25-year-old now youngest state legislator in decades

Lee will represent District 25 in State Assembly, filling seat vacated by Kansen Chu

Like many other young adults in the pricey Bay Area who can’t afford to move out, 25-year- old Alex Lee still lives at home with his mom, in North San Jose.

But soon he may have to find a second home in Sacramento because on

Nov. 3 he was elected to represent District 25 in the California Assembly.

In addition to becoming the youngest person elected to the Legislature in several decades, his accomplishment was marked by some firsts: the first Generation Z legislator, the first openly bisexual state legislator and the youngest Asian American legislator.

“It’s been an exhilarating whirlwind,” Lee said of his campaign and watching the election results pour in last week, giving him a landslide victory to represent a district that encompasses his hometown of Milpitas and portions of North San Jose, Santa Clara, Fremont and Newark. Among the progressive Democrat’s endorsers was presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Quite a ride for someone who grew up splitting time between his mother’s home in North San Jose and his father’s in Milpitas. He went to Milpitas High School, often getting there on VTA buses or light-rail trains from his mother’s home.

Lee looks back fondly at his days at Milpitas High, the only comprehensive high school in the city of 80,000 residents, where he was comfortable despite knowing “from an early age that I did not fit the traditional cishet male” stereotype. Lee said his time there melded his approach as a candidate and soonto-be lawmaker.

“It’s a very diverse town and every

“We really need to be moving toward a vision where the public is in the driver’s seat when it comes to affordable housing and we aren’t just relying on the goodwill, inclusionary housing of for-profit developers.”

— Alex Lee, Assemblymember District 25

one has different political beliefs, and I think that was a strong empathy-building and relationship-building foundation for me,” he said.

“I got to experience through other people’s lives and working with them in classes that everyone has different challenges in life and different experiences,” he said. “Growing up that way, I really did want to make a difference in everyone’s life no matter their different challenges in life.”

State Sen. Henry Stern, from Calabasas in Southern California, said he’s not surprised that Lee, one of his former legislative aides, connected with voters.

“I think people are looking for authenticity first, a real person. So even if he was to the left of some people, or to the right of some people, he’s real,” Stern said.

“Being a young person in that community, growing up there, there’s a trust that gets built in when you really know where people are coming from,” he added.

Lee may be young, but he and his supporters say he’s far from inexperienced.

During his college years at UC Davis, where he majored in political science, and in the following years, he interned for several legislators, including Congressman Mike Honda and Assembly members Ed Chau, Evan Low, Cecilia Aguilar Curry, and his predecessor in District 25, Assemblyman Kansen Chu.

Soon after Lee became his intern, Stern said he hired him as a policy aide because he was so knowledgeable and dedicated. Lee even managed a spreadsheet tracking every piece of legislation in the Capitol.

“He was my guy to keep a finger on the pulse of the whole building. You knew whose bill lived, whose bill died, who was mad at who,” Stern said.

“He became the Siri of the Senate floor in a way,” Stern added.

That dedication and know-how helped Lee climb his way into the general election over seven Democratic candidates in the March primary. On Nov. 3, he trounced perennial Republican candidate Bob Brunton.

When Chu announced in May 2019 he wouldn’t seek reelection to his District 25 seat, Lee jumped right into the race the next month. Near the end of June, he and a group of volunteers already were pounding the pavement, talking to voters about their concerns and his progressive agenda.

“We knocked on every door we could get to, and that was 30,000 doors by the primary, and that really paid off,” Lee said, noting some of his opponents outspent him by 15 to 1.

“There’s no real secret to it,” he said.

“I think it is refreshing — albeit not a new invention — to my constituency to have someone actually show up and ask them what they care about, listen empathetically and commit to doing something about it,” he said.

Lee said residents told him they were frustrated with the status quo.

When he was campaigning, Lee had to work as a gig worker for an app-based delivery service to make ends meet. He says being an app worker who still lives at home helped him relate to voters on one of the region’s biggest issues: the affordable housing crisis.

“I live at home because that is the economic survival, economic necessity to live at home. Even with a college degree and a professional job, it just wasn’t cutting it,” he said.

“That is an insecurity that people of Republican, Democratic or independent households feel because it is way too expensive in the Bay Area, and I feel it personally,” he said.

“That always strikes a chord with either parents, young people, new families, immigrants, everyone,” he said.

As a legislator, he wants to eventually repeal the Costa-Hawkins Act, which limits rent control in California.

“We really need to be moving toward a vision where the public is in the driver’s seat when it comes to affordable housing and we aren’t just relying on the goodwill, inclusionary housing of for-profit developers,” he said.

Lee hopes to quickly “introduce a bill to vastly curb corporate political special interest money” in California politics once he’s sworn in Dec. 7.

“Even if he’s not in charge of the conversation, being the unabashed progressive voice that he is, he’s going to move that machine,” Stern said of Lee.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets something big done early,” Stern added.

Although some people might get hung up on his youth, ethnicity or bisexual identity, Lee said it’s the whole package that makes him who he is.

“I wasn’t running to be the first bisexual. I’m running on my ideas and my merits in my hometown,” he said.

Lee