The Digital Landscape #003: CA-22
There are 4 Democrats running for California’s 22nd Congressional district as of 12/28/25. They are:
The primary is on June 2nd, 2026.
Jasmeet Bains
Jasmeet is active on X, Instagram, and Facebook. She gets decent traction compared to the average congressional candidate, and her launch video got 330K views.
On Instagram, she has over 1200 followers, but she’s just posting the standard campaign trail photo dumps. This is solid, but it’s just the bare minimum. She hasn’t dabbled in video at all.
Given that she is a doctor, I would start doing some videos on healthcare. Many candidates are creating content around healthcare — not many are doctors, though. It’s a unique authority play.
Eric Garcia
Eric only has a Facebook and he has zero posts. No offense to Eric, but this is not the social media presence of a serious candidate. I don’t understand this philosophy in 2025. If you don’t invest any effort into social media, you must be betting your in-person networking skill is so good that you don’t need an engine driving name recognition.
But if you do have a ground game that good, simply taking photos and cross-posting them everywhere gets you a social media presence that’s infinitely better than no presence. This just doesn’t fly for a candidate in 2026.
Rudy Salas
Rudy is a strange case. He ran for this seat in 2024, and judging by those posts and some of the comments, he built up at least a little momentum on social media.
But he hasn’t posted a thing on his X, Instagram, or Facebook since the 2024 campaign. Ballotpedia lists him as a candidate and the FEC has fundraising data, and he’s over $100K, so he’s certainly active on that front.
If I were him, I’d start posting on social media immediately. I would start with an Intro video on Instagram that he can pin, and then focus on 3 videos a week centered around the issues he’s campaigning on. I’d also start posting the standard campaign trail photo dumps to maintain the aesthetics of someone running for Congress.
Randy Villegas
Randy is active on X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, giving him the most complete social media presence in the race. He’s doing a solid job on X and has had some good-performing videos on Instagram and TikTok. If I was him, I’d do 2 things.
The first is take any time I invest into X and invest it into growing on Threads instead. Most liberal social media users have migrated to Threads by now.
The second I’d do is scale up the video operation. They are solid, but too sporadic. The algorithm loves and rewards consistency.
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