This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.
On a sunny September afternoon, Juan Carlos stands behind the counter of his compact variety shop in California’s Central Valley, notes the lack of customers and pulls out a binder full of questions. During breaks, the slender 47-year-old is studying for his U.S. citizenship test. With business down 30% from a year ago, there’s plenty of time to study.
“The other stores are also struggling,” he said. “Prices keep going up, so people are not spending.”
Juan Carlos’ store, which sells a bit of everything — cowboy boots and piñatas, toiletries and backpacks — is in downtown Livingston, a small city in Merced County best known for its sprawling Foster Farms poultry plant and sizable Punjabi Sikh community. After living a more urban life in places including Oakland, Juan Carlos appreciates the slower pace of this city of 14,000, where the biggest event is an annual sweet potato festival. In interviews, locals tend to describe Livingston with words like quiet, diverse, safe.
It is also politically unique: Livingston was the California city that swung most heavily for Trump, shifting 36 percentage points in his favor between 2020 and 2024. Other nearby cities tacked right as well.
The November midterms promise to test the durability of that shift, especially among Latinos, a group Donald Trump made significant gains with in 2024. Voters in California’s Central Valley will help determine whether and how decisively Democrats retake the House of Representatives and gain new leverage to thwart the president’s agenda.
Livingston, which is about 71% Latino, lies in California’s 13th Congressional District, which has a history of extraordinarily close races. In 2022, the moderate Democrat Adam Gray lost his campaign there by 564 votes; in 2024, he won by just 187 votes. His new Republican challenger, Kevin Lincoln, is a Trump-backed Marine veteran and former mayor of Stockton.
Both candidates have campaigned on bringing down prices and making life more affordable. But interviews with Livingston residents underscore the stiff headwinds Lincoln faces.
Take Juan Carlos. (At his request, Capital & Main is withholding his last name to protect his identity, as his U.S. citizenship application is still in process.) The shopkeeper said plenty of his Latino customers, who mostly work in the surrounding fields or the poultry plant, backed Trump in 2024. A Mexican immigrant, Juan Carlos understood the attraction: Though he couldn’t vote, he also supported Trump; his three adult children, who are U.S. citizens, all voted for him.
“He has some racist ideas, but the economy will be better, the gas will be cheaper,” is how he described his thinking in 2024.
Today, though, with gas in Livingston starting at around $6 a gallon and business slow, Juan Carlos and his kids have lost faith in Trump. “I thought it would all get better — but nothing is better,” he said.
He is also newly anxious, which explains the binder full of citizenship questions. During a recent trip to Mexico, Juan Carlos was detained at the border, questioned extensively and released only after reaching his attorney. Although he has been a legal resident for more than a decade and owns his home and business, he felt the ground shift beneath him for a few frightening hours. The scare convinced him that he should forgo further trips abroad until he becomes a citizen.
Gurpal Samra, a Livingston city councilmember whose family became the first of the Punjabi diaspora to move to the city in 1970, has seen a similar change in his community. Punjabis are an important voting bloc in Livingston, making up about 22% of the city.
“We’re in the valley; it’s fairly conservative around here,” Samra said. “In the Indian community, we have a lot of farmers and truck drivers. They all went to support Trump because he said gas was going to be $2 a gallon. Now they’re not so happy.”
A lot of anxiety
The 13th Congressional District encompasses all of Merced County, an agricultural area of about 300,000 residents, along with portions of neighboring counties. Last year, when voters approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting in response to the Trump-backed remapping of Texas, the 13th was redrawn to include sections of Democratic-leaning Stockton.
Gray, the district’s representative, is a Merced native who spent a decade in the California Assembly, where he founded the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and focused on rural issues such as farming and water policy (as well as expanding health care access).
Lincoln, his opponent, served as the mayor of the district’s largest city, Stockton, from 2021 to 2025, leaving the job after unsuccessfully challenging Rep. Josh Harder in California’s 9th Congressional District. Lincoln has criticized Gray for voting against Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which cut social services to pay for tax cuts and an immigration crackdown, while highlighting his own Latino roots. (Lincoln’s mother is of Mexican descent; his father is African American.)
Despite the election’s high stakes nationally, many local residents and business owners interviewed for this story weren’t particularly aware of it. Most of the political signs on display across the city are for candidates for City Council and school board. Yet federal policies over the last two years have certainly left their mark.
“The kids have dealt with a lot of anxiety,” said Mario Alcazar, who was born and raised in Livingston and works as a high school counselor in the nearby town of Atwater. During heightened Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area, he said, school attendance dropped for several days. “I would talk with a couple of my students who are undocumented about the classes they were going to take next year. One said, ‘Why are we talking about this when I might not be here?’ Their anxiety affects everything — their health, academics, relationships with friends.”
