Early on a Saturday morning at Rawley Duntley Park in Lancaster — the high-desert sun blazing — George Whitesides, a Democrat running for Congress, was encircled by dozens of cheering, noisemaker-blasting volunteers.

“I really want to make sure that even the astronauts out there can hear his name!” Nadia Abrica, an organizing director with the state Democratic Party, shouted, pointing to the sky. “George! George! George!”

“Are you guys feeling fired up?” Whitesides asked the crowd. “Are you feeling ready to go? … Are we going to change the House of Representatives?”

“Yes!” they screamed.

George Whitesides’ supporters gather at a campaign event in Lancaster.

(Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)

Whitesides, a former NASA chief of staff under President Obama, is running to unseat Rep. Mike Garcia, the thrice-elected Republican incumbent, in California’s hotly contested 27th Congressional District in northern L.A. County. The race will be crucial in determining whether Republicans maintain their narrow majority in the U.S. House.

Democrats, riding the national enthusiasm unleashed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race, feel good about their chances to flip the district.

“You feel the difference — and what really helped is the re-energizing when we found out about Biden dropping out,” said Alvarez Marcos, 61, a volunteer for Whitesides. “We’re building off that.”

But after leaving the pep-rally vibe at the park to knock on doors at a nearby apartment complex, Whitesides spoke with middle-of-the-road voters who made one thing abundantly clear: Winning this purple suburban district will not be easy.

“I am not a Democrat,” said a young woman who was the first to open her door. “Are you for open borders?”

“No, ma’am,” Whitesides said, after trying to summarize his message — largely about creating local jobs — in about 90 seconds. “We’re trying to create a secure border for our country.”

In this presidential election year dominated by hyperpartisan national issues — including immigration — both Whitesides, 50, and Garcia, 48, are trying to cast themselves as a moderate and their opponent as a political hardliner.

“People are excited to bring positive change to the district, and they’re really excited to beat Mike Garcia, who they view as this extreme guy who doesn’t connect or fit with the folks in our district,” Whitesides told The Times.

Rep. Mike Garcia is looking to keep the Antelope Valley seat he has held since 2020. The race will be crucial in determining whether Republicans maintain their House majority.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Whitesides calls Garcia a pro-Trump sycophant and highlights the congressman’s vote against certifying the 2020 presidential election results after the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well as his vote against President Biden’s $1-trillion infrastructure bill.

Whitesides also points to Garcia’s anti-abortion record. Garcia was among the GOP congressional members who signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and, in 2021, co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which amounts to a nationwide abortion ban with no exceptions. (Garcia later indicated he could support such exceptions for rape, incest or threats to the mother’s health — a departure from the bill. He did not sponsor a reintroduced version.)

Garcia’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But his backers are trying to paint Whitesides as a far-left mega-donor trying to use his personal wealth to buy a congressional seat.

As a first-time candidate, Whitesides has no voting record to scrutinize. So, Republicans have zeroed in on his hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to progressive candidates and causes.

Ben Petersen, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement that Garcia, a former Navy pilot, “has led a life of service, from flying fighter jets in combat to his mission in Congress of lowering inflation and defending public safety.”

“Voters can easily spot the difference with extreme George Whitesides, who backed legislation raising the cost of living and bankrolled radical activists attacking police and dismantling law and order,” he added, referencing Whitesides’ support of Equality California, an LGBTQ+ rights organization that prominent conservative fundraisers have dubbed a defund-the-police group. (Whitesides has touted his endorsement by Equality California.)

About an hour’s drive north of solidly liberal downtown Los Angeles, the 27th Congressional District stretches from fast-growing Santa Clarita to the Kern County line. It includes the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, as well as rural desert towns such as Acton and Pearblossom.

With its close proximity to Edwards Air Force Base, the region has deep ties to the military and aerospace industry, as reflected by the name of its recently disbanded Minor League Baseball team, the Lancaster JetHawks.

Once staunchly conservative, the district has become more favorable to Democrats, with the population growing younger and more diverse as L.A. residents moved in for more affordable housing. Redistricting after the 2020 census made CA-27 even bluer by excising conservative Simi Valley.

Just over 41% of registered voters are Democrats, and about 30% are Republicans. More than a fifth are independents, a wildcard that makes the district somewhat unpredictable.

The district voted for Biden in 2020. But in the 2022 gubernatorial race, it backed Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle over Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Though his district has more registered Democrats than Republicans, frustrations over California’s high cost of living have given GOP Rep. Mike Garcia an edge in earlier campaigns.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The district has been on the front lines of partisan warfare since Katie Hill, a millennial Democrat, unseated the Republican incumbent in 2018, only to resign less than a year later amid a sex scandal. Garcia won the seat in a special election and retained it in two subsequent elections, thrice defeating the same Democratic challenger, former state Assemblywoman Christy Smith.

