Lainie Goldstein, of Temecula, California, bought champagne for her Election Night watch party two years ago but never popped the corks. “When Trump got elected, we were actually stunned,” she said at home on Sunday. “I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get out of bed, and so I started calling people I knew who were involved in politics and asked them what to do.” Several phone calls later, she found herself the founder of a twenty-member chartered political club called the Temecula Valley Democrats; today, it comprises nearly two hundred dues-paying members and, in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, is one of several organizations in Southern California working to channel the so-called blue wave into a swell. “That would be great on its own,” Goldstein said. “But the fact that it’s Temecula is amazing.”

An hour northeast of San Diego, on the lower span of the Inland Empire, Temecula is a mostly white, middle-class city of a little more than a hundred and ten thousand people, along the upper edge of the Fiftieth Congressional District—a swath of California that, at about forty per cent registered Republican, twenty-seven per cent Democrat, and about twenty-five per cent unaffiliated, is often thought to be among the state’s reddest. Redistricting intensified the population’s over-all conservative cast, bringing together members of the military, religious families, and libertarians. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by fifteen points.

Yet the Fiftieth has become the setting for an unusually fraught race this week: Duncan Hunter, a five-term Republican congressman who was indicted, in August, for allegedly using two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of campaign funds for personal expenses, is facing off against Ammar Campa-Najjar, a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican-Palestinian-American Democrat. Recent polling puts Hunter in the lead, but Campa-Najjar is close on his heels. Suddenly, the race has become one in which all outcomes are astonishing: either voters will reëlect a congressman under indictment (one who has been stripped of all committee assignments by his own party leader), or one of California’s reddest regions will vote young and blue.

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For a few hours on Sunday, Goldstein’s extremely beige one-floor house, in Temecula, became the front lines of the county’s Democratic charge. The kitchen was laden with coffee urns and troughs of breakfast food. A table near the driveway bore sign-in sheets and flyers. In the back yard, in an impromptu amphitheatre assembled from folding chairs, a couple of dozen volunteers gathered, to get instructions for canvassing.

“I just want to say, we’re having a watch party here,” Goldstein announced into a microphone, standing on the amphitheatre’s makeshift stage (her concrete patio). Some bamboo wind chimes dangled from the pergola; an orange tabby peered out through a sliding door, framed by at least three enormous scratching posts. Campa-Najjar had arrived in a black S.U.V. and had slipped into one of the seats. “We’re breaking out that champagne when we win!” he called from the back.

The crowd cheered. Goldstein introduced three speakers: Alan Geraci, who is running for State Assembly (“Let me tell you something: there is a sleeping giant in Temecula, and that giant has to be awakened”); Sara Jacobs, a twenty-nine-year-old who ran and lost in the primary of the neighboring Forty-ninth Congressional District (“I met Ammar the first day I started running, and he’s, like, ‘Welcome to the circus—we’re the exact same age’ ”); and Susan Davis, the longtime congresswoman from the more liberal Fifty-third, which includes eastern San Diego. “I think this race epitomizes for this country a lot of what we’re feeling,” she said. “What’s going on is making us sad and frustrated and unsettled.” She turned toward Campa-Najjar. “And then you come along, and you bring us this hope and vision,” she said. “You’re a builder—that’s what we need.”

Campa-Najjar took the stage, to a small standing ovation. Unusually among politicians—a profession frequently dismissed as “Hollywood for ugly people”—he is famously dashing, with slicked-back hair, a stubby beard, and a certain ruggedness around the eyes. (When he announced his candidacy, last year, his looks got more attention than his platform.) He wore a navy blazer, a blue pin-striped shirt, and brown trousers. In one-on-one encounters, he is subdued, but, before a crowd, he turns quick-talking and enthusiastic.

“I know a lot of people feel like this is just too conservative an area, but I don’t believe it,” he said. “I think this is going to be the last seat called on Election Day. I think the whole country is going to be watching with bated breath to see whether we flip the twenty-four seats we needed.” He paused, and smiled slightly. “I believe we will. But I also want to put the fear of God into you guys.”

The race in the Fiftieth has gained attention in part because it brings the midterms’ referendum into relief. Hunter, a marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, was the second member of Congress to endorse Trump, in 2016. He is a legacy congressman; his father, also named Duncan Hunter, represented the region for more than twenty-five years. Campa-Najjar, who grew up in the district and worked in the Obama White House, represents a fresh-faced order of liberals who coalesced after the Democratic defeat in 2016. At twenty-nine, he is older than all but one member of his senior staff. (His communications director, Nick Singer, is twenty-seven; his executive assistant, Alyssa Terrado, who runs his schedule and logistics, is nineteen.) Against the grain of a partisan moment, his campaign has emphasized novelty and flexibility more than progressive bona fides.

“What I want is to get the outsiders in and the insiders out,” he said at a Starbucks in Temecula, during a break between events. “Like, the whole Trump argument—that ‘What do you have to lose?’ thing? That’s kind of our tone.”

Campa-Najjar was raised by single mother in East County, California. “When Obama got elected, I got really inspired by him,” he said. “Here was a skinny brown guy with a funny name I could identity with.” He also recognized an aspect of himself in “Dreams from My Father”; in a similar bid to get to know his own father better, Campa-Najjar had gone with his mother and brother to live near him, in Gaza, for three years when Campa-Najjar was nine. He got to San Diego State via community college, then worked as a deputy field director for Barack Obama’s reëlection campaign, in 2012, while he was still in school.

Graduation brought him to the White House, where he picked constituent letters for the President to read. He moved on to jobs at the Department of Labor and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce before leaving to found a consultancy firm called ACN Strategies, doing marketing work for small businesses. “Instead of me working for the Chamber, representing two hundred local chambers and four million businesses, I just had some of those businesses and chambers become my clients,” he said. “I was making a lot more money. I started realizing, Oh, God, this is why Republicans hate taxes!”

When Democratic organizers suggested that he mount a congressional campaign, he realized that his skill set could carry over to that, too. “The campaign is a three-million-dollar organization—we have staff, we have constituents, we have services, we have a brand,” he explained. “I took my experience with my small business and turned it into the campaign.” (At the moment, he said, he’s living off his savings.) Though he travels under the flag of blue millennialism, his positions are decidedly centrist—an orientation that seems to serve him well in the district. He champions universal health care, debt-free community college, and cap-and-trade. And yet he’s also a deficit hawk who opposes the gas tax, supports “renovating” San Diego’s border wall, and expresses enthusiasm about working with “McCain Republicans” in Congress.