20 years of voting data finds growing turnout gap between Salinas Valley, rest of county
Squeezed into one 90-mile-long wedge between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains, the valley's residents constitute less than 1% of Californians but have shaped the identity of the whole state.
Yet in the past two decades, one metric of civic engagement has suggested a departure from the valley's apparent penchant for politics: voter turnout.
From 2002 to 2022, a gap in voter turnout rates mushroomed between the Salinas Valley and the surrounding county and state, according to data from the redistricting database for the state of California.
In the 2002 midterm election, about 52% of those registered in the Salinas Valley voted.
That was three percentage points higher than the state at-large and about 10 percentage points below the rest of Monterey County. Twenty years later, Salinas Valley voter turnout shrank to 37%, but California and the rest of the county held steady at 50% and 60%.
Though voter registration in Monterey County surged between 2002 and 2022, the number of submitted ballots in the Salinas Valley did not always match those increases.
"Turnout is like an iceberg," said Monterey County Registrar of Voters Gina Martinez. "Turnout is just a little peak of something much larger underneath the water."
She added that reasons for such shifts in voter behavior could be many. Martinez further put it: "Nothing about civic engagement is simple."
What did not change in those two decades were the valley's major employers: the agriculture and hospitality industries accounting for much of its jobs.
On the other hand, redistricting resulted in unfamiliar candidates on the valley's ballots, local news coverage declined, rents rose and government scandal shook public trust.
Though these changes may seem commonplace in California, some local leaders say they still have deterred some Salinas Valley residents from the polls or diminished their faith in voting altogether.
"Turnout is like an iceberg. Turnout is just a little peak of something much larger underneath the water."
Gina Martinez, Monterey County Registrar of VotersAfter the 2020 U.S. Census, the boundaries of legislative districts were rejiggered across the country. In the aftermath, the region became a battleground for electoral races with candidates often parachuting in from outside Monterey County.
"Monterey County historically has been used to local candidates for these congressional, state senate and state assembly seats," Martinez said. "That is not the case any longer."
New districts, new representativesFrom 2017 to 2023, U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta represented all of Monterey County, including the Salinas Valley. After redistricting, Panetta won in a new district, which retained the Monterey County coast but not the Salinas Valley.
The valley now populates U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren's district, which stretches from San Jose to Monterey County's southern terminus. A South Bay congressmember since 1995, Lofgren was new to Monterey County.
In 2018, state Sen. Anna Caballero won over much of the Salinas Valley. A former Salinas councilmember and mayor of 15 years and Salinas Valley assemblymember, Caballero's name had long frequented ballots in the region.
Though the Salinas Valley was due for a state Senate election in 2022, redistricting deferred the vote to 2024, and Caballero ran in a redrawn district outside Monterey County.
"You really can't undermine the power of known candidates — and candidates, period," Martinez said.
Martinez also pointed to another change in the county's elections: Some small jurisdictions have been divided into ever smaller voting districts.
For example, before 2016, all voters in King City could vote on all five at-large City Council seats, a King City representative confirmed. Now, voters in the Salinas Valley town of 13,000 residents can only vote for councilmembers running in the district in which they live.
According to Martinez, there has not been much research on splitting up small jurisdictions like King City into smaller voting districts. Martinez also could not say redistricting was surely a cause for any shifts in voter turnout.
Decline of local newsAs candidates vied for the valley's vote, there was also a reduced local press corps to report on them. The result, some local leaders say, was a voter base with less information on its elected decision-makers — leaving some residents unsure about whether to vote at all.
Several local newsrooms cover the valley: the Monterey County Weekly , KSBW , the Salinas Valley Tribune , the King City Rustler , Voices of Monterey Bay and others. But its 153-year-old Salinas Californian has become another example of the disempowerment of local news nationwide.
From the 1940s to the 2000s, the Californian employed more than 120 people, according to an on its website. Much of its reporting was also available in Spanish through the publication El Sol — both subsidiaries of newspaper giant and USA Today publisher Gannett.
In Salinas, about 69.1% of residents over the age of 5 speak Spanish, and about 32.4% do not speak English "very well," according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 estimates.
In 2008, the Californian slashed staffing by a third, according to the on its website. In 2016, it cut print from six to three days per week, and in 2022, Gannett axed El Sol.
