On November 5, the fate of the House of Representatives, and maybe democracy itself, hinges on just a handful of candidates in swing districts across the country. California Democrat Will Rollins is one of them.
A Democratic majority in the House, accompanied by a win for Kamala Harris for the presidency, would deny Donald Trump a repeat of his January 6 plot to overturn the election by putting it in the hands of his MAGA allies in Congress. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Rollins, 43, a former federal prosecutor, is making his second run against 16-term Republican incumbent Ken Calvert to represent California District 41 in Riverside County and the Coachella Valley.
Calvert voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
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Rollins was in Los Angeles, just west of his district, when we spoke between fundraising events in support of his sophomore campaign.
LGBTQ Nation: We last spoke in October 2022, in the heat of your first campaign against Calvert. You lost that race, 52.3% to 47.7%. There were high hopes that a redrawn CA-41, now including solidly blue and very gay Palm Springs, could help flip the longtime red district — but it didn’t happen. Who do you blame?
Will Rollins: (Laughing) Me, for not getting into the race early enough. I think that was the key lesson from the first campaign, because I think if we had had a little bit more time, we could have flipped the seat in 2022. Because I only had six months after that primary and going from a job in national security and law enforcement to become the congressional candidate in a hotly-contested, high-profile House race was a steep learning curve. And also, it just takes time to introduce yourself to voters.
What we saw in the midterms is, where people got a chance to know me, I beat Calvert… by 20 points in the Coachella Valley and not just Palm Springs. So voters did get to know me there, because we were able to communicate with them through messaging, through events. And then on the other side of the district, in western Riverside County — part of the LA media market — I just did not have enough time to communicate with voters in that part of our district.
And we also didn’t have the resources. In the first campaign, I raised a good amount of money, but it’s been nothing like the massive arsenal we’ve been able to build by starting a campaign in May of 2023 versus virtually less than one year before the midterm election with no prior political experience.
So the fact that we almost beat the longest-serving Republican in Congress from California after six months is a very good sign to me that we will ultimately finish the job this November, because more people are going to know who we are.
Let’s talk about that progress. In California, we have a nonpartisan primary system, known colloquially as a jungle primary. This year, you went head-to-head with Calvert and a second Democrat in the primary in March and you swamped the other Democrat. But together, your totals added up to almost exactly the same margin as yours against Calvert in the general election in 2022. In other words, you’re on track to lose again to the Republican by the same percentage as you did two years ago. What’s changed since then, and why should you expect a different outcome now?
Well, primary electorates are just a different ballgame in California, and this year we had Nikki Haley and Donald Trump in the Republican primary. That really juiced a lot of Republican turnout. And I think there was something like a six-to-eight point gap between Republican and Democratic voters in the primary with one of the lowest primary election turnouts ever in California. So we weren’t too worried about that low number, especially because we didn’t spend very much money, which was a smart, strategic decision on our part, because we wanted to save it for the general election.
And if you look at just the projections from the midterms to 2024, it’s expected to be a 50% increase in turnout, with an additional 120,000 people voting in this November election compared to the midterms. Democratic enthusiasm now is off the charts, and that’s going to be a huge part of our path to victory.
According to the latest campaign financial reports, you’ve raised more money than Calvert, you’ve spent more money than Calvert, and you have more money on hand than he does. You’re also ahead in outside spending for your campaign and against Calvert’s. But as an incumbent, Calvert gets a boost, with the ability to spend money mailing CA41 constituents on the taxpayers’ dime, among other perks of incumbency. How do you counter that kind of insider advantage?
Well, the good news is we know that our resources are working, because we had a one-point lead in our last internal poll, and that’s a great position to be in at this point against a 32-year incumbent. It means that the work we’ve been putting in for the last three years is actually paying off and that our message is breaking through to the electorate.
But to your point, I think there’s a lot of advantages for an incumbent, especially a Republican incumbent who’s willing to take unlimited funding from corporations and whose bulk of contributions come from corporations and special interests. We’ve had close to 60,000 unique donors to our campaign, versus somebody that raises most of his money from outside of California.
The fact that he abused a loophole in Congress barring constituent mailings during the 60-day blackout period before the March primary is a testament that he could care less about burning your tax dollars to benefit himself, and he’s done that for three decades. He’s made up to $20 million since first taking office in ’92. He’s directed earmarks to his own personal real estate investments, while the rest of us who live in Riverside County are seeing astronomical housing prices.
That’s a good segue to my next question. You and the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, share an important line on your resumes: you were both government prosecutors. But while her opponent has been indicted and convicted, yours has only faced accusations of corruption. What are the charges you and others have made against Calvert and how are you making your case?
The most important thing is, just think of the source of the allegations and the complaints about him, because they certainly didn’t start with me. They started with Fox News doing a seven-minute documentary on his use of earmarks to benefit his own land. The Orange County Register has reported on this, and the LA Times and the National Review. His own Republican colleagues in the House tried to keep him off the Appropriations committee because they were worried about ethical issues.
The depressing reality of Washington, D.C., is that sometimes things can be unethical but still legal, because we have a corrupt campaign finance system and a corrupt lobbying system and folks in office who are willing to abuse their positions of power for personal gain. No party has a monopoly on this. It just happens to be that Ken Calvert embodies it and personifies it because of his own record.
I think more important is, what do we do to fix this long-term for the country? That’s why I’ve been talking about banning stock trading by members of Congress and insider real estate dealings by members of Congress, which is how Calvert’s gotten rich.
If you win and Calvert loses, would you go after him on those charges?
It’s up to the Justice Department to investigate wrongdoing, so I think rather than being vindictive as a member of Congress, my goal is to fix this long-term. What we really need are public servants on both sides of the aisle that are willing to take votes to police themselves because people are rightfully pissed-off at Congress.
