Feinstein heads for exit after pioneering career
Will finish term: Still more to do, senator promises
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the former San Francisco mayor whose pioneering career paved the way for a generation of women in politics, will not seek re-election in 2024, her spokesperson told The Chronicle on Tuesday.
“I am announcing today I will not run for re-election in 2024 but intend to accomplish as much for California as I can through the end of next year when my term ends,” Feinstein said in a statement. “Even with a divided Congress, we can still pass bills that will improve lives. Each of us was sent here to solve problems. That’s what I’ve done for the last 30 years, and that’s what I plan to do for the next two years.”
The announcement was not a surprise given that Feinstein would be 91 on Election Day 2024 and, if re-elected, 97 when her six-year term ended. Many high-profile politicians have already jumped into the 2024 race, anticipating an open contest for the first time in decades.
Questions about Feinstein’s mental fitness have followed her for more than two years, and even her Democratic colleagues told The Chronicle in April 2022 that they believe her memory issues were hindering her ability to do the job. Feinstein defended her abilities amid each new wave of concern.
Those concerns resurfaced Tuesday after her office released the statement announcing her retirement. A short time later, when a gaggle of reporters asked Feinstein to comment on her decision, she said, “I haven’t made that decision. I haven’t released anything.”
A Feinstein staffer interjected to say, “We put out the statement.”
Feinstein replied, according to audio of the interaction, “You
put out the statement? I didn’t know they put it out.”
Feinstein said she plans to finish out her current term, which ends in December 2024. She plans to spend her remaining time in Congress focusing on preventing wildfires, mitigating the drought that has plagued the state in recent years and working to pass legislation on one of her long-standing priorities — gun violence, she said in a statement.
Feinstein’s retirement announcement comes as yet another mass shooting shakes the country and less than a month after two mass shootings roiled California.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom called Feinstein a “mentor” and “a powerful champion for California and California values on the national stage for three decades” in a statement Tuesday. “For the last 30 years, she has served her state with distinction as our senior U.S. senator, blazing a trail for a new generation of female lawmakers,” Newsom said.
Democrats began vying to replace her days after the new Congress was sworn into office. Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, launched her campaign in January, followed by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, two weeks later. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, is expected to announce her candidacy soon.
Yet Feinstein’s massive shadow had hung over the race until now. Schiff made a point to say that he spoke with Feinstein, a longtime ally, “weeks before” announcing. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi prefaced her February endorsement of Schiff by saying, “If Senator Feinstein decides to seek reelection, she has my wholehearted support,” and called her “iconic.”
It was a sign of respect — and perhaps a proposed reframing of how Feinstein’s last months in office should be viewed.
Feinstein’s influence in Washington, once substantial, has been waning for several years. First elected in 1992, last year Feinstein became the longest-tenured female senator in history, and is the longest-serving congressional member from California.
Yet despite Feinstein’s status as the Democrat with the most seniority, she does not chair any Senate committees. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer appointed Sen. Patty Murray of Washington to the position of Senate president pro tempore, a position that stands third in the succession line to the presidency and typically goes to the most senior member. Feinstein said in October that she would not be seeking the position.
“You can’t tell the story of California politics — or the story of American politics — without the trailblazing career of Dianne Feinstein,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement. “I’ll truly miss her leadership and her counsel in the U.S. Senate. But the legacy she leaves behind will be carried on by the 40 million Californians who now see their government — and their country — differently because of her service.
Feinstein’s late-career low profile stands in stark contrast to her decades of groundbreaking public service, which started shortly after she graduated from Stanford University in 1955. Her career has been shaped by tragedy, perseverance and an adherence toward political moderation — even as she represented some of the most progressive areas in the country.
“I’ve learned through all this — through death, through illness — this is what I’m meant to do,” Feinstein told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast in 2018. “It’s sounds like I’m on some kind of messianic mission. That’s not the case. But you do figure out what you’re meant to do. I’ve tried to serve people.”