The Californian's editorial roster now comprises one editor and one reporter, and their s do not always cover Salinas, the valley or Monterey County.
Their recent reporting has covered local news, the upcoming presidential election, California's lawsuit against Exxon Mobil and the launch of McDonald's "Happy Meals" that come with plush dolls of characters from the Yu-Gi-Oh! And Hello Kitty franchises.
"Without a good source of local news, people aren't really sure where to turn," said Trish Triumpho Sullivan, a visual arts professor at Hartnell College and owner of Downtown Book & Sound, a bookstore in downtown Salinas.
The growing dearth of local news, Triumpho Sullivan said, has left many residents with less information about their government — discouraging some from even voting in the first place.
Though Triumpho Sullivan lauded the efforts of local publications like the Monterey County Weekly, many do not publish daily and some report on the entire county — which she deemed a large coverage area for their staff sizes.
"There's very little in-depth reporting on the issues," Triumpho Sullivan said. "We're not telling the local stories that need to be told."
Monterey County Supervisor Chris Lopez, whose district contains most of the valley all the way to the county's southern border, also praised local newsrooms like the King City Rustler. Though shrinking, he said news coverage can spark civic engagement among constituents, some of whom are often too preoccupied commuting or making rent to sweat politics.
According to Zillow data, the typical market-rate rent in Salinas grew 77.7% from $1,275 to $2,265 between August 2015 and 2024.
"The housing costs are getting to the point where — with what folks are willing to pay for their food — the people who produce it can't afford to live here," Chris Lopez said.
The Salinas motto — "rich in land, rich in values" — extends southward into the valley, the salad bowl which set the scene for John Steinbeck's canonized oeuvre and cultivates much of the nation's produce to this day.
Of all leaf lettuce, head lettuce and celery grown in the country, more than half of it originates in the county, according to the Monterey County Farm Bureau. To the west of the agricultural heartland is a coastline of resorts padded with tourists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, Cannery Row and other attractions.
Agriculture remains largest employment sectorIn Monterey County, farm work accounted for about 33.6% of all jobs in June 2024, according to the California Employment Development Department. Leisure and hospitality accounted for another 11.9%.
The average farm, fishing and forestry job in Monterey County paid $18.85 per hour in May 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In cleaning and maintenance jobs, the average was $21.11 per hour.
By some measures, the agriculture industry is a bigger employer in the Salinas Valley than technology in Silicon Valley — several dozen miles north of Salinas where the landscape around U.S. Highway 101 turns from cornucopia to the headquarters of Google and Intel.
In May 2023, about 19% of jobs in the San Jose metropolitan area were math, computer or engineering occupations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to Cesar Lara, director of workforce strategy for the California Federation of Labor Unions, the rising cost of housing has strained the Salinas Valley's economy — one he said was already "controlled by low wages."
"At the root of it, there's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the bottom realm is food and shelter," Lara said. "If you're just trying to survive with the cost of housing, child care, health care — just all the constraints to have a thriving, working family environment in the valley — it is hard to think outside the box and think of civic engagement, elections and everything else."
Even as housing costs grew in the Salinas Valley, the region welcomed a growing demographic of residents seeking relief from high costs of living elsewhere, according to Chris Lopez.
"We're a beautiful place to live," Chris Lopez said. "At the same time, you're where people have chased lower housing costs, and so much so that for many of them, they've gone further from their place of work, further from the community that they know."
Chris Lopez said his district falls along one exit route from costs of living outside the Salinas Valley: "People move from San Jose into Gilroy, people from Gilroy go to Salinas, people from Salinas come into the valley."
With much of residents' time spent working and commuting, he said some may not salvage enough to vote or learn about the political issues affecting them.
Though he has seen signs of growing engagement over social media and in meetings with his constituents, he said apathy and a "feeling of disenfranchisement" may also have dissuaded some Salinas Valley residents from voting.
"If you're just trying to survive with the cost of housing, child care, health care ... it is hard to think outside the box and think of civic engagement, elections and everything else."
Cesar Lara, director of workforce strategy for the California Federation of Labor UnionsHe pointed to San Lucas, a Salinas Valley community of about 300 at the intersection of U.S. Highway 101 and state Highway 198 that he said has gone 14 years without clean drinking water.