Congressional swing districts in California are going to determine control of the House. How much support are you getting from national Democrats, and how much more do you need?
The party has been incredible this cycle, and the leadership, in particular. [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries did his first fundraising event for any challenger in the country for our campaign in January of this year. That was a very encouraging sign, and I really appreciate his support from the beginning of my second campaign.
We only need four seats to get the majority back, and leadership knows that the contrast in this race between a former federal prosecutor and somebody who tops the rankings of the most corrupt members of Congress is a winning contrast for our party in this district.
Not long after your March primary, you were a co-host for a DNC fundraiser in the Palm Springs area headlined by Jill Biden and hosted by President Barack Obama’s gay ambassador to Spain, along with Barry Manilow, among others, which sounds super gay and like an example of the power of the LGBTQ+ community in the Coachella Valley. You and your partner, Paolo Benvenuto, moved to Palm Springs before the last election in 2022. What’s life been like for a gay couple in the city with the highest per capita gay population in the United States, and who were you more excited to meet at that fundraiser, Jill Biden or Barry Manilow?
Well, we love Barry, and we’ve been lucky to have gotten to know him and his partner over both campaigns. They are just amazing and we are so grateful to them. And of course, I love Barry’s music, and they’re such awesome members of the LGBT community and the Palm Springs local community. I mean, their involvement in so many issues is incredible.
And it’s great to live in Palm Springs. I think what we love most about it is the ability to just feel like you belong and like you’re normal. You know, that’s what most LGBT Americans want: to feel like they can be themselves in public without any self-consciousness. And of course, the Coachella Valley is just one of the most stunning places of natural physical beauty on Earth, and we wake up every morning there feeling grateful to be able to live in a city like Palm Springs.
The First Lady is also awesome, by the way. I didn’t want to leave her out. Her willingness to fight for military families and her role in helping to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, in particular, really resonate with me personally, because she, of course, was a military mom, and then she went out and tried to make sure that everybody could serve the country they love, no matter who they love. It was especially personal and powerful to be able to help the First Lady with that event and to get a chance to meet her in person.
Calvert spent his career in Congress voting down pro-LGBTQ+ legislation, but after Palm Springs was drawn into your district, he voted for the Respect for Marriage Act. Has he pandered to the LGBTQ+ community in other ways since, and if so, would he be right to claim that he’s fairly representing his constituents?
I think the funniest part about his pandering is he can’t even do that right, because while he voted for that marriage bill, he also voted to continue employment discrimination against LGBT people and he voted to defund LGBTQ senior centers. So I guess his philosophy is, we can get married on Saturday, but as we age, we don’t deserve to eat.
You were quoted in The New York Times recently about the collective effort to label Donald Trump’s GOP “weird.” What about Ken Calvert is weird?
Probably the weirdest thing to me is he got caught with a prostitute in the ’90s, which I don’t judge, but I do judge the fact that he wants to make it illegal for women to control their own bodies. That’s weird and unfortunate behavior, to say the least.
What’s the single most important thing the world should do to address the climate crisis?
That’s a tough one to choose just one. I would say, I think America has to keep leading technologically on climate because we have to be the global hub of the clean tech industry. And given our economic, our global economic dominance, if we can establish a clear lead in green technology in the 21st century, it’ll give us the leverage that we need moving forward to apply pressure on countries like China and India and our partners in Europe to get down to the emissions levels that we so desperately need in order to save our species.
Would you support a form of mandatory national service for young people in the military, or some other form of public service, like the Peace Corps or Teach for America?
Yes, 100%. And I think it would help restore some of the personal contacts and community that has started to dissipate with the rise of social media and smartphones. And I also think it’s really important to restore civic responsibility and appreciation for a democracy that a lot of people died to give us.
There’s a scene in the classic gay movie The Birdcage where Diane Weist suggests that her daughter get married to whip up support for her senator husband played by Gene Hackman. Have you and Paolo ever considered the same tactic?
I don’t think he wants to inherit my credit card debt (laughing). But yes, that would be a good fundraiser.
What can you tell us about Paolo? Where did you meet, and if you do get married, who’s going to propose to whom?
That’s the million-dollar question. We met in New York at a mutual friend’s birthday party, and I know love at first sight is a cliche, but we definitely hit it off right away and we’ve been together almost 14 years now.
We’ve been debating who’s supposed to propose to whom for a long time now, because neither one of us has been proactive enough to do it. I think it’s mainly just laziness.
I have some hypotheticals. J.D. Vance is promoting a conspiracy theory that Dutch immigrants have overrun the little town of Solvang, California. What are they eating? A) Endangered California condors, B) Trump Steaks or C) J.D. Vance’s lunch.
(Laughing) Definitely C.
Trump fangirl and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer infamously predicted that the White House would “smell like curry” if Kamala Harris is elected president. What would the White House smell like if Trump were elected to a second term? A) Victory Cologne by President Trump, B) Rotting from the inside, or C) Fear and burning tires?
(Laughing) Oh, God. A combination of B and C.
The devil makes a deal with Donald Trump to drop all pending charges against him, but he has to leave the race for president and retire to Palm Springs, next door to you. What’s your reaction?
I mean, I’m glad he’s not in the White House, but we’d start looking for a new house.
What are you looking forward to most if you win your race to represent the constituents of CA-41?
Having the honor of saying that I serve them in Congress. You know, there’s a big difference between campaigning and governing, and so far, I’ve only experienced campaigning, and I’m really looking forward to actually being able to do something to improve people’s lives. It’ll make all of the dialing-for-dollars worth it.
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