Rural, conservative California will have more power under Trump

Two politically powerful Californians who have gotten to know Donald Trump say liberals shouldn’t fear him. They promise that Trump behaves a lot differently than the bullying, blustery presence he cuts when he’s before the public.

“He’s really a nice guy when you’re with him,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, the Tulare Republican who is a member of Trump’s transition team and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committe on Intelligence. “He’s very inquisitive. He really works very hard.”

“He’s very intuitive. He listens. He asks lot of questions. He listens to opinions of people who he doesn’t agree with,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, the second highest-ranking Republican in the House. “People have a misimpression of him. They shouldn’t be fearful about him.”

Regardless, many progressive Californians remain dubious. When Trump takes office Friday, the GOP will control the presidency and both houses of Congress. That means California’s locus of power will shift a bit away from its wealthier, more liberal coastal areas to its less-wealthy more rural inland counties. Nunes and McCarthy, both from the Central Valley, will be key gatekeepers to the Trump administration.

Under Trump, “rural America is going to have a strong voice,” Nunes said.

Their positions on issues such as trade, immigration, water use and the Affordable Care Act differ from those of coastal liberals. And in some cases their views are different even from Trump’s.

After the anticipated flurry of activity in “Trump’s first 100 hours or 100 days, there will be few avenues for Californians to connect with Washington. And one of the main ones is through Kevin McCarthy,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The shift in power has caused some Silicon Valley leaders to change their thinking. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, immigration reform would have been a top priority for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a public policy and trade organization that represents 400 top companies in the tech capital. But there is little hope of that happening now.

“Now the opportunities are more in comprehensive tax reform, and perhaps infrastructure investment,” said Carl Guardino, president of the group. “We need to align to the areas where the current seems to flowing.”

Nunes will remain in the spotlight for as long as Trump and the intelligence community continue to snipe at each other over Russian-directed hacks during the presidential campaign.

That perch also means that “Nunes is now between a rock and a hard place,” said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science at Cal State Fresno.

“He’s trying to be supportive of (Trump) and not do anything to stain the legitimacy of the Trump presidency,” Holyoke continued. “But he also has an oversight role to serve as chair of the Intelligence Committee. That’s a potential conflict of interest, and he’s got to figure out a way to navigate around it.”

But in an interview in his Washington, D.C., office this week, Nunes said, “I don’t feel like I’m in the middle at all.”

Nunes said concerns about the Russian hacking have been overly politicized. He said his committee has been warning Congress and the Obama administration for years about Russian hacking of American institutions. The only thing new about the latest revelations, Nunes said, “is now Democrats are looking for a scapegoat to blame their election loss (on).”

Here are other areas where Nunes and McCarthy will likely be in the spotlight:

Trade: Trump’s desire to rip up international trade deals — particularly the Trans Pacific Partnership — may put the Central Valley congressmen in a tricky spot, caught between Trump’s populism and farmers who rely on overseas markets for customers. It will also hurt Silicon Valley, whose tech leaders strongly back the deal, Guardino said.

“McCarthy could be a liaison (to the administration) there because he has robustly been for trade, and I know his principles have not changed,” Guardino said.

Health care: Like Trump, both Nunes and McCarthy say they want to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. But nonpartisan studies show their constituents — many of them Trump voters — could be hurt badly if they lose coverage.

In 49 of the state’s 58 counties, nearly 1 in 4 residents is enrolled in Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, which Obamacare helped to expand, according to a study by the nonpartisan California Budget and Policy Center.

On election day, Trump won eight of the 15 counties with the highest percentage of Medi-Cal clients — places like Kern and Tulare counties, which are in the heart of the Central Valley.

Nunes said “there will not be a gap” between the end of the ACA and whatever comes next. But McCarthy didn’t offer specifics on what a new GOP plan might look like, saying he was still soliciting input.

Immigration: About 27 percent of the eligible voters in McCarthy’s district are Latino, 32 percent in Nunes’. Both lean away from Trump’s promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, an idea many Latinos find offensive. In California, roughly 8 in 10 Latinos voted for Hillary Clinton.

“My personal opinion is that you can build a virtual wall that is just as effective,” Nunes said.

Trump has also promised to deport millions of “criminal” undocumented immigrants but hasn’t defined what “criminal” means. An estimated half of the Central Valley’s farmworkers are in the country illegally, according to studies. Deporting a significant number of them could cripple the valley, which produces 25 percent of the nation’s food.

McCarthy said: “I’ve talked to (Trump) about guest worker program. He’s been receptive to the challenges that agriculture faces.”

Water: When Trump campaigned in Fresno last year, he denied California was in a drought and promised to change federal regulations to send more water to farms.

“Believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water, so that you can have your farmers survive,” he said without providing specifics. “We’re going to get it done quick. Don’t even think about it. That’s an easy one.”

Holyoke said it won’t be that simple, but Republican control in Washington will likely mean more water for Central Valley farmers. It is an issue that Nunes has been talking about for years as illustrative of the dominance that big cities have over the state’s heartland.

“I have a lot of problems,” he said, “with some of the strange ideas that come out of San Francisco and Hollywood. Particularly about water.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli