Nine candidates seeking Bonta seat
1 Republican, 1 socialist, 7 Democrats running in Tuesday’s special election
Seven Democrats, a Republican and a socialist are battling one another to win Tuesday’s special election to replace former assemblyman Rob Bonta in representing one of the state’s most progressive areas.
Some of them have raised substantial amounts of campaign funds for the effort, and those who haven’t are hoping their messages alone will be enough to carry the day.
Bonta left his Assembly District 18 seat after accepting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s offer to serve as California’s attorney general.
Any candidate who gets more than 50% of the vote will win the seat outright. Otherwise, the top two vote-getters in this primary will face off in a general election Aug. 31, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The 18th District represents a little more than 500,000 people across much of Oakland and all of San Leandro and Alameda.
The Democratic candidates are San Leandro Unified School District board member James Aguilar, 21; San Leandro Vice Mayor Victor Aguilar, 42; Alameda Unified School District board member Mia Bonta, 49; public health consultant Eugene Canson; social justice attorney Janani Ramachandran, 29; Alameda Vice Mayor Malia Vella, 36; and organizer and political consultant Nelsy Batista, 36, who is a write-in candidate.
Stephen Slauson, 81, is the lone Republican candidate, and Joel Britton, 80, is the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party, which is not officially recognized by the state.
The candidate with arguably the most name recognition is Rob Bonta’s wife, Mia Bonta, and she also has raised the most money in the race so far — roughly $1 million, according to state campaign finance records.
Mia Bonta’s campaign received roughly $575,000 as of Thursday afternoon, according to her campaign staff, much of it from labor unions, teachers unions, medical and health care industry employees, gaming industry groups and casinos.
Independent expenditure committees formed to support her campaign with mailers and
television, newspaper and digital media ads have spent nearly $400,000 as of Thursday. Most of that came from one committee formed by teachers unions, school employees, doctors and dentists. Another committee is
backed largely by $40,000 from health insurance company Blue Shield of California, as well as large individual donors.
Labor unions also contributed heavily to the campaign of Vella, the vice mayor of Alameda since 2016, who has raised about $361,000 as of Thursday, according to Vella and state records.
Ramachandran said she has raised roughly $203,000, mostly from individual donors, including some attorneys, software engineers and tech industry workers.
All of the Democratic candidates interviewed for this story said police should be removed from dealing with calls involving people experiencing mental health crises and low-level issues like complaints about homeless people. They say unarmed specialists could handle those calls so police can focus on dangerous criminal activity.
They also support state reform efforts to decertify police officers for misconduct, such as SB 2 by state Sen. Steven Bradford.
“We’re at a low point in terms of police accountability,” Mia Bonta said.
Vella said she would try “to create pathways to make it easier for cities to create civilian police commissions” given oversight of law enforcement.
The candidates agree that more must be done to prevent homelessness, which increased more than 40% in Alameda County from 2017 to 2019 and continued to grow during the pandemic.
Vella said Newsom’s Project Roomkey and Homekey programs helped, but they are temporary and “we need to expand (such programs) into some level of permanence.”
“We already spend hundreds of millions of dollars on housing and homelessness issues,” she said. “We need to better utilize the money we have.”
Tenants rights is a key issue for several candidates, including political new
comer Ramachandran, who said she was “motivated to run for this seat because of how horrible our government is when it comes to tenant protections.”
If elected, Ramachandran said she’d likely be only the third legislator in the state who’s a full-time tenant, adding that some lawmakers are landlords.
“There’s a reason protenant legislation does not pass out of committee many times,” Ramachandransaid.
She wants to repeal the Costa-Hawkins and the Ellis rental housing acts, which allow cities to expand rent control however they see fit.
Mia Bonta agreed CostaHawkins should be repealed, noting that as a youth she moved 13 times in 16 years largely as a result of landlords acting in “bad faith.”
Ramachandran said though she has no political office experience, she has worked on the ground with homeless people, advocated for domestic violence survivors and implemented violence prevention programs.
She said corporate interests are controlling the Democratic majority of the Legislature and accused Mia Bonta of a possible conflict of interest in accepting gaming industry money, explaining that she could theoretically influence her attorney general husband in writing the title and summary of a potential ballot measure to legalize sports betting at tribal casinos.
Mia Bonta called that accusation “incredibly unfortunate, largely sexist” and “ignorant,” saying it puts her candidacy only “within the frame of what my husband might do.”
Ramachnadran and other candidates including Aguilar and Batista support a single-payer health care system in California, which Aguilar said should be funded with a wealth tax on the mega-rich.
Aguilar, the school board
member, also wants to establish a wealth tax, overhaul much of the state’s institutional spending on prisoners and corrections, and reform Proposition 13 to better fund education.
“We can spend $70,000 or so per prisoner. As a student, it didn’t make sense, and as an adult it doesn’t really make sense, either,” Aguilar said.
Though he’s only 21, Aguilar said his youth should be a perspective voters value.
“I come from the generation that is going to inherit the consequences of the decisions of my parents’ generation and generations before that,” he said.
Batista, the write-in candidate, said she’s in the race “to take the voice of the community and bring it to the table.”
She says local elected officials should hold private developers more accountable, and charge them more fees to build.
Slauson, the Republican, wants to eliminate the gas tax and end extended unemployment benefits, but he acknowledged that with only about 6% of voters in the district registered as Republican, the only chance he’d have at winning the race is if the Democrats “kill each other off” in the polls.
Britton similarly realizes he’s unlikely to win but nonetheless is knocking on doors to spread the word about wanting to form a party of workers, and to encourage officials to create a “massive, federal government-funded public works program to provide millions of jobs.”
Canson wasn’t available for an interview about his candidacy.
Voters already have been sent mail-in ballots, and people can vote in person beginning today.
Voters also can mail back their ballots as long as they are postmarked by Tuesday or can drop them into one of 19 ballot drop boxes around the district before 8 p.m. Tuesday.