“If you heard a lawmaker spent taxpayer money on projects he personally benefited from, you’d probably say that’s wrong, if not worse.” That leads off a damning news segment about Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), the longest-serving member of the California congressional delegation. It goes on to describe two instances where Calvert, a longtime real estate investor, inserted earmarks into transportation spending bills that personally benefited his real estate holdings.

The first, in 2005, was an improvement project for a road connecting two major highways, adjacent to a property he bought just three months before adding the earmark. Six months after that, Calvert sold the land for nearly $1 million, earning a 79 percent profit. Calvert’s alibi was a local watchdog report that said the profit matched the rise in market value for the area; that would stand to reason if the earmark made the area more valuable. The news report tracked down the president of the organization who conducted the analysis. He said he only spent ten minutes looking at it, and that Calvert “should probably be using a better source than I am.”
Two years later, in 2007, Calvert submitted an earmark for a transportation hub in Corona that would raise the value of the surrounding area; he had seven properties in the vicinity. Calvert acknowledged that his properties would benefit from the earmark in a letter to the House Ethics Committee, while asking if he could still submit it. The Ethics Committee said it was fine, as long as other local businesses benefited as well.

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It was the kind of uncompromising investigation into political self-dealing that is rarely seen outside of independent media. But this story was featured on Fox News in 2008, as part of a documentary that remarkably held a major Republican accountable.

At the time, Calvert was in a safe district in a conservative part of the Inland Empire, the warehouse-heavy patch between Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley. But in 2022, Calvert’s district changed in reapportionment, losing Republican areas like Murrieta and Temecula and picking up several desert cities to the east like Palm Springs, which at one point in 2017 had an all-LGBT city council, the first in the nation.

The seat is now a toss-up, and in 2022 Will Rollins, a federal prosecutor, stepped up to challenge Calvert. He came within four points of winning; he even attended freshman orientation in Washington when the race was up in the air. “I had people walk up to me after that election and say, ‘I didn’t even know you had a chance until they were counting your name on the ticker on CNN for a week,’” Rollins told me in an interview. “I would say, ‘Did you vote?’ And they’d be like, umm, no.”

Rollins is running again in California’s 41st District, and the race will likely be even tighter. One public poll shows a pure toss-up, 46 percent to 46 percent with a handful of undecideds. Other partisan Democratic polls have shown Rollins up by between one and six points. It’s one of several toss-up California districts that could determine who controls Congress in 2025.