A few short years ago, Kim Adams couldn’t have told you the name of her representative in Congress.

Jane Shi, a 50-year-old banker and independent voter who lives in Irvine, said volunteers for both Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Beach) and Democratic challenger Katie Porter had come to her door. Even so, she had yet to make up her mind about who she was voting for.

Federal policies and candidates, Shi said, matter little in her life. Her priority has been state ballot propositions, and particularly Proposition 10, on rent control. She has a personal stake because she owns rental property.

“That’s more applicable for me locally,” she said. “I’m definitely against it; it’s bad for everybody,” she said.

To large and rambunctious crowds of volunteers on the final stretch of his campaign, Democrat Josh Harder on Saturday stressed the issue that started it all for him: healthcare.

The former investor and venture capitalist spent most of the last decade outside his Central Valley district for school and work. But he has said he made his return to the place where he was born and raised to run for Congress — his first bid for elected office — because of Republican Rep. Jeff Denham’s vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.

“Every person you will be talking to today has a loved one who would be affected and hurt by that vote,” he told a group of more than two dozen people gathered at a Turlock home for a canvass kickoff. “For me, it would be my younger brother, David. He was born 10 weeks premature.”

Jason Gates doesn’t have a TV at home, but it’s still been difficult for him to avoid what seems to be wall-to-wall political campaigning ahead of next week’s midterm election.

His mailbox has been stuffed daily with campaign mailers — his three young kids sometimes draw on them before they all go into the trash — and he’s barraged by ads on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Nextdoor.

No matter. This election, like all the others in his 40-year life, Gates is not voting.

Jake Wenger grows walnuts on land where early settlers arrived in search of gold and instead found rich soil. His orchards just west of Modesto stretch 700 acres and supply a nut company that has remained in his family for four generations.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti stopped by Escondido to help Democratic congressional candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar kick off his get-out-the-vote push Saturday. Campa-Najjar is challenging Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) for his seat in the conservative 50th Congressional District.

Recent polls have showed the gap narrowing between the 29-year-old first-time candidate and the five-term incumbent, who was indicted in August on charges of campaign finance violations. Hunter still holds a narrow lead, but it is within the margin of error.

In his remarks to the volunteers, who filled the cramped campaign headquarters, Garcetti spoke about the importance of electing someone who values unity over self-preservation.

Patricia and Michael Hayes came to a Sears parking lot in Buena Park to vote in person Saturday afternoon, their grandson Terrence in tow. Michael said the most important issues driving his congressional vote as a retiree were protecting Social Security, Healthcare, and Medicare. 

"There is a movement, I think, on the Republican side to do away with it," he said. 

"Especially for people with preexisting injuries," his wife, Patricia Hayes, chimed in.

Saturday morning at the Tustin corporate office park headquarters of Katie Porter, volunteers ready to knock on doors ranged in age from a 1-year-old strapped to his mother, to a woman who said she was “old enough that I remember World War II.”

Britta Lindgren, who did not want to give her exact age other than to say she was in the last quadrant of her life, had driven an hour and half from her home in West L.A. to volunteer for Porter,  a first-time Democrat challenging Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Beach) in a district that has never sent a Democrat to Congress.

“I remember Hitler and Mussolini. I don’t want to be alarmist but it feels the same,” she said.