Last week, nearly 100 people packed a Hope Ranch living room to hear Katie Hill, a 31-year-old first-time Democratic candidate in one of the country’s most consequential races of the 2018 election.
Hill, running what one national news organization dubbed “the most millennial campaign ever,” is campaigning to oust Republican incumbent Rep. Steve Knight in California’s 25th Congressional District, the closest battleground to Santa Barbara amid the desperate Democratic struggle to stem Trumpism by capturing at least one house of Congress.
The daughter of a cop and a nurse and executive director of a nonprofit that advocates for people experiencing homelessness, Hill identifies as bisexual and lives with her husband, Kenny, and a batch of rescue animals on a small farm in Agua Dulce in the district where she works and was born, raised, and educated.