The first congressional race following the voter-supported gerrymandering of District Two, represented by Jared Huffman since 2013, has brought on a crop of candidates to run against him.

The candidate filing deadline for the upcoming primary election was Friday, March 6, and at least five people are running against Congressman Huffman.

This includes Nicolette Hahn Niman, a Marin County author, former environmental attorney and rancher. Hahn Niman filed as a candidate with no party preference in paperwork submitted last week.

The representative will be tasked with championing the interests of both wealthy, ultra-liberal Marin and strongly conservative Shasta. To Hahn Niman, her independent nature and aversion to partisanship would be an advantage in this new district.

Hahn Niman, who has lived and worked on a ranch in Bolinas for 22 years, told the Outpost she’s interested in learning about concerns across the entire district, including Humboldt County.

“I believe that a single person can do that. I don’t think you have to be solely focused on the red parts of your district if you’re a Republican or the blue parts, if you’re a Democrat. I think that especially in today’s very polarized society, it is the job of whoever is sitting in this seat to reach those two communities and work across party lines,” she said.

She described her political beliefs as center, or slightly left of center. She says she’s never joined a political party in her life, but had an interest in policy from a young age and was on the city commission of Kalamazoo, Michigan. She’s served on a local church board and school board in Marin County.

Hahn Niman started looking into the idea of running following her opposition to a deal which closed dairy and cattle ranches leased in Point Reyes National Seashore for a cash payout, which Huffman was involved in negotiating (he told the Outpost he didn’t cut the deal but rather encouraged everyone to get to the table and try to work something out).

Hahn Niman is married to the founder of Niman Ranch, a network of humane livestock farms in the U.S.. The Nimans were one of two ranching families to sue the National Park Service over its move to phase out ranching operations within Point Reyes National Seashore last year, according to reporting by the Press Democrat.

She said Huffman was closely involved with “basically getting rid of those multi-generational ranching families there.”

Plus, Hahn Niman said, after speaking to some people in the rural, northern part of the district, it led her to believe Huffman is “failing to represent the issues, or even try to understand the issues of the rural parts of the district.”

“At the same time that we are hearing nationally that the Democratic Party needs so desperately to be more representative and engaged with its rural constituents and understand its rural voters better. I felt like this was an exact example of that phenomenon right here in our district,” she said.

Her campaign’s theme, she says, is about rural America being left behind. 

Huffman, however, had a different perspective of what happened in Point Reyes, and accused his political opponent of running a “single-issue candidacy.”

“Nicolette and her husband sat on the sidelines while I worked closely with the ranching community for many, many years to navigate these issues. [The Nimans] went it alone, thinking they could cut a better deal. And when that didn’t happen, they sued the federal government, and they tried to blow up the entire settlement that these ranching families worked out,” he said when reached for comment, later noting he’s been going to ranching association meetings for 14 years and has never seen Hahn Niman at one.

He also denied being absent from rural communities, pointing to his recent efforts to meet with people in the new parts of the district and efforts to support rural communities, including ranchers in Humboldt County.

“This is just a disgruntled outlier of the Marin ranching community with a personal agenda,” said Huffman, later remarking “I guess we’ve reached a point in the ethical race to the bottom of the Trump administration, where people now run for Congress, apparently to advance their own personal financial interests.”

Huffman also argued the climate for bipartisanship is tough in D.C., particularly as Trump actively punishes Republicans who work with Democrats. “It can’t be the sound of one hand clapping,” he said.

Back to Hahn Niman.

She said Humboldt County residents may be interested in her background as an environmental attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance, pursuing litigation against farming corporations polluting water in the early 2000s.

“That’s actually kind of what put me on this whole path of beginning my work as a sustainable food and farming activist and advocate,” she said. 

At Waterkeeper she worked with RFK Jr., now US Secretary of Health and Human Services, someone she’s still friends with. If elected, she said at the very top of her list is working on policy in the continuum of food systems, health care and the connections between the two.

She identifies with pieces — but not all — of the Make America Healthy Again movement. She pointed to shared concern over ultra-processed foods, food additives, chemicals in food and food processing, and the use of chemicals and pharmaceuticals in food production. She referenced work by Democrat Tim Ryan as part of a movement toward health she was interested in working on.

“It’s clear that the way that we’re eating and the way that we’re producing food is very closely connected to the rise in all of these chronic health problems that exist today in the country,” she said, which she said is connected to food and farming.

This priority is followed by an interest in housing affordability.

In general, she says “I’m a great admirer of the natural beauty of California and just sort of helping to protect and preserve that, but I’m also a really big believer in this idea that we have to stop pitting that value against economic vitality.”

When asked about proposed plans for offshore drilling off the coast of California, she generally thinks ”we need to be open to all different kinds of sources of energy. We need to consider what the impacts are, what the implications are, what the needs are,” she said, but added she wanted to learn more about the topic before saying more. As for proposed plans for offshore wind in Humboldt County, she feels similarly; not everywhere is a good place for wind power, but said “I think everything should be on the table.”

Toward the end of her conversation with the Outpost, she noted that if elected, she’d be the first woman to represent District 2.

The district includes the counties of Humboldt, Marin, Modoc, Siskiyou, Del Norte, plus parts of Mendocino and Sonoma counties. The primary election is June 2, 2026.

There are a smattering of other candidates. Gregory Burgess, an elder caregiver, has similarly filed candidacy paperwork in Marin County. He has dedicated much of his campaign website to the Point Reyes deal.

And in Shasta County, at least three people have publicly announced their candidacy, though the Shasta County elections office declined to share a list of who’d submitted their paperwork to the Outpost. 

“Please refer to the secretary of state’s website for the qualified candidates which will be published on March 26, 2026, we do not publish a list of qualified candidates for State and Federal elections in our office,” an election official said in an email.

According to their respective websites, Shasta County candidates include:

• Paul Saulsbury, a Republican-registered Associate Marriage & Family Therapist
• Robin Littau, a Republican owner of a cleaning service and Christian mother of four
• Rose Penelope Yee, Chair of the Democratic Central Committee of Shasta County

Modoc County had yet to respond to a request on if anyone had filed candidacy paperwork for District 2 by publishing time. The remaining counties confirmed nobody had filed paperwork to run.