Three candidates are seeking the 24th Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Thomas Cole and Helena Pasquarella are challenging incumbent Salud Carbajal.

The primary is March 5. The top two will compete in a runoff in November. Below are short bios of the candidates.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara

Carbajal is seeking a fourth term in Congress. If re-elected, Carbajal said he would continue to focus on reducing gun violence and cracking down on the fentanyl epidemic. He said he wants to create jobs and lower the cost of living on everyday essentials such as food, housing, health care, gas, child care and education.

“I’m proud of my work representing Central Coast values in Congress and advocating for legislation that supports our region’s hardworking families and growing our middle class,” Carbajal told Noozhawk.

Carbajal said his priorities also include reducing climate change and preparing for damage from “increasingly damaging extreme weather and wildfires.”

“I know that bold and decisive action must be taken to counteract the effects of climate change to protect our communities and our environment, which is why I worked with my colleagues to approve the largest climate bill in U.S. history,” Carbajal said. “The climate law that we are now implementing, the Inflation Reduction Act, is projected to reduce carbon pollution by 40% by the end of this decade while helping Central Coast families afford more energy-efficient appliances and investing in more domestic clean energy production.”

Carbajal noted that he immigrated to the United States from Mexico when he was 5 years old, when the immigration system worked.

“I know that our immigration system is broken and in need of critical reforms,” Carbajal said. “I have worked across the aisle to pass common-sense, bipartisan fixes to our immigration system, which I am still working to get signed into law. And I will continue to work in Congress to restore order and humanity at our southern border, reduce backlogs in our overwhelmed system, protect Dreamers who know no other home but this country, address workforce shortages in the agriculture industry, and provide stability and fairness for farmworkers, and other critical measures ensure we have a fair immigration system that works.”

Thomas Cole

A Republican, Cole said California once was a prosperous state “where a family could start a business, buy a house and have a life that was full and reasonably rich,” but now those days are gone.

“I place the blame mostly on leftist policies,” Cole said, “like open borders, like destroying our school systems and like destroying our energy businesses that created great incomes for families, provided cheap, clean American energy and paid lots of taxes.”

Cole, the founder of Analytics 805, an election data research company in Montecito, said government is bloated, is overspending and faces a national debt crisis. He also described himself as a “peace candidate.”

“I care about peace and believe any chance where we can work for peace is a worthy and beneficial cause,” Cole said. “My belief is to support peace through strength and diplomacy. I will not fund proxy wars anywhere. War is not peace. The current proxy war in Ukraine is a war that never should have been funded or supported.”

He also said he wants to focus on education and battle back against “leftist policies” that lead to “social indoctrination.”

“I stand to protect Title IX from being stripped out, slyly altered to now require trans men into women’s and girls sports.”

He added: “Schools with a 70% failure rate are not doing their jobs. I support federal vouchers for all parents and any school, and the cutting of any federal funds for schools that violate parents and students rights.”

Cole said Carbajal “is fully on board with the mandatory, woke gender training, anti-America training in our schools today.”

“Our taxpayer-funded schools have utterly failed in their promised mission to give a classical education to our students, and Salud is totally onboard with that failure,” Cole said.

Helena Pasquarella

Pasquarella is a teacher and former photojournalist who said she wants the United States to halt its spending on war and focus resources on the needs of Americans.

She wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $25, pass universal rent control, prohibit rental deposits, fund social housing to end homelessness, and address prison reform.

In addition, she has called for universal health care and a one-year paid maternity leave “so that our children can be raised and connect with their parents.”

“Mothers need to be able to have time to breastfeed their children, and the present model of maternity leave doesn’t foster this,” Pasquarella said.

She is also an active proponent of ending military spending.

“When the U.S. government spends $886 billion on the military that funds numerous wars and supports 800 bases in 80 countries worldwide to ‘keep the peace,’ I know that our representatives are not meeting the needs of all Americans,” Pasquarella said. “The U.S. government has money to spend on the wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, and the genocide in Gaza, but not to pass a balanced budget here at home.”

She said the U.S. spends “billions of dollars” on war but neglects the homelessness situation in this country.

“We must stop feeding the ravenous appetite of the Military Industrial Complex,” Pasquarella said. “We need a government that represents all of the people, not just the military and the 1%. I want to be a representative who actually knows what it is like to struggle month to month to pay the bills. I know what it means to have a budget and meet that budget, unlike most of our wealthy Congress people.”