Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D\u2013Bakersfield) has a Democratic challenger for her seat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bakersfield City Councilwoman Manpreet Kaur filed paperwork with the California Secretary of State\u2019s Office to form a committee to run in Senate District 16.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Driving the news: Kaur was elected to the Bakersfield City Council in 2022 to represent Ward 7, the district that covers southern Bakersfield.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She founded the Kern County chapter of Jakara Movement in 2016<\/p>\n
State of the race: Hurtado is currently in her second term in the Senate and can serve one more four-year term if she is reelected to represent the 16th district in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She narrowly defeated Republican David Shepard by a margin of 22 votes four years ago and ran for Congress against Rep. David Valadao (R\u2013Hanford) in 2024 but did not make it out of the primary.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hurtado had been running for reelection unopposed until Republican Guillermo Gonzalez recently launched his campaign for the seat with widespread GOP support. Gonzalez is a field representative for Valadao.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 16th district spans parts of Fresno, Kern and Tulare counties and contains all of Kings County.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While Democrats have an eight-point advantage in voter registration, President Donald Trump won the district by nearly nine points in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D\u2013Bakersfield) has a Democratic challenger for her seat.\u00a0 Bakersfield City Councilwoman Manpreet Kaur filed paperwork…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[151,153,152],"class_list":{"0":"post-154131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bakersfield","8":"tag-bakersfield","9":"tag-bakersfield-headlines","10":"tag-bakersfield-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}