Representing Ventura County in Congress tends to be a stable job.
In the last 40 years, two people have held the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that covers most of the county: Republican Elton Gallegly, first elected in 1986, and Democrat Julia Brownley, first elected in 2012.
This year, Brownley is retiring and two new candidates are vying for the 26th Congressional District, which includes all of Ventura County except for the cities of Ventura and Simi Valley and most of the Ojai Valley.
Democrat Jacqui Irwin, who is wrapping up 12 years in the State Assembly, finished first in the June primary to advance to the November general election. Republican Sam Gallucci, a pastor and former tech executive, finished second in the primary to win the other
spot on the general election ballot.
By the numbers, Irwin looks like the heavy favorite. She won 41% of the vote in the primary, about twice as many votes as Gallucci. She’s raised a little over $822,000 in this election cycle, almost half a million dollars more than Gallucci, and she’s spent about $180,000 more than he has, according to data from the Federal Elections Commission.
Irwin has a big advantage in party registration, too: The district is 43% Democrat and 28% Republican, according to the latest report from the California Secretary of State. Cook Political Report, which analyzes U.S. federal and state elections, lists the 26th District as “Solid D,” which means it is “not considered competitive and is not likely to become closely contested.”
Sam Gallucci: software exec turned pastor turned politician
Gallucci said he realizes he's an underdog, but he doesn't feel like one.
"I feel like we're all underdogs, as people of this district and of the state of California," he said. "Our voice is not heard. We vote for things that don't get done and our values are being trampled."
Gallucci, 67, was born in Long Island, New York and raised in Torrance, California. He went to San Diego State University and by 1981, he'd graduated, gotten married, moved to Thousand Oaks and taken a job with IBM. He eventually became an executive vice president at PeopleSoft, a business management software company that was acquired by Oracle in 2005.
By then, Gallucci had left the software industry. He started volunteering at his church, Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village.
Soon he got a job at Cavalry and enrolled in seminary school. At 42, he moved to Oxnard and started a second career as a pastor, with his own church in midtown Ventura.
At Harbor Community Church, Gallucci started a ministry for homeless people, offering daily services, food, clothing and a place to shower and do laundry.
Some of the neighbors were furious, and the city eventually shut the program down and told the church it needed a permit for its homeless services. The church won a federal appeals court decision in 2016 andsettled the case with an agreement to sell its property to the city and leave Ventura.
"It was such a tragic situation," Gallucci said. "That's when I realized, if good people do nothing, bad things happen."
Gallucci is now lead pastor at Embrace in Oxnard, which is part of the Missionary Church, an evangelical Protestant denomination. He also founded a nonprofit that runs a homeless shelter for women and children, and one that helps migrant farmworkers.
His true passion, what he calls his "No. 1 issue," is immigration. He said during a debate with Irwin in Moorpark on Sept. 25 that his position boils down to, "all the workers need to stay and all the criminals need to go."
Gallucci believes that any immigrant who has been in the United States for more than five years and doesn't have a criminal record should be able to become a legal guest worker with a visa that renews annually. Those immigrants could pay taxes under a federal identification number that isn't a Social Security number, and under Gallucci's plan, they could "get in line with a path to citizenship."
"These workers need to be here legally without fear of deportation," he said.
That's not a common message in Donald Trump's Republican Party, but it's one that Gallucci thinks could have bipartisan support. He said he knows he sounds like an early-2000s "compassionate conservative," a label that George W. Bush assigned to himself when he ran for president.
"Compassionate conservative is exactly what I am. That is accurate," Gallucci said. "I think here in California that is exactly what everyone wants. The Democrat and the Republican parties have lost their way. We've gotten so politically polarized that we're judged by the color of our party, and that's not who we are."
Jacqui Irwin: from Thousand Oaks City Hall to Sacramento, to DC?
Just as Gallucci doesn't see himself as an underdog, Irwin doesn't like to think of herself as a favorite.
"Certainly I did not have an easy race in the primary. I didn’t take anything for granted," she said. "There were eight other people in the race. They ran hard and I ran hard, and I will do the same in the general."
Irwin, 64, has a few biographical details in common with Gallucci. She also grew up in the Los Angeles area – in her case, in the San Fernando Valley. She also went to college in San Diego, at UC San Diego. And she also has a career in the technology industry, as an aerospace engineer.
Irwin was elected to the Thousand Oaks City Council in 2004. In 2014, she was elected to the California State Assembly where she will be termed out at the end of this year.
On Jan. 8, she got a text message from Brownley, giving her a few hours advance notice on Brownley's announcement that she would not run for re-election. Irwin decided to run for the seat that day.
Brownley and Irwin are close. Irwin's daughter was an intern in Brownley's office and met her husband there, and Brownley was the officiant at their wedding. Irwin has Brownley's endorsement, along with those of Newsom and both U.S. senators from California.
Republicans now hold a narrow majority in the House, and many experts and pollsters are predicting that they will lose that majority in November. Irwin wants to be part of that blue wave in order to act as a check on the Trump administration.
"Congress right now, specifically the Republicans, are giving the president too much power," she said.
Irwin said her proudest accomplishments from 12 years in Sacramento include a bill to strengthen California's "red flag law," meant to keep firearms out of the hands of unstable or dangerous people; authoring the renewal of the state's cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions; and writing bills regulating artificial intelligence that led CalMatters to dub her "the Legislature's top expert on tech."
Passing bills in Washington, D.C. is a different challenge. Measured by legislation enacted and votes taken, the House "slumped to historic lows of productivity in 2025," the New York Times wrote in January.
Congress is as unpopular as it is unproductive. Its approval rating was 16% in the latest Gallup poll.
Irwin said she thinks partisan divisions are to blame, along with the executive branch's expansive claims on power. She said she'd like to see a return to the days of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill, the Democratic House speaker in the 1980s.
"We need to go back to the idea of compromise, and not that we're each in our partisan corners," she said. "That's the way we get things done."
Though the 26th District is heavily Democratic, Irwin said she sees it as essentially moderate. She said she thinks voters want an end to the war in Iran, which has raised fuel prices and other costs without any benefits to our security; and a reversal of HR1, the "one big beautiful bill," which cut nearly $1 trillion over 10 years for the Medicaid health insurance program.
"Just like everywhere in the country, the thing they really care about is the cost of living, how gas prices are going up, how grocery prices are going up, how they're going to be losing health care," she said.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism. The foundation plays no role in story selection. The Star retains full editorial control.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Meet the candidates in Ventura County's biggest congressional district
