan’s

top priorities, and prevalent among her campaigns for Congress. Surprisingly, Representative

Barragan did not create a substantial campaign for the 2022 Midterm Elections. While

Representative Barragan’s first campaign in 2016 was heavily influenced by gender and race, her

most recent run for reelection was successfully based entirely off her status as incumbent and her

work in the community.

The 44th Congressional District of California is situated at the southern end of Los

Angeles, encapsulating San Pedro, the Los Angeles Harbor, and North Long Beach. The district

is 70.5% Hispanic (“California’s 44th Congressional District”) with 85% of all people born

abroad were born in Latin America (“Census Profile: Congressional District 44, CA”). This is

extremely significant to Representative Barragan, who is a first-generation Mexican-American.

She is the first Latina to represent the 44th Congressional District, and credits this with her

ability to relate to “low-income minority families” (“About”) in the district from her own

childhood experiences. The campaign for Representative Barragan’s first election in 2016

focused heavily on the fact that her parents were undocumented and her feats as a lawyer in the

field of immigration (Daily Breeze, 2016). Her government website reports that immigration

reform is among one of her top priorities, which draws the support of her constituents that have
gone through or are connected to people going through the process of immigrating to the United

States.

During her first election, Representative Barragan focused heavily on the intersection

between being a woman and being Latina. In fact, being a woman cannot be separated from

being Latina, the word itself is gendered. She told the Daily Breeze that she hoped to “stand up

for women and immigrants” against former President Trump specifically, but to no doubt is

continuing her work as a descriptive representative (Daily Breeze, 2016). Being a descriptive

representative in addition to being a substantive representative is crucial to this district, as the

majority Latinx population are among the population that is considered second class citizens

benefit from the representation of their interests by someone from the same demographic

(Mansbridge, 1999).

The government website highlights Representative Barragan’s novelty as the first Latina

to represent the district, but it does little else to explicitly discuss her gender and the role of

representative. Being the first Latina to represent the district is a point for Representative

Barragan, as shown by the four times the biographic page of her website emphasizes her novelty

(“About”). These novelty labels have died out since winning reelection, but during her first

election in 2016, Representative Barragan received much more coverage on her triumph as she

became the first of an entire demographic to represent the district. This increased coverage with

the use of novelty labels in candidates running for visible political positions made her first

election win seem historic, and it continues to be painted in that light with the use of the novelty

labels (Meeks, 2012). The page also mentions some of the issues she considers most important,

but even those are fairly evenly split between male and female gendered topics. She is focused

on education and health policies, which are typically considered female topics, but she is also
invested in strengthening the local economy and is on the Committee on National Defense,

which are both typically considered male topics. This divide loosely reflects the ideal politicians

that the young girls in Bos et al. drew; most of the younger girls drew female presenting

politicians with both male and female characteristics (Bos et al., 2021).

Representative Barragan’s ability to deeply connect with the community in her district

had a significant impact on the results of the 2022 Midterm Elections. She was already known as

the incumbent for the district, but her activities in promoting public education and family

services got her a lot of media coverage in the last year. In October, her Twitter account

highlighted her trip to State Street Elementary’s heritage celebration (Twitter, 2022) along with

her support for the Los Angeles Dodgers during the postseason (Twitter, October 12 2022). This

connection to the community is a strong character trait for candidates that is slightly gendered

female but looked for in most candidates, as seen with the Draw a Political Leader experiment

(Bos et al., 2021).

There is a strong connection to her parents in Representative Barragan’s biographic

section of her website. She orients herself in the public eye as a daughter that has learned

important values from her parents and is therefore qualified for her position. This strong tie to

family is heavily gendered female, as family-oriented campaigns are attributed more femininely.

She creates a sense of familial community and pushes the ideal of a well connected family where

the now-adult daughter applies what the parents taught her to improve the community for future

generations. The improvement for the future can be seen with her fight for environmental

policies and education reforms. She takes on the role of caregiver of the community of San

Pedro, California, by representing her constituents as she would represent older parental figures

unable to represent themselves. She presents herself as capable of caring for the community,
inherently a female gendered concept that plays well into the Latinx ideal of family that many of

her Latinx constituents no doubt admire.

