A Fresh-Faced Political Outsider Tries to Turn Her Blue California District Red By Alexandra DeSanctis
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/elizabeth-heng-campaign-brings-conservative-values-to-california-race/
In the central San Joaquin Valley, 32-year-old Stanford grad Elizabeth Heng is standing up for conservative values against an entrenched Democratic incumbent.
Over the last several months, a host of Republican congressmen have announced that they won’t seek reelection this cycle, leaving their House seats open and vulnerable to Democratic pickup.
While polling data remain far from uniform on the chances of a “blue wave” sweeping Democrats into Washington in November, Republican politicians are right to be concerned. But in California’s 16th district, a young Republican woman is rising to the challenge, opposing Democratic congressman Jim Costa, who has held the seat since 2013 (and represented a somewhat different district for the previous four terms before redistricting).
The 16th district is located in California’s central San Joaquin Valley. It includes the western half of Fresno as well as the cities of Los Banos, Madera, and Merced, and it hasn’t been represented by a Republican in Congress since the mid 1970s, before redistricting gave it its current shape.
But 32-year-old Elizabeth Heng hopes to change that.
Heng’s parents immigrated to the United States to escape violence in Cambodia. About a decade ago, after she graduated from Stanford University, where she had served as student-body president, she returned to the Central Valley and opened a series of cell-phone stores with her brothers. Eventually, she found herself responsible for managing about 75 employees. “That was when I saw firsthand how government regulations impacted businesses negatively,” she says. “I constantly felt that from Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, they were saying that I was everything wrong with our country, when all I was doing was creating jobs.”
She subsequently decided to leave California to work in Washington, D.C., not expecting to stay long. “But it takes a long time to understand how to get legislation across the finish line,” she explains. Before she knew it, she had been in the nation’s capital for about six years, on and off. At one point, she worked on the House Foreign Affairs Committee with congressman Ed Royce (R., Calif.). At another, she aided Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Nevada.
