In Monterey County, voter turnout disparity widens between Salinas Valley and coast

by Cameron Fozi, Bay City News October 30, 2024January 7, 2025

Crops grow on a Salinas Valley farm in Soledad on Aug. 4, 2024. Produce isn't the only thing growing in the Salinas Valley — especially when it comes to politics. A survey of voting statistics found a widening disparity between voter participation in the valley and the rest of the county dating back 20 years, with as few as 37% of valley voters showing up in the most recent election of 2022. (Cameron Fozi/Bay City News)

THE SALINAS VALLEY is the setting for fecund soil, labor rights movements and John Steinbeck novels.

Squeezed into one 90-mile-long wedge between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains, the valley’s residents constitute less than 1% of Californians but have shaped the identity of the whole state.

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Cameron Fozi, Bay City News

Cameron Fozi is a data journalism intern at Bay City News through the Dow Jones News Fund. He is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where he reported and edited for the city and campus newspaper, the Daily Californian. In summer 2023, he interned for his hometown newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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