In 2011, nitrate from fertilizers contaminated the town's well water, according to the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. Now residents rely on bottled drinking water from the agriculture businesses deemed responsible for the contamination.
According to the State Water Resources Control Board, ingesting nitrate-ridden water can interfere with the body's carriage of oxygen to bodily tissue. As a result, the water could tinge infants' skin blue — a sign of insufficient oxygen in their blood.
The San Lucas Union School District also must keep students from ingesting the tap water, according to the district's office clerk Estella Ramirez.
"Kids don't complain about it. They're so used to it," Ramirez said. "Some of the people here have been living here for quite some years. They don't even say anything anymore."
A San Lucas resident of about 50 years, Ramirez said she did not see a correlation between the town's water and residents' decision whether to vote.
In the last 14 years, Chris Lopez said county efforts have helped deck the town with new streets, sidewalks and streetlights, but the town still awaits funding from state and federal agencies to bring potable water to its taps.
"This feeling of disenfranchisement has sort of existed and lingered," Chris Lopez said.
This November, California voters will vote on Proposition 4, a bond measure that would remove funding obstacles keeping clean drinking water from San Lucas' taps, he added. If voters approve the measure, the state would borrow $10 billion and earmark $3.8 billion of it for water programs.
Eroding trust in governmentNorth of San Lucas in King City, scandal among police officers eroded residents' trust in government, said planning commissioner and former city councilmember Margarita Lopez. As a result, she said, many lost faith in the impact of their vote.
In 2014, six King City police officers were arrested on suspicion of bribery, embezzlement and other charges. Some of those charges were filed against the acting chief, his brother and a sergeant in connection with a scheme to tow, gift and resell the cars of low-income Mexican nationals who could not afford towing costs and were unlikely to report the issue to authorities, then-Monterey County District Attorney Dean Flippo said at the time.
The six officers and the acting chief's brother all pleaded guilty or no contest to various charges against them, prosecutors said.
"The attitude in our community, especially with the tow scandal, was 'If we can't trust locally, how is my vote going to matter?'" said Margarita Lopez. According to the 2010 census, Hispanic and Latino residents made up about 87.5% of King City's population.
With much of the Police Department arrested, King City was tasked with rebuilding the force. That rebuilding, treatment of the city's financial problems and other changes, Margarita Lopez said, have helped repair residents' distrust.
"I think we have gained the trust," said Margarita Lopez, who was born and raised in King City. "I can't say 100%, but it's there."
Though recent voting trends between the Salinas Valley, the rest of Monterey County and California reveal a widening gap, it was not always so.
Since 2002, the apparent divergence in turnout among the region's voters has occurred alongside more positive indicators of civic engagement.
In Monterey County, the number of voters has at times grown faster than the county's citizen voting-age population, according to data from the redistricting database.
Estimates from the database show that 217,000 voting-age citizens resided in Monterey County in the five-year period between 2006 and 2010. By the period between 2018 and 2022, there were 9.2% more voting-age citizens.
Between the 2006 and 2022 midterm elections, Monterey County saw an approximately 16.2% increase in the number of voters. Between the 2008 and 2020 presidential elections, the increase was about 33.2%.
Over the past few years, the Monterey County Elections Department has attempted to galvanize its voters.
"When we overlay the increase in outreach and education efforts and the enhanced communication programs over turnout in the Salinas Valley, it adds another layer of complexity to the story of civic engagement and patterns of voter behavior," said Martinez, the county registrar of voters.
According to Martinez, the county's elections department works with translators to disseminate voting information in both English and Spanish on online platforms, which include its website and Facebook, Instagram and X accounts.
The department's outreach has also included high school registration drives, internships and a poll worker program, which has seen the greatest participation among Salinas Valley high schoolers, Martinez said. In "Books and Ballots" events, the department has brought its services to locations across the county to help residents vote and file for candidacy.
Between 2012 and 2022, the county saw an approximately 31.7% increase to its population of registered voters, according to the redistricting database. Meanwhile, census blocks within the Salinas Valley saw about a 42.4% increase.
"I'm certain that there's room for growth," Martinez said. "But looking at the body of research that surrounds voter behavior, voter participation and the variables that impact it, we really, desperately need better research that focuses on these communities."
