State race may be harbinger
Foe challenges candidate’s run as independent
In what could be a glimpse of California’s future, an independent candidate is on the November ballot for state insurance commissioner.
Steve Poizner, who was elected to the post as a Republican in 2006 and served four years, is running again — this time without any party backing. He is facing Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County).
“I feel very liberated,” the 61-year-old Poizner said in an interview. “There’s no room in this job for a partisan politician. I can just be a problem solver.”
The timing works, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow in public policy at the University of Southern California. This year, no-party-preference voters became the state’s second-largest “party,” moving past the Republicans in registration and pulling away.
Independent voters — and candidates — are the wave of the future, she said.
Since the 1950s, “California has had a candidate-oriented political system,” Jeffe said. “The only place that party matters now is in the Legislature. Many people are discouraged, frustrated and even
angry at political parties, and they don’t feel any loyalty.”
Poizner is in a good position to test that theory. A Los Gatos resident who became wealthy by founding and selling a couple of high-tech companies, he has some statewide name recognition from his time as insurance commissioner and his unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination for governor in 2010.
The $1 million of his own money that Poizner has dropped into his campaign hasn’t hurt, either.
But that losing campaign eight years ago casts a shadow over his run for insurance commissioner. In an effort to play to conservative GOP primary voters, Poizner came out strong against illegal immigration. He blamed undocumented residents for many of the state’s problems, saying California was doing “too much for too many” and promising to end that. He spent more than $24 million of his own money to make sure everyone heard the message.
It was a mistake, said Poizner, who calls himself a social progressive and a fiscal conservative.
“I talked myself into a few positions I wish I had done differently,” he said. “I’ll never run again so divisive a campaign.”
But Lara and his Democratic backers aren’t going to let Poizner wave away his anti-immigrant words.
Just this week, Lara began airing an unusual ad that repeats one of Poizner’s antiillegal immigration commercials from 2010, adding only the title, “In his own words ...” and a tag showing that Lara’s campaign paid for it.
Poizner’s claim to be independent also doesn’t go far with the Democratic legislator.
Poizner “was a registered Republican until right before the race,” Lara said in an interview. “He ran on a record to divide us, and now he flips on those issues.”
Lara, 43, sees his time as a Democratic legislator as a plus in his bid for insurance commissioner. The commissioner’s office “touches the life of every Californian,” he said. “My record speaks for itself for its commitment to consumer protection. I’ve taken on difficult issues in the Legislature and brought people together to find a solution.”
Lara was born in East Los Angeles, the son of two undocumented residents. A graduate of San Diego State University, he worked for years in the Legislature as an aide to Los Angeles Democrats, including former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and state Sen. Kevin de León.
He was elected to the Assembly in 2010 and to the state Senate in 2012. On his campaign website, Lara notes that, if elected, he would be the state’s first openly gay statewide official.
The insurance issue Lara is most closely associated with has little to do with the insurance commissioner’s office.
Lara was a driving force behind SB562, a 2017 bill that would have created a singlepayer health care system for California. While the measure passed the Senate, it never came up for a vote in the Assembly.
Health insurance in California, however, is almost entirely regulated by the state Department of Insurance, not the insurance commissioner. That hasn’t stopped Poizner from weighing in.
“I’m totally against (Lara’s) single-payer plan,” he said. “It was blocked in the Assembly by his colleagues because there was no way to pay for it.”
On the issues the insurance commissioner does deal with, there’s surprisingly little disagreement. Both recognize the narrow line the commissioner must walk, standing up for consumers against insurance companies, but also recognizing that insurers have to be allowed to make enough money to continue to write policies in California.
“The last thing we want is what happened after the (1994) Northridge earthquake, when companies stopped writing earthquake insurance,” Lara said. “We can’t let that happen.”
Lara and Poizner talk about the need to deal with the growing threat of wildfires, both by making sure that companies pay off on claims and by educating residents on the need to make sure they keep their home insurance up to date after they make improvements.
They also stress the need for tough enforcement measures against all types of insurance fraud, which raises costs for every policyholder in the state.
Poizner believes the state needs to become involved in the new market of cyberinsurance, providing ways for companies to protect themselves financially against hacking, data breaches and other online crimes.
“If insurance companies are providing insurance, they also will become much more involved in finding ways to provide increased cybersecurity,” he said.
Lara wants the state to be a pioneer in climate insurance, protecting its residents from the dangers of sea level rise and other climate changerelated problems.
“We need to establish California as a leader,” he said. “We need to help companies calculate risk and determine what’s vulnerable. They can create products to protect our infrastructure.”
The few polls that have been done in the race suggest that Poizner has a slight lead, with many voters still undecided. Poizner edged Lara in the June primary, 41 to 40.5 percent.