Representative Barragan presents herself as an environmental advocate. In her years as

citycouncilwoman and mayor, she protected Hermosa Beach from an oil drilling company

building rigs off the coast of the city. In Congress, she was on the Committee on Natural

Resources during her first term, and the Committee on Energy and Commerce during her second

and third terms. Both committees tie heavily into environmental issues, which gives more credit

to her environmental passions. She promised on November 14th that in the new term that she

was reelected for, she would “send message America is all in on the climate fight” (Twitter,

2022)

The media covered very little of Representative Barragan’s campaign for the 2022

Midterm Election. To be fair, Representative Barragan did not run much of a campaign, but the

media covered very little. After the results of election day were released, all news sources that

reported on Representative Barragan’s victory gave one to two sentence updates on her success,

simply stating that she had won reelection. Sources like the SFGate, CHRON., and APNews all

state the same sentence: “Democrat Nanette Barragan wins reelection to U.S. House in

California’s 44th Congressional District.” This short and sweet sentence was the only coverage

given on her reelection, likely due to the fact that Representative Barragan was the incumbent

and incumbency has a very significant and positive effect on the likelihood of reelection (Dolan,

2013). The reports of reelection focus only on the party that Representative Barragan identifies

with rather than her gender, which also plays into Dolan’s theory that party matters much more

than gender in elections (Dolan, 2013).

 Local media sources from California report the most on Representative Barragan, while

national and international sources rarely feature her alone. Representative Barragan is most often

briefly mentioned in articles based on her position on various bills, but most other coverage is

done at the local level. The local stories often highlight Representative Barragan’s efforts in the

community, working to bring benefits from the District of Columbia to the 44th District of

California. For example, Representative Barragan secured $250,000 to help fund educational

programs at the Michelle Obama Library in Long Beach (Merino, 2022). By bringing federal

funding directly to the community, Representative Barragan was able to prove her ability as a

substantive representative, which helped her campaign as it was only four months before the

election. These on-the-ground initiatives that Representative Barragan took were what

constituted her campaign, rather than explicit campaigning.

Republican Paul Irving Jones unsuccessfully ran against Representative Barragan in the

2022 Midterm Elections. His campaign focused on controlling inflation, emphasizing mental

health in crime reduction policies, getting rid of “gender-ideology programming” in public

schools, and increasing efforts to limit undocumented citizens from living in the United States

(“Paul Irving Jones (California)”). His anti-immigration rhetoric, as well as his often use of the

word “illegals” in regards to undocumented citizens, lost him many votes in the election. When

trying to garner the trust and support of a constituency that is primarily made of immigrants and

descendants of recent immigrants, using language that dehumanizes other immigrants proves to

be detrimental. The issue topics he chose to campaign on were heavily gendered male, except for

the topic of abortion which he included in his campaign. Representative Barragan had very little

response to Jones’ campaign; she does not mention him on any social media platforms or press

releases. Furthermore, there was no news coverage of Paul Irving Jones’ campaign. There did
not seem to be news coverage in general surrounding this election race until the election results

were released, and campaign advertisements also did not exist for either party.

Although being Latina plays very heavily into her identity in politics, Representative

Barragan relied on her incumbency to win reelection during this election cycle. She presents

herself as the daughter of the community, working hard to make life better for her elders and the

next generation through her service in Congress. By having the advantage of being the

incumbent, Representative Barragan was able to directly show the community her capabilities in

office close to the election date to sway her voters. She started her career as a representative by

being a pioneer for the community, and she maintains her constituents’ trust by consistently

bringing benefits from the federal government directly to the community. Her issue topics align

more closely to the ideals of her constituents than to a gender of issues. Thus, she leans into

gender through her characteristics as a candidate, but chose to not include gender in her issue

competencies. She also realized that her party affiliation and incumbency had the greatest effect

on her chances of reelection. Media coverage virtually did not exist for this race, so she had the

advantage of working with the community, while her opponent, Paul Irving Jones, scraped

together votes. In the end, Representative Barragan’s campaign (or lack thereof) was successful

in winning her reelection.

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