Randy Villegas Cements Socialist Ties With Joint Fundraising Committee for Michigan DSA Founder

Randy Villegas, the Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat running against Republican Rep. David Valadao in California’s 22nd Congressional District, has formalized a fundraising partnership with William Lawrence, a self-described socialist running for Congress in Michigan. 

The newly listed Lawrence Villegas Victory Fund is a joint fundraising committee pairing the Central Valley nominee with Lawrence, who founded a local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and has described his project as “winning full socialism in the United States.” 

On his podcast, Lawrence said the goal included a desire to “redistribute all the land and all the money.” He has also endorsed defunding police, including a pledge that “We are going to defund the Lansing police,” and has called for abolishing ICE and eliminating enforcement limits at the border. 

The pairing lands in a swing district that California Globe has already documented as a test of how far left Democrats are willing to go in the Central Valley. Villegas upset DCCC-backed Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains in the June top-two primary despite national party spending against him, then advanced to face Valadao with endorsements from Sanders and California DSA. 

The Globe has reported that Villegas campaigns as a working-class auto shop owner while carrying a published academic record that treats university research as Marxist-style organizing, rejects neutral fact-finding as an “ethical violation,” and frames the Valley through critical race theory, “white supremacist violence,” and the “prison industrial complex.”

His 2022 UC Santa Cruz dissertation, Voices from the Valley of Vulnerability, argues that political activism made his research more rigorous and that researchers’ biases “can actually be assets.” 

That record is the lesson in who he is, not the mechanic branding built for a swing seat.

In the 2021 peer-reviewed article “Ethical Complexities of Civically Engaged Research,” which he co-authored, Villegas and colleagues insist political scientists must “redistribute power” through research, treat community organizers as “equal contributors” in setting the agenda, and police their own “positionality.” Research that merely displays facts is labeled an “ethical violation.” The proper goal, they write, is “tangible benefits” and political mobilization; otherwise scholars are seeking to “control” vulnerable communities.

His 2022 UC Santa Cruz dissertation, Voices from the Valley of Vulnerability, applies that dogma to the district he now wants to represent. Villegas argues activism made his research more rigorous and that researchers’ biases “can actually be assets.” He describes the Central Valley as a site of “white supremacist violence” rooted in the Ku Klux Klan, characterizes working-class White voters as upholding a “White-dominated political structure” and “politics fueled by racism and solidified through [the] Ku Klux Klan,” and invokes the “prison industrial complex” plus an “intersectional” frame drawn from critical-race theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins.

He presents himself as a “scholar activist” whose role includes lobbying for open-border immigration legislation—the same lane as the Michigan socialist he is now financially tied to through the Lawrence Villegas Victory Fund, William Lawrence, who has said his goal is “winning full socialism in the United States,” to “redistribute all the land and all the money,” to “defund the Lansing police,” and to “throw open the gates,” abolish ICE, and impose no limits or enforcement on immigration law.

Earlier Globe reporting also tied him to the same socialist-aligned campaign vendors used by figures such as Zohran Mamdani and members of “the Squad.” 

National Republicans framed the new joint committee as radical confirmation, not moderate coincidence.

“Bernie Sanders’s understudy Randy Villegas is cementing his socialist with a fundraising letterhead. His partnership with William Lawrence is a collection plate for the same rotten ideology that punishes hard work, bleeds taxpayers dry, and sticks Central Valley voters with the bill for their socialist fantasies,” said NRCC spokesman Christian Martinez.

RNC spokesman Nick Poche was blunter: “These two far-left lunatics are perfect together: they both hate America, want to defund the police, support open borders, and belong in an insane asylum.”

Lawrence, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 7th District against GOP Rep. Tom Barrett, co-founded the Sunrise Movement and until recently held DSA membership. He has since said that membership lapsed and has walked back some earlier rhetoric, telling interviewers he does not support open borders. 

His recorded beliefs remain part of the record Republicans are now attaching to Villegas. 

The joint committee comes as Villegas already faces questions the Globe has pressed before: silence after sexual-assault allegations against fellow Sanders-aligned candidate Graham Platner, whose campaign shared management firm Fight Agency, and confidential multimillion-dollar sex-abuse settlements approved by the Visalia Unified School District board while Villegas served as a trustee. 

After he won the primary, the DCCC flipped from opposing him to backing him against Valadao. 

CA-22 has been a knife-edge Central Valley seat for years. Valadao lost it in 2018, won it back in 2020, and held it through successive close races. 

Villegas’s primary win over the party’s preferred moderate was billed by progressives as a working-class revolt. The Lawrence partnership gives Republicans a simpler argument: the mechanic branding now shares letterhead with a candidate who talked about full socialism, defunding police in one of America’s more dangerous midsize cities, and throwing open the gates. 

Villegas’s campaign did not immediately issue a public explanation of why a Central Valley general-election candidate chose a national joint fund with a Michigan socialist. 

Until it does, the FEC listing itself is the statement. Voters in November will decide whether that letterhead is a footnote or the point.