Two Republican members of Congress from California are fighting against each other for political survival, and the intraparty spat turned especially nasty thanks to a scathing ad about a 1994 prostitution scandal.
Reps. Young Kim and Ken Calvert currently represent Orange and Riverside counties, respectively. However, an anti-Trump gerrymandering plot last year by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom combined their two districts for this election cycle, making it one of the few safe GOP seats left in California.
The competition has been fierce, and both sides have spent millions on ads accusing each other as not being conservative enough.
Kim’s most recent attack ad has caught political observers off guard for its “brutal” and “insane” relentlessness in attacking Calvert.
The ad starts by referencing a 2009 news article to imply Calvert is corrupt.
“But he’s not just swampy, he’s sleazy,” the narrator read. “Calvert got busted with a prostitute, pants down in his car, tried to flee then lied to police.”
“No wonder President Trump can’t trust Calvert,” the ad went on.
According to reports on the referenced incident in 1994, the rookie congressman was caught by police with unzipped pants. After a local newspaper sued for police reports, Calvert then confessed to the “extremely embarrassing” situation but insisted he never knew the woman was a prostitute and didn’t pay for sex.
He had apologized for his “inappropriate” behavior, said he will seek counseling and attributed the mistake to personal family trauma.
Calvin Moore, a spokesperson for Calvert, slammed the ad bringing up a long-ago incident as “desperate sh*t” and then shared damning footage of Kim, a sign of how increasingly toxic the race has become.
In that 2020 footage, Kim is recorded telling diners that “I would not let any one of my three daughters to date or marry someone like Donald Trump.”
However, in that same event, Kim also did praise the president for delivering on conservative policies.
Both candidates have tried as much as possible to align themselves with Trump while portraying the other as insufficiently supportive, if not downright hostile, of Trump. The president has not endorsed in the race, though Calvert caught some flack for making it appear so.
The new ad by Kim, for instance, claimed Calvert “betrayed MAGA.” Calvert has also launched brutal ads himself, including a recent one that said Kim is a “RINO,” or “Republican in Name Only” when she voted to censure and condemn Trump.
“Trump traitor Young Kim: a liberal,” the ad concluded.
The back-and-forth attacks have extended into social media, where each have accused the other of not supporting Trump-aligned policies from the border wall to cracking down on illegal immigrants.
The California Post reached out to both camps for comment.
“Young Kim has said the nastiest things about President Trump… so it’s hardly surprising that she would makeup nasty and untrue attacks about Ken Calvert too,” Moore told The California Post.
Meanwhile, a number of Democratic candidates in the race such as Esther Kim Varet are watching the fighting from the sidelines.
“Right now, they’re having to out-MAGA each other,” Varet told the New York Times.