photo credit: Audrey Denney for Congress

In the June primary election California voters will be looking at new Congressional maps, courtesy of Proposition 50.

Sonoma County residents in Santa Rosa and northeastern parts of the county will be voting for California's redrawn 1st Congressional District.

One of the that'll be on the ballot when Sonoma County voters go to the polls is Audrey Denney.

A longtime Chico resident, educator and non-profit leader, Denney is making a third run for the 1st District seat.

While the California Democratic Party has endorsed State Senator Mike McGuire over Denney in the primary, that hasn't stopped Denney from carrying forward her campaign for the 1st District race, and what she sees as critical issues in the 2026 midterms.

Denney, who says she was active in 4-H and Future Farmers of America in her youth, moved to Chico in the early 2000's, studying agricultural science and education at Chico State University.

"I've spent my career teaching in higher education and doing international human rights and non-profit work," Denney said, describing her background. "For the past couple years primarily I've worked with with food banks across the country, and my career has really been rooted in service and community, and in making systems work better for people."

Denney has run for Congress before, first in the 2018 midterms.

"I was part of that wave of of women in their mid-30's at the time that stood up to Donald Trump when he first got elected and said like nope, we deserve better," Denney said about her first run for Congress. "We need to fight and resist against this administration with everything that we have. I have a long history of fighting for this part of the world in this specific way."

She went up against the late Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa in that race for the old 1st District seat in 2018 and 2020, drawing heavily on small dollar donations.

Denney ultimately lost out to LaMalfa both times on the old map, which more heavily favored Republican voters.

The new 1st Congressional District stretches from Santa Rosa in the west, north along the Highway 101 corridor through communities like Healdsburg and Cloverdale, into parts of Lake and Mendocino counties, and east towards the High Sierras, Susanville, and the border with Nevada.

Even with the changes, Denney says she still sees lots of similarity across the new map.

"I think the fact that it's two college towns of over 100,000 and then the rest of it is really rural and remote rural...tied together with kind of the backbone of the agricultural industry and natural resource management being key across the whole thing is pretty beautiful," Denney said.

While the redrawn district is seen as more favorable for Democrats, Denney said the focus of her campaign is no different to her previous runs.

"Every single issue that really dramatically affects the day-to-day lives of people in our district is money," Denney said. "Money in politics and the corporate consolidation of power that we're seeing."

Denney argues it impacts things like, "health care, insurance costs, grocery cost rising, like every every single issue that we're seeing comes back to the fact that we have a political and an economic system that are designed to center corporations and the richest among us at the expense of working-class people."

Denney said campaign finance reform - she has refused to accept corporate political action committee money - is a major plank in her platform.

"In order to make any real change on any of these issues, we have to elect leaders that are free from and refuse corporate PAC money," Denney said. Then the second element of that, is we have to elect leaders who are learners and who are collaborative, who want to listen to, and learn from the communities."

Denney pointed to community efforts like the Quincy Library Group as a model for the kind of cooperative efforts she wants to promote. That's a collaborative of foresters and environmentalists in the northern Sierra Nevada.

When it comes to wine industry issues, Denney said she's sensitive to its concerns.

She said her family were some of the first to plant commercial vineyards in the Paso Robles area, and said President Trump's policies have contributed to the industry's worst crisis since prohibition.

"Specifically looking at Canada, we lost about 25% of the California wine market overnight because of his Canadian tariffs," Denney noted. "Those are markets that are going to take not only a reversal of tariffs, but years and years and years to build back."

She said the agricultural industry as a whole - a core part of the district - is getting squeezed on all sides.

"Across the spectrum of large-scale conventional farmers to small kind of more organic or regenerative farmers, they're seeing across the board supply chain costs increases," Denney said. "[And] fewer and fewer markets because of Donald Trump's reckless tariffs. "we absolutely need leadership in the House of Representatives that has a deep and nuanced understanding of their issues and the the ability to fight for and work for producers of all of all types of all industries within ag."

The California Democratic Party, at its recent party convention in San Francisco, endorsed State Senator Mike McGuire over Denney in the 1st Congressional District race. The process was tinged by internecine drama between McGuire and state party chair Rusty Hicks over a review Denney filed during the nomination process.

Denney said the episode has been an unwelcome distraction, at a time when she feels the state party and California's Democratic super-majority haven't done enough to improve the day to day lives of Californians.

"I think this is a really good year to be running anywhere in the United States not as a career politician," Denney said. "Because I think people across the political spectrum definitely, in Northern California, are sick and tired of establishment politicians, establishment Republicans, and establishment Democrats, not actually working for change and not actually making any meaningful change on the issues that make their lives hard."

"I'm thrilled to be representing a new generation of leaders who wants that system change," Denney said.

Denney is also running in the special election set by Governor Gavin Newsom on August 4th to fill the remainder of the late Doug LaMalfa's term.