California’s Youngest Assemblyman Wants to Save the Golden State

David Tangipa wants to coach high school football. For now, though, he’s California’s youngest state assembly member.

A self-described budget hawk with policy proposals to “combat crazy” in the Golden State, Tangipa represents a new generation of conservatives in California. A generation, he told National Review at Run Gen Z’s annual conference last weekend, that “will not give up.”

“Anybody from California loves the state of California, they just have an issue with the policies and politics in California. But for me, that’s the easiest thing that we can fix,” he told National Review. “If it’s people and policy in the way, it only takes people and policy to change that.”

Tangipa’s biggest fight right now is against the redistricting effort California Democrats pushed, and passed, through Proposition 50 in a November special election. The Fresno assemblyman sued Governor Gavin Newsom and other state leaders, saying that the newly drawn congressional map violates the 14th and 15th Amendments because congressional districts are drawn along racial lines.

“The easiest way that I like to describe California is that we have a toxic relationship with our Governor,” Tangipa said. “And while we’re talking about redistricting, [my constituents] can’t afford gas, they can’t afford groceries, they can’t afford their insurance. I want to get back to talking about what’s important, and they’d rather move through this political game.”

A former football player for Fresno State University, Tangipa grew up in Sacramento, Calif., and worked in real estate before he ran to represent the eighth district in 2024.

Dominated by Democrats for decades, California is awash with fraud, waste, corruption, crime, and deformed by progressive social experimentation. While conservatives haven’t been able to exercise real power in their home state since before Tangipa was born, he believes that just by fighting back, Republicans in the Golden State can highlight the negative consequences of progressivism for the rest of the country. “California conservatives are the frontlines combatting crazy,” Tangipa said. “And if conservatives in California can “combat crazy in this state, we’ll stop it from spreading to the rest of them.”

Recent events seem to be galvanizing Republican opposition: Newsom’s anticipated 2028 presidential run, the state’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires, immigration enforcement in Southern California, impregnation scandals in women’s prisons as a result of the state’s allowing prison transfers for trans-identifying men, and more.

Established East Coast conservative institutions are joining the fight: the New York Post opened a Los Angeles–based outlet, the California Post did so this year, and the Manhattan Institute announced last week that it would open a California bureau under the leadership of Christopher Rufo to cover the state’s chronic fraud and waste problems. There’s a window of opportunity for Republicans to exploit issues California Democrats have bungled for years — homelessness, crime, affordability.

“We have more registered Republicans in the state of California than in any other state,” Tangipa said. “We’re just overwhelmed by the 10.7 million registered Democrats.”

The first thing Republicans should focus on? Fiscal corruption.

“How money is being taken from the taxpayers, put into the government, reallocated to nonprofits and NGOs, then granted toward these high-paying, huge salaries — then those salaries are being used to be the number one, and largest donors, to the people who granted them the money,” he said. “That’s how they’re legally washing the money.”

“It’s taxpayer funds being funneled back to political campaigns,” he added.

Republicans should also capitalize on California’s early-release programs for violent criminals, as well as the state’s allowing men in women’s sports and spaces, Tangipa points out.

Affordability is also top of mind for young voters, Tangipa said, singling out student debt as a policy the GOP should address more practically. A conservative solution to what liberals have properly identified as a problem is making student loans a tax write-off, he added.

“That’s an actual conservative solution,” he said. “We’re incentivizing people through taxation instead of weaponizing people through taxation, which is what my liberal colleagues like to do.”

Tangipa will stay involved in politics until he successfully manages to fix some of California’s issues. If that ever happens, he wants to be a high school football coach and the athletics director at his alma mater, Fresno State.

“That place changed my life. Sports, athletics pulled me out of abject poverty, and if I’m still doing politics [in the future], that just means things are still broken,” he said.

Watch NR’s full interview with David Tangipa below.