Federal immigration policies also fell heavily on the Sikh community, whose men disproportionately work in the trucking industry; by one estimate, they comprise 35% of the state’s commercial driver workforce. In September, the Trump administration issued new regulations targeting immigrant truckers that could lead to the cancellation of 61,000 truckers’ licenses, CalMatters reported. The state Department of Motor Vehicles already rescinded about 17,000 such licenses after a federal audit.
“My uncle employed at least one or two young people who had their licenses canceled,” Livingston Councilmember Japjeet Singh Uppal said during a driving tour of the city. He passed by a vacant Rite Aid, the city’s lone bank and a Masonic lodge that is being converted into housing for veterans. Beyond downtown, the city has several parks and two domed Sikh temples, or gurdwaras, along with a handful of churches.
“I went to one house where I met these four young guys who all lost their licenses,” said Uppal. “Now they’re doing DoorDash, Uber, whatever they can find. It’s had a huge impact, especially on younger men.”
The administration intensified its targeting of Sikh drivers last month: A Homeland Security Department social media post depicted a Sikh man with the text “Get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh,” “Self-deport or find out,” and “America for Americans.” The agency, which took down the post, said it was referring to Harjinder Singh, an Indian immigrant truck driver who has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in a fatal crash in Florida. Singh, however, is a very common surname among Sikhs.
Uppal, whose father was a trucker, said the Sikh community was “all in” for Trump in 2024 based on memories of the economy during his first administration. That’s changed dramatically.
“I would hear this all the time from my own uncles: Business was booming, gas was cheap, truckers were getting solid rates on their loads,” he said. “Now they have their federal government calling all of them — or at least the truckers, which are a very prominent portion of the community — bad drivers that are at risk of deportation. It’s definitely been a 180 for a lot of people.”
Massive class problem
Although heightened immigration enforcement is a significant concern in Livingston, where about 40% of the population is foreign-born, the overriding issues there, as in the rest of the country, are high prices and the financial stress they cause.
Not everyone, however, blames Trump. Brandon Friesen, whose family has run the town’s True Value hardware store for more than 60 years, considers California’s high gas taxes, decreased local oil production and government regulation the most significant obstacles to bringing prices down.
“What California does has more effect on us than what Trump does, and California policies are more harmful,” he said. “We’ve changed light bulb sets about four times in the last 10 years to keep up with regulations. That ends up costing local people more money.”
While Friesen appreciates that Gray “fights for local stuff,” he said he is also frustrated by the Democratic Party’s dominance in California and “looking for anyone that could disrupt the status quo.”
Merced County Republican Chairman Gene Johnson echoed Friesen’s complaints about California regulations, but he also noted growing unease among local conservatives. During Trump’s first term and early in the current administration, he said, “Everyone was happy.” But now, he added, “All prices are up because of the Iran war. Most of the Republicans think the war should have been over by now.”
Johnson, whose father was born in El Salvador, worries that Trump’s Latino backing in particular is eroding.
“Trump got a lot of support from Latinos, but I think he’s lost quite a few of the ones that he gained,” he said. “People are paying $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. That’s very difficult, especially for Latinos in this area.”
Mike Madrid, a political strategist who broke with the Republican Party after Trump’s first nomination, has been following voter sentiment in the Central Valley and predicts Gray will win easily. He sees the Latino shift away from Trump as having less to do with ethnic identity than the community’s working-class orientation.
“Latinos have always been concerned … more about the economy and the cost of living than immigration issues,” Madrid said. “They can’t get ahead. They represent the massive class problem we have in America.”
There are plenty of signs that residents of the 13th District are struggling to meet their basic needs.
“A year ago, we were distributing 1,000 pounds of food a week in Merced County,” said Terika Smith, who runs the local charity Food Para Todos. In one recent week, though, the group handed out 17,000 pounds. “We’ve never seen an increase this large. We have to turn people away at every distribution site.”
Although Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” reduced funding for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program by about $186 billion over 10 years and tightened work requirements, Merced County received a yearlong exemption due to high unemployment. Its number of SNAP recipients has remained steady as a result, according to Merced County’s Human Services Agency director, John Ceccoli.
Hats off
While there haven’t been any public polls of the 13th District in this cycle, the influential Cook Political Report moved the district from “toss up” to “lean Democratic” in January. And locals have their own way of tracking the political winds.
“In the Punjabi community, it’s just been really quiet,” said Uppal, the councilmember. “Before, they were loud. Now they just don’t talk about politics anymore.”
Elsa Rodriguez Juarez, a teacher in Livingston, said that while she could never support Trump due to his immigration policies, he initially represented “a sense of hope for some people” who were struggling economically.
“You would often go to the grocery store in Livingston and see people wearing their Trump hats,” she said.
Now, however, the president’s vocal local supporters have lowered their voices, Juarez said, “and I can’t tell you the last time I’ve seen somebody wearing that hat.”
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