San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Padilla filling screens while Feinstein lies low
It’s hard to miss Sen. Alex Padilla lately. California’s junior senator has been a relentless media presence since he was sworn into office Jan. 20 to replace Vice President Kamala Harris.
Padilla has done 89 interviews since then, including 46 with Californiabased outlets. It’s a Swalwellian pace of interviews that included an emotional appearance on my “It’s All Political” podcast in February.
And then there’s California’s other Democratic senator, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Californians are more likely to see a unicorn than
their senior senator being interviewed on their favorite media outlet or answering questions at a virtual town hall meeting.
Her office doesn’t keep count of interviews, but her spokesperson assures that she regularly chats with reporters in the halls of Congress and “has held countless videoand teleconferences with California groups throughout the pandemic.”
Padilla has to be out there because he faces election next year, and a March poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 1 in every 3 likely voters surveyed didn’t know enough about him to form an opinion.
That explains why he has sat down with HBO’s Bill Maher and Los Angeles hiphop DJ J Cruz. He’s done interviews with the Black News Channel and Univision — in Spanish. He even chatted with actor Chris “Captain America” Evans, cofounder of a civic organization called A Starting Point. Earlier this month, Padilla held a town hall meeting that was broadcast on TV stations around the state.
Feinstein hasn’t done any teletown halls, has none scheduled and isn’t up for reelection until 2024. She could use some positive publicity, as a growing number of California voters disapprove of how she’s doing her job.
The March poll found that 44% of likely voters surveyed approved of her job performance and 47% disapproved — lackluster support in Democraticdominated California. In February 2020, 50% of likely voters surveyed by the Public Policy Institute approved of Feinstein’s performance.
The March survey indicated that 42% approved of how Padilla was doing in his first weeks in office and 25% didn’t.
Padilla is scheduled to speak this month at the California Democratic Party convention, which is being conducted virtually. Feinstein declined an invite, party officials say. Perhaps she’s holding out for Captain America.
Coming soon to your door: Californians are excited that schools, restaurants and offices are opening again. Democratic Party leaders are looking forward to the return of another familiar sight: a party activist knocking on your door to talk about politics.
They say inperson campaigning in California could be key to Dems holding their small majority in the House, in part by flipping a Central Valley seat that Republican Rep. David Valadao won by less than one percentage point in November and a Southern California seat that GOP Rep. Mike Garcia took by just 333 votes.
Pavitra Abraham, national organizing director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me that her party lost four House seats in California last year in part because, unlike the GOP, it suspended doortodoor campaigning when the pandemic hit.
“Democrats put public health over politics and ceased inperson organizing events to keep our volunteers, staff and voters safe,” Abraham said. “We’re on course to be able to resume our highly effective facetoface organizing program for the midterms to mobilize our voters and protect our majority.” When? As soon as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it’s OK.
California Republican Party chair Jessica Millan Patterson is skeptical that Democrats will have more luck by going door to door.
“That’s a complete joke,” Patterson told me. The reason the GOP turned those four seats, she said, is because “we bumped up our game last year.”
California exit interview: Alison Grady and Ernest Brown made a spreadsheet of places they wanted to live a few years ago, and Oakland came out on top. Within a day of moving to the Town, Brown found a salsa dance class near Lake Merritt that he said was “truly diverse, not ‘hashtag’ diverse.”
The politically active couple, who grew up in the South, fell in love with the city. But they knew they were living on borrowed time.
“You can’t go to a party or a house or a bar with 20somethings” without the high cost of housing coming up, said Brown, who chaired the board of the prohousing YIMBY Action organization. “Because however much fun people are having, there’s a low sense of dread constantly that this party can end at any moment if there’s a rent increase.”
Same goes for people who need more space to start a family. That’s where Grady and Brown are now.
Both are 30 years old and hold solidly paying health care jobs, but felt the financial pressure of living here. They were paying $1,500 a month to split the bottom unit of a twostory duplex in downtown Oakland with another couple. They love the location and their roomies, but Grady said, “We’re 30, and it’s so silly to be living with housemates.”
Brown is African American and Grady is white, and Brown said part of the appeal of staying in Oakland would be that they could raise a child in a place with a “meaningful Black population.”
But ultimately, they couldn’t make it work. They just moved to Atlanta, where they can a bigger place in a similar downtown neighborhood for half as much.
They said the final straw came last year when California voters rejected Proposition 15, which would have raised property taxes on commercial property to help schools and local governments. Its rejection made the couple wonder whether the public school system would ever improve.
“The decision to underinvest in the public infrastructure that is particularly important to families raising children in California makes (living here) such a hard bargain,” Brown said.
Other young, middleclass couples are facing the same decision, he said.
“What that leaves behind are just people who couldn’t afford to move, or who have so much money that they can ride it out, kind of no matter how bad things get,” Brown said.
“We are not a sob story,” said Grady, a former head of East Bay Young Democrats. “Like, I’m genuinely excited to be moving to Atlanta.”
But they wanted to stay.