Historic pick for Senate
New senator: Secretary of state has blazed trails in politics for 20 years
SACRAMENTO — When he heads to Congress as California’s newest senator, it will be a fullcircle moment for Secretary of State Alex Padilla. After launching his career as an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Los Angeles Democrat will now serve alongside the woman who gave him his first job in politics.
Padilla has risen steadily through local and state elected office in the two decades since then, frequently breaking new political ground. He made history Tuesday when Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed him to fill the seat being vacated by Vice Presidentelect Kamala Harris. Padilla
will be the first Latino to represent California in the U. S. Senate.
Entering Washington at a moment of transition, Padilla will need to quickly find a place and make a name for himself. Best known for his efforts to expand voting access, he has not enjoyed the sort of public tussles with outgoing President Trump that have made political stars of many other Democrats over the past four years. Ambitious colleagues, particularly from the party’s progressive wing, may be eager to run against Padilla in 2022, when he would face voters to seek a full sixyear term.
His first challenge, however, will be helping guide the country through the coronavirus pandemic. Padilla said his early focus as senator would be to ensure aid flows to lowincome communities and communities of color that have been disproportionately hurt by both the virus and the economic upheaval it has caused — a priority he attributed to his upbringing as the son of Mexican immigrants, a shortorder cook and a house cleaner, neither of whom had more than an elementary school education.
“To think that in one generation, my family could be one of the leading voices for the most populous state in the nation in the United States Senate — that’s just, like, wow,” Padilla said in an interview this month with The Chronicle before his appointment. “What a testament to the American dream.”
Padilla, 47, grew up in Pacoima, a workingclass neighborhood of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, and went on to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering.
But as the Southern California aerospace industry collapsed after the Cold War, Padilla shifted gears to politics, working as Feinstein’s assistant and then as a campaign manager for several state lawmakers. At 26, he won a 1999 special election to the Los Angeles City Council, and within two years he was elected council president, the youngest ever and the first Latino to hold the position in more than 100 years.
Like many Latinos of his generation, Padilla was motivated by Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, which would have blocked immigrants living in California illegally from public education, health care and other services. Although approved by voters, it was eventually overturned in court.
“I was offended. I was insulted. I was enraged,” Padilla said. “I knew that I had no choice but to get involved and engage more of my family members and friends and community members to kind of defend ourselves politically. If we didn’t, we’d continue to be scapegoats and targets.”
Padilla served two terms in the state Senate beginning in 2006. He grabbed the most attention for crafting business regulations — phasing out singleuse plastic bags, requiring chain restaurants to label their menus with nutritional information, allowing landlords to ban smoking in rental housing — that made California a national leader on environmental and public health protections to some, and a nanny state to others.
But Padilla also quietly reshaped the contours of state government, carrying bills to streamline transfers between community colleges and the California State University system, fund a statewide earthquake early warning system and develop regulations for selfdriving cars. He credits his engineering perspective, which trained him to solve problems.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who defeated Padilla in the contest for Senate leader in 2008 and eventually shared a desk with him in their final session together, said Padilla was a standout lawmaker. Although Padilla frequently took on issues he could have lost, Steinberg said, he persisted, sometimes for years, to get them passed — such as with the first-in-the-nation menu labeling law, which Padilla said he was inspired to carry by his mother’s struggles with diabetes.
“When somebody takes on a hard issue and succeeds, that shows that they have all the qualities that you want in a public official. And he did it with integrity,” Steinberg said. “He was a workhorse and he’s got a fire in his eyes. He’s got a little bit of an understated style, but he’s pretty fierce and very driven.”
Since he was elected secretary of state in 2014 — one of only a handful of Latinos to hold statewide office in California history — Padilla’s focus has largely been on expanding voter access and participation.
He sponsored legislation to automatically register voters through the Department of Motor Vehicles and to transition toward allmail ballot elections, both of which he hoped would boost the state’s traditionally lagging turnout. He also settled a lawsuit allowing prisoners serving time on community supervision for nonviolent felonies to vote and organized a campaign that has preregistered more than half a million teenagers.
“If you’re eligible to vote in American but not registered, odds are candidates and campaigns are not knocking on your door or calling you during dinner time,” Padilla said. “So it’s a true disengagement that’s happening to millions of Americans that are eligible to vote.”
However, these efforts have also led to some of the highestprofile missteps of Padilla’s career.
After Padilla pushed to move up the start of the automatic voter registration program by several months, the 2018 rollout was plagued by technical glitches, including the improper registration of 1,500 people, some of whom were not U. S. citizens. Padilla’s office ultimately
identified six people who were improperly registered to vote who cast a ballot that year, though it concluded none was an undocumented immigrant and that their votes did not change the outcome of any races. With those issues fixed, Padilla said, the program “has been an overwhelming success.”
This past summer, Padilla awarded a $ 35 million contract for voter education to a prominent Democratic public affairs firm, SKDK, with ties to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Critics noted that the contract went through an emergency approval process that required no public bids and that Padilla’s office tried to repurpose money set aside to help counties prepare for an election amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Newsom “couldn’t have picked a more partisan politician who has yet to answer for his illegal $ 35 million getoutthevote contract with a ‘ Team Biden’ PR firm,” Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of the California Republican Party, said in a statement. “Californians deserve to have a U. S. senator that has a strong track record of working for all Californians, not a liberal politician willing to engage in voter suppression to advance his party politics.”
State Controller Betty Yee, a
Democrat, has so far refused to approve the contract payments, leading to a showdown over how Padilla will cover the cost. Padilla said he was confident the contract is lawful and that he would leave it to Yee and the state Department of Finance to determine how it gets paid.
“The contract was properly negotiated and entered into and executed, and I think it played a big part in the successful, secure and smooth election this year,” he said.
The pressure is now on for Padilla to avoid the fate of California’s last gubernatorial appointee to the Senate, Republican John Seymour, who lost his election bid to Feinstein in 1992.
To do that, he may need to rally the Democratic Party’s progressive base, which lobbied Newsom to consider other candidates. Party activists criticized Padilla for his ties to Feinstein, a frequent target of theirs, and for some of his legislative positions, such as abstaining on a 2012 bill to establish a singlepayer health care system in California, which failed by two votes.
Kate Chatfield, policy director for the criminal justice advocacy group the Justice Collaborative, said choosing Padilla was a “wasted opportunity.” She had hoped Newsom would appoint Reps. Karen Bass of Los Angeles or Barbara Lee of Oakland. Both, she said, have been far more outspoken advocates for the most vulnerable Californians, such as people in prison and those who are homeless.
By contrast, Chatfield said, Padilla’s biggest criminal justice bill in the Legislature was to crack down on cell phones in prisons, and he voted against a measure to reduce the penalties for certain drug crimes, something voters did two years later.
“I don’t see that he’s super bold and, as our governor likes to say, meeting any moment, let alone this moment,” Chatfield said. “I have not heard a compelling argument that he’s going to fight for the vulnerable in California.”
Padilla said his work, from streamlining college transfers to automatic voter registration, has largely helped communities of color that have historically been marginalized in California.
“If that isn’t progressive, I don’t know what is,” he said. “They clearly don’t know me well enough, and so I look forward to demonstrating to them who I am, what I’m about and how I would govern.”