Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, said on Friday that he would not run for re-election in his competitive Southern California district. Minutes earlier, another California Republican, Representative Kevin Kiley, announced that he would run for re-election in November as an independent.
Taken together, the decisions demonstrated the struggles the Republican Party faces in a tough midterm environment, as well as the difficult prospects for some of the party’s House members as they confront a gerrymandered map in California.
Mr. Issa, 72, who represents an area of Riverside and San Diego Counties, had faced a challenging re-election fight. His district was redrawn last year to favor Democrats under Proposition 50, a ballot measure pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to give his party more House seats as part of the country’s redistricting fight. Nonpartisan political analysts considered Mr. Issa’s race a tossup.
“After a quarter-century in Congress — and before that, a quarter-century in business — it’s the right time for a new chapter and new challenges,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Kiley, 41, who represents the conservative suburbs east of Sacramento and the rural foothills stretching to Lake Tahoe, faced even more dire straits because of how his district was redrawn. Political analysts view it as likely to flip to Democrats, and Mr. Kiley, who has bucked his party on several key issues in recent months, mulled running in a different district before opting against doing so.
On Friday, he framed his switch to “no party preference” — the equivalent of an independent in California — as a way to strike back at Mr. Newsom’s gerrymandering push.
“This means I will not have a party affiliation on the ballot or as an officeholder,” he said in a statement. “As an elected representative, I’ve always seen my role as being an independent voice for our community.”
Mr. Issa, a businessman who is one of the wealthiest members of Congress, has served for 12 terms in the House, and he retired once before — in 2018 — rather than face a tough re-election contest. President Trump nominated him to lead a trade agency, but Mr. Issa returned to the House after winning his race in 2020.
Late last year, staring at the new congressional map with liberal areas now a part of his district, Mr. Issa briefly considered running for a House seat in Texas. But he ultimately concluded, “I’m not giving up on California.”
Speculation that he planned to retire began circulating on Friday afternoon, when another Republican, Jim Desmond, a member of the San Diego County board of supervisors, filed to run for Mr. Issa’s House seat. In his statement, Mr. Issa endorsed Mr. Desmond to succeed him.
Other candidates could jump into the race, too, because state law requires an extension of the filing deadline — which was Friday evening — when an incumbent decides not to run for re-election.
Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Democrat who lost to Mr. Issa in 2020, is running along with several other Democrats in a nonpartisan primary for the seat this year.
He celebrated the congressman’s decision.
“While Republicans are scrambling to reshuffle their candidates, Democrats are united around our campaign,” Mr. Campa-Najjar said in an interview. “It is clear that Darrell Issa knew what we knew, which is in a general election, we would prevail over him. And now Republicans are looking for an alternative in the 11th hour.”
Christian Martinez, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, thanked Mr. Issa in a statement for his “decades of dedicated service to the people of California and our nation,” and said that his party was “optimistic that this district will continue to be represented by a Republican who will stand for common sense.”
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
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