The DIgital Landscape #004: CA-48
California’s 48th Congressional district (CA-48) has 10 Democrats competing in the primary as of 12/29/26:
The primary is June 2nd, 2026.
Ammar Campa-Najjar
Ammar has an incredible social media presence in terms of audience size. He is active on X, Threads, Instagram, and Facebook, and has 86K total followers across those platforms. He has videos of him being interviewed on The Young Turks and Meidas Touch, which are 2 prominent New Media political programs.
He has the audience in place to go all-in on video for his Instagram audience, while also turning the subject matter of those videos into Threads to grow his audience there. If he got to 40K on X, he should have no problem building a strong following on Threads.
Abel Chavez
Abel is active on X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, with TikTok being his most active platform. His other social profiles could use some TLC, but his TikTok is great.
The lowest lift move for him would be to scale up the volume of his TikTok content without sacrificing quality.
Corinna Contreras
Corinna is active on X, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, but all of her accounts are brand new. Since they are barely a month old, there isn’t much content.
She’s on the right track with trying to be everywhere, but this can become a massive time-suck if you don’t have a strong re-purposing strategy. I would pick a platform as the primary content platform and then re-purpose everything off of that.
I like Threads for this because it allows you to basically test the validity of ideas in a short-form Thread before investing time into making a video.
With that being said, making Instagram or TikTok your primary content platform makes cross-posting to every other platform easy. Either one would work here.
Nicholas Davis
Nicholas is listed as a candidate on Ballotpedia but does not have a campaign website or any social media presence.
Marc Iannarino
Mark is present on X, Instagram, and Facebook. It seems like all of his accounts are relatively new, so not much of a presence to comment on.
Curtis Morrison
No social media presence, but has a campaign blog which I thought was interesting.
Ferguson Porter
No social media presence.
Brandon Riker
Brandon is active on X, Threads, Instagram, and Facebook. He doesn’t have a huge following on any platforms, but from what I gathered from his posts, he’s got an excellent ground game.
He’s doing a ton of town halls and other in-person events. If I were him, I’d focus on trying to capture some videos at these events, especially the town halls.
Whitney Shanahan
Whitney Shanahan has an insanely strong social media presence. She has over 9K followers on Threads, over 84K on Instagram, and over 537K on TikTok. She has a lot of pro-choice content, which is a great thing to run on in this climate. It does look like she ran unsuccessfully in 2024, but her current content is not really campaign-focused.
It’s great, she’s obviously doing something right, but it doesn’t quite say “I’m running for Congress”. If I were her, I’d just make a small tweak to my videos to start letting people know I’m running for Congress. I’d also spend some time consistently creating Threads on the fight for reproductive rights.
Marni Von Wilpert
Marni is active on X, Instagram, and Facebook. She has a solidly average presence for a politician. Her campaign trail photo dumps are frequent enough to convey momentum. She dabbles in video but is sporadic. I’d commit to video 3x a week to see if she can grow her name recognition.
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