Connie Conway, first woman sent to US House from San Joaquin Valley, finishes 6-month term

For the last six months, the San Joaquin Valley has been represented by a woman for the first time in the United States House of Representatives.

California’s 22nd Congressional District picked Rep. Connie Conway, R-Tulare, when former Congressman Devin Nunes vacated his seat. Nunes, 49, left at the beginning of 2022 to lead former President Donald Trump’s social media company, Truth Social.

Nunes’ resignation led to a special election to fill the remainder of his 2022 term. Conway won after a runoff in June. She was sworn in a week later.

“It was the opportunity of a lifetime, not something I had planned on or expected,” Conway said in an interview at the end of December.

“I was thrilled that the voters thought my experience and my outlook on life was a good fit for six months,” she said. “I worked hard. Somebody said once, ‘wouldn’t you like to stay longer?’ Well, simply to try and finish a few more things. But in six months, I thought I did pretty good.”

Conway, 72, will leave Congress as the current 22nd district — which holds Tulare, Visalia, Clovis and a lot of eastern Fresno — phases out. This legislative session ends and a new one starts on Jan. 3, 2023, with new congressional maps that emerged from redistricting, the once-a-decade redrawing of legislative boundaries.

The Tulare Republican decided not to run for a full congressional term in 2022 when she ran for this one.

Regarding her political future, Conway said, “never say never.”

“Life has a way of happening to me,” she said. “In my political experience, I was 50 years old before I got elected. So it’s never too late.”

In the meantime, she said she hoped to do a lot of mentoring.

The San Joaquin Valley has never had a woman serve a full term in the U.S. House. It has also never picked a Latino candidate for the House, despite now having three Hispanic-majority voting-age congressional districts.

New districts in the San Joaquin Valley will be represented by incumbent Republican Reps. Kevin McCarthy, David Valadao and Tom McClintock; GOP newcomer John Duarte; and Democratic Reps. Jim Costa and Josh Harder.

Congresswoman Conway

In the House, Conway took positions on committees for natural resources and veterans affairs.

She introduced a bill in November to open up the Hetch Hetchy reservoir for public recreation and increase San Francisco’s annual fee to access it.

Conway was an original cosponsor on 11 other measures, including ones on bolstering water access, protecting giant sequoias and enhancing penalties against people who defraud veterans. Only one of them made it out of the House: a measure to dedicate a San Diego post office, which passed both chambers but has not been signed into law. She also backed a few failed measures to restrict abortion access.

In votes, Conway has sided with House Minority Leader McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, and most of her GOP colleagues. She voted against an act for same-sex and interracial marriage protections and a spending-package for climate, health and tax measures. The California congresswoman said Democrats’ claims that this Inflation Reduction Act would “lower inflation is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”

Conway, McCarthy and Valadao, R-Hanford, led an August letter from California Republicans to the U.S. Department of the Interior to probe its re-consultation of biological opinions made in 2019 about water deliveries from the Central Valley Project and State Water Project. Both projects deliver clean water to California farmers and families.

Valadao, who has been friends with Conway and her family for over a decade, said that she “has been a champion for the Central Valley” in Congress. He said that he has “really enjoyed serving with her” and called her “a vital voice for California water issues.”

“Her common sense voice in Congress will be greatly missed by me and the entire California delegation,” Valadao said.

Before Congress

Conway has represented the San Joaquin Valley from the local level to the federal level. From 2008 through 2014, she served the Valley in the Assembly and was the chamber’s Republican leader for the final four years of her tenure. There, Conway advocated for lowering taxes and increasing water access in the San Joaquin Valley, which carried over to her congressional agenda.

She first took political office as a Tulare County supervisor in 2001, leaving to join the Legislature. Her father, John Conway, had been a member of that board of supervisors for a decade before he passed away in 1991.

Conway worked in health care and business before entering politics. She ran her own consulting group after her time in the Legislature.

In 2019, Trump appointed her to serve as California’s executive director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, where she distributed more than $100 million in safety net and disaster relief programs for farmers, ranchers, foresters and agricultural producers.

Conway is a life-long San Joaquin Valley resident: She was born in Kern County, went to school in Fresno and calls Tulare home with her husband and dog.

“My wish for this country, for any elected persons,” Conway said, “is that they would figure out how to prioritize what’s important to the voters, work together on that and solve the problem.”

This story was updated at 5 p.m. Pacific Time to include quotes from a phone interview with Conway after several queries to three different people in Conway’s offices over the course of several months went unanswered. The congresswoman responded to a direct email on the cusp of the holidays and called after this story was originally published.