A Republican candidate, Matt Jacobs, is within striking distance of flipping Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, red. Until very recently, the seat was not considered in play for the GOP, which speaks to the opportunity for Republicans to win decisively as voters appear to swing toward them in the final weeks of the campaign. 

“I think it’s a jump ball race as we head into the final two and a half weeks here,” Mr. Jacobs told the Sun via phone. The National Republican Congressional Committee agrees, and has invested in the race over the past month following a late September poll showing Mr. Jacobs a single point down on a generic ballot, with a 10-point lead among independents. 

How did that happen? Mr. Jacobs focused on the basics: cost of living, crime, education, adequate energy, and water. The basic things everyone wants and needs to live a good life, but things that, in California and in many places around the country, feel like they are slipping away amid skyrocketing prices, surging lawlessness, and an often inadequate education system.

“It’s simple,” Mr. Jacobs says, “It’s just safe neighborhoods and an economy that rewards hard work and good schools. It’s very basic.” 

Mr. Jacobs reckons that “issue no. 1” is “far and away” gas prices, which are still more than $6 a gallon in his district. Also, “food prices are through the roof,” he says, as are “energy costs, rent.”  He says he’s knocked on “thousands of doors in Latino areas,” meeting registered Democrats who requested ballots in Spanish — “and not once has someone asked me about party affiliation. It is always about cost of living.” 

The second big issue — another in which party affiliation doesn’t matter — is crime. “Everyone,” he says, “cares about and needs a safe neighborhood.”

Mr. Jacobs says LA’s district attorney, George Gascon, has “effectively legalized crime by refusing to prosecute a whole swath of crimes,” including stealing anything worth less than $950. 

“As you’d expect,” he adds, “crime is up significantly here. Home invasion, burglaries, follow-homes, carjackings — non-violent and violent crime.” 

Mr. Jacobs argues the federal government should withhold funds from districts not enforcing the law, much like states not getting “freeway money if your drinking age is under 21.”

He is also passionate about school choice, and points to his opponent’s decision to kill a school choice bill (it would let parents take children out of failing schools) when she was in the state legislature.

Parents, Mr. Jacobs says, are intensely angry. “There’s residual anger over 18 months of lockdowns here because parents feel like their kids won’t reach their full potential,” and there is anger “over the kind of ideological curriculum that’s been injected into these schools.”

He says California “proposed a sample seventh grade essay prompt that says, ‘Please explain why Jewish and Irish immigrants were privileged in America,’ to massive uproar.” 

The state is also “proposing eliminating advanced placement courses and honors courses in public schools to achieve equity. So instead of working to challenge every kid and raise every kid up, they’re gonna achieve ‘equity’ by lowering higher achieving students,” he says.

“I’ll tell you,” he adds, “a parent could be a lifelong Democrat but when they’re talking about getting rid of honors math because it’s racist and that parent’s kid’s gonna suffer, that parent wakes up real quickly.” 

When it comes to water and energy, meanwhile, he calls California a “third world situation.”

“We are not allowed to water our lawns here more than 10 minutes a week. … And then when it comes to energy, the state puts forward a proposal to ban gas-powered cars by 2035, but three days later, they put out an announcement saying, ‘Do not charge your electric vehicles. It’ll overwhelm the power grid.’

“So, we can’t use our water. We’re not allowed. They tell us not to use electricity between the hours of 4 and 9 p.m. We’re the richest state in the richest country in the world, and we’re rationing water and energy. Those are third world situations. And people are scratching their heads and thinking, ‘Why is this happening here?’ … We don’t have a water supply problem, we have a storage and transportation problem because we haven’t built a reservoir in 40 years.”

Mr. Jacobs is also a pro-immigrant candidate and campaigns in Spanish to the 31 percent of his district that is Hispanic. “The history of this country,” he says, “is the history of waves and waves of immigrants who have made this country what it is.”

His grandparents were Holocaust survivors and immigrated, and he says he sees himself in the Latino immigrants in his district.“Skin color doesn’t matter. Yeah, we come from different parts of the world but the hopes and the dreams and the challenges are very similar. I don’t blame anyone who wants to come to this country. Why wouldn’t you?” he asks with a laugh. 

If elected, he says, he wants to “make sure that America remains a force of good in the world. There’s a growing number of extreme politicians on the far left who think America is a bad place. You know the types — AOC, Bernie Sanders — who think the American dream is dead or not accessible to certain people. I couldn’t disagree more. I think that that’s toxic thinking because America needs to be that shining city upon a hill. It has to be that way because there’s no other in the world.

“America,” he says, is “the one indispensable nation.”