In the 2020 general election, Garcia defeated Smith by just 333 votes. He won by 12,732 votes during the subsequent midterm election, when fewer people cast ballots.

The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election handicapper, calls this year’s election a toss-up.

“When you’ve run a company that launches humans into space on a test-flight program, you kinda get used to being involved in high-stakes things,” said Whitesides, the former chief executive of Mojave-based Virgin Galactic. “We’ve got to flip the House so we can protect all these hard-won gains in healthcare and climate and jobs.”

“The Republican caucus right now is totally dysfunctional,” he added. “I”m trying to bring, like, actually getting stuff done back into focus. Wouldn’t that be great? Make the Congress work again.”

Lawrence Becker, a political scientist at Cal State Northridge, said it’s “going to be a tough election for Garcia.”

Most voters “are going to the polls with the presidential election on their minds,” he added. Trump is deeply unpopular in California, and having him at the top of the ticket “becomes a bit of a headwind that Mike Garcia has to face.”

Still, frustrations over California’s high cost of living and gas prices — potent issues for the many residents in this district who make the long commute to L.A. for work — have previously given Garcia an edge. He easily won last spring’s three-way primary election with 55% of the vote, while Whitesides got 33%.

State GOP Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said the fact that Republicans are able to be so competitive in a district where Democrats have a large registration advantage shows how much voters “are getting sick and tired of what California Democrats have been serving up to them.”

Both parties are pouring money into the race.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that supports Republicans running for the House, is planning an $18.2-million ad blitz in the L.A. area this fall, with a focus on the 27th district.

Courtney Parella, a spokeswoman for the super PAC, said Garcia has a unique biography that resonates in his district. As a Navy pilot, the congressman flew in more than 30 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom before spending 11 years as an executive with the defense contractor Raytheon.

“California voters remain fed up with rising crime, chaos at our border and skyrocketing costs — all caused by Democrats’ progressive single-party rule,” Parella said in a statement. “The House majority runs through California, and CLF is committing significant resources here this fall.”

George Whitesides introduces himself to Sean and Megan Holst. “It’s supposed to be more affordable in the Antelope Valley,” Megan says. “I thought we had a decent income, and it’s still — it’s hard.”

(Zoe Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)

Meanwhile, Whitesides — who loaned his campaign more than $1 million — is outraising his opponent. As of June 30, Whitesides’ campaign had $3.9 million in the bank, according to the Federal Election Commission. Garcia’s campaign had $2.2 million on hand.

Whitesides’ campaign is seizing on accusations that Garcia hid his sale of up to $50,000 in Boeing stock in August 2020, just before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, of which he was a member, released a scathing report about the company.

According to the Daily Beast, which first reported the sale, Garcia missed the 45-day deadline to disclose the sale and filed paperwork only after narrowly winning his election that November.

A spokesman for Garcia’s campaign told Politico that Garcia had not seen the report before it became public and that his failure to disclose his stock sale was an accident.

After leaving Rawley Duntley Park that late-July Saturday, Whitesides — who has embraced his nerdy-dad vibe — donned a white NASA ball cap and brandished a 50-SPF spray can of sunscreen for his canvass of the apartment complex.

In each brief interaction, he said that, while running Virgin Galactic, he created 700 local jobs and that he was centering his campaign around job creation.

Propped in one apartment window was a license plate that read, EPDMLGY. Whitesides bounded up to the door, saying, “Epidemiology! Come on, that’s my voter.”

“I’m a moderate Democrat,” he said when Nancy Welsh, a 63-year-old pharmaceutical administrative assistant, opened the door. “I worked for NASA, so I’m a big science and facts kind of person.”

When Whitesides asked what issues were important to her, she laughed and said: “Don’t get me started.”

He stopped Megan and Sean Holst, a married couple in their early 30s, as they walked their golden retriever, Cosmo. “I know you from my dad!” said Megan, whose father planted a Whitesides yard sign outside his home on a dirt road in Acton.

Megan said she supports abortion rights and did not like Garcia’s record on the issue. But the couple — she is a clinical lab scientist and he is a programmer — are pretty moderate, she said. Mostly, they care about local issues, such as crime and cost of living. They have lived in the apartment complex for years and hope to someday be able to afford a house.

“It’s supposed to be more affordable in the Antelope Valley,” she said. “I thought we had a decent income, and it’s still — it’s hard.”

Whitesides handed her his campaign flier. She said she would consider it.