Former tech executive challenges Salud Carabajal for SLO County congressional seat
A former tech executive and current UC Santa Barbara graduate student is challenging Democrat Salud Carbajal for his seat in Congress.
Sarah Bacon, a Democrat and Santa Barbara resident, is running for California’s 24th Congressional District, which extends from Cayucos through southern San Luis Obispo County and all of Santa Barbara County to the northern portion of Ventura County.
Currently enrolled in a religious studies graduate program at UC Santa Barbara, Bacon also serves as the vice president of external affairs for the university’s Graduate Student Association.
Bacon said she jumped into the race to root out corruption in Congress and effectively lower costs for working class families.
“Washington is broken and captured by money and influence, and it’s showing up in people’s daily lives: in rents they can’t afford, in institutions they can’t trust, in a democracy that feels less democratic every year,” she said in a news release. “I’m running because this moment requires urgency and courage, and because fixing broken systems is genuinely the work I was made for.”
Bacon has lived on the Central Coast her entire life. She was born in Ojai, raised in Ventura and attended UCSB as an undergrad.
As she watched democracy erode under the Trump administration, she said she was disappointed by her local representative and the Democratic Party at large.
“I saw a real lack of speaking out quickly. I saw a slowness and a hesitancy to act,” she told The Tribune.
If elected, she said she would immediately take action to fix systemic issues.
The midterm primary election will take place on June 2. Bacon is the fourth candidate to enter the congressional race.
She joins Carbajal, the incumbent who’s held the seat since 2017, Republican Bob Smith, a retired Navy veteran, and longtime peace activist Helena Pasquarella, an Ojai resident who’s running as a Peace and Freedom candidate.
UCSB graduate student challenges Carbajal’s seat in Congress
Bacon spent more than 20 years in the tech industry, working for start-ups Citrix Online, RightScale, Zype, Airship and CaptivateIQ, according to her Linkedin page.
As the vice president of marketing at CaptivateIQ, she managed 15 people and a $2 million staff budget, similar to the size of a congressional office, she said.
Eventually, she decided to pivot out of the tech world and enter into public service and activism, she said.
“I became really disillusioned by using all of my time and energy toward making a very small number of people super wealthy, and so I wanted to reclaim that time and use that to help people in general,” she said.
In her current role with UCSB’s Graduate Student Association, Bacon advocates for state and federal policy that affects more than 63,000 graduate students in the UC system.
“I find myself really drawn to the structural issues, like, why isn’t this organization working well, or why is this process so broken, or why is this so slow, or why do we have so much potential that is not being realized?” she said.
Congressional candidate aims to reform political system
Bacon’s political platform centers on weeding out political corruption, fixing Congress and getting big money out of politics.
She aims to push legislation that bars corporate PAC money in elections, abolishes U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and bans gerrymandering.
She is not accepting any corporate PAC donations or contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to a campaign news release.
Even though Bacon is a political newcomer, she said her career has prepared her for a congressional role. Besides, many successful representatives have entered Congress without past experience in politics, she said.
“I know exactly how to do this even though I have never been a politician before,” Bacon told The Tribune. “I’ve managed very large projects. I’ve built consensus toward my vision and initiatives over a long period of time where there was initially not buy in.”
On day one in Congress, Bacon pledged to support legislation that bans congressional stock trading, raises the federal minimum wage and expands tuition-free access to higher education.
Locally on the Central Coast, she said is opposed to all offshore oil drilling expansion, including the Trump administration’s current efforts to reactivate the Sable pipeline off of Santa Barbara’s coast.
“We’ve gotten used to representatives who say the right things, hold press conferences, and make big claims, but ultimately do nothing to push forward the initiatives they claim to champion,” Bacon said in a release. “I’m telling people exactly what I’ll do in Congress and exactly who I’m willing to take on to get it done. That includes corporate PACs, entrenched interests, and the entire political system that simply does not work for everyday people.”