That mission started in 1960 when Gov. Pat Brown — father of former Gov. Jerry Brown — appointed Feinstein to the California Women’s Board of Terms and Paroles. It was a different era, when sexism was more overt and it was harder for a woman to be taken seriously in politics. A 1965 article in The Chronicle on Feinstein headlined “A Pretty Expert on Crime” said, “San Francisco’s Dianne (Mrs. Bert) Feinstein is a raven-haired, blue-eyed beauty who looks more like an actress (which she was) than an expert on California criminal justice (which she is).”
Feinstein served on the parole board six years before she was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969. Even then, she faced discrimination. She recalled that she and fellow Supervisor Dorothy von Beroldingen wanted to have lunch at the private Concordia-Argonaut Club in the early 1970s, but were told they couldn’t because it was a menonly day. Feinstein told the staff that if they wanted them to leave, they’d have to call the police to have them escorted out. The club backed down.
She failed in two early runs for mayor — in 1971 and 1975. By 1978, Feinstein was openly contemplating leaving politics for good.
But her career path changed on Nov. 27, 1978, when former Supervisor Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in their offices. Feinstein heard the shots and rushed into Milk’s office, where she was the first to see him. The daughter — and former wife — of physicians — instinctively reached for his pulse. She found a bullet hole.
“Then,” Feinstein told the podcast, “everything changed.”
It was “the hardest thing I have ever gone through. The shock and the horror and the fact that this is a colleague of yours that has killed another colleague,” she said.
Then the president of the Board of Supervisors, Feinstein was chosen as mayor by her colleagues — the first woman in the city’s history to hold the position. It was a tumultuous time in San Francisco. Earlier that month, 913 people — mostly San Franciscans — were massacred at a compound in Guyana run by cult leader Jim Jones.
Feinstein steered the city through that era on a more moderate path than her predecessor, the more progressive Moscone. She was re-elected twice — in 1979 and in 1983. She survived a recall attempt in 1983, organized by a group that was upset by her gun-control efforts.
Her popularity grew, and she was on the short list to be Sen. Walter Mondale’s running mate in the 1984 presidential election. Mondale ultimately chose New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro — and lost all but one state to the incumbent, President Ronald Reagan.
The snub didn’t hurt her standing. In 1987, a Chronicle sponsored poll found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed thought that she had done a good or excellent job as mayor and 78% gave her a favorable rating.
But her bid to jump to higher office initially stalled. She lost a 1990 bid for governor to Republican Sen. Pete Wilson. Two years later, however, she won election to the Senate along with fellow Democrat Barbara Boxer, in what was dubbed the “Year of the Woman.”
There she carved a role as a centrist at a time when some still existed.
In 1994, she shepherded into law the Desert Protection Bill, which carved new national parks from the Southern California desert and preserved more than 6 million acres of endangered land as wilderness. That same year, she spearheaded passage of the assault weapons ban — inspired in part by a 1993 mass shooting at a Financial District building at 101 California St. that killed eight people and wounded six.
Feinstein wasn’t shy about taking on some institutions.
As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2009, she oversaw its six-year investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 program of torturing terrorism suspects to try to gain information. In 2014, she spoke for an hour on the Senate floor, outlining the panel’s 525-page report, which found that the CIA misled policymakers about the extent and effectiveness of the torture program. It showed how intelligence officers tortured foreign prisoners and terrorism suspects, with no proof the efforts were effective in preserving American lives.
She won her current term in 2018, when she was challenged by then-state Senate President Kevin de León, who presented himself as a more progressive alternative. She barely campaigned and refused to debate him, consenting only to a “conversation” hosted by the Public Policy Institute of California that wasn’t televised. The executive board of the California Democratic Party endorsed de León. Nevertheless, Feinstein coasted to a fifth term with 54% of the vote.
But she largely disappeared during what will be her final term in the Senate. She rarely did interviews longer than a brief chat with reporters in the Senate hallways and rarely did public events in her home state. She hasn’t led a town hall meeting in California since 2017, according to LegisStorm. Her job rating tumbled to an all-time low in February 2022, as 30% of registered voters approved of her performance while 49% disapproved, according to a Berkeley IGS poll. At her peak in 2001, 57% of voters backed her.
In April, four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and a California Democratic House member, told The Chronicle that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.
One staffer for a California Democrat told The Chronicle, “There’s a joke on the Hill, we’ve got a great junior senator in Alex Padilla and an experienced staff in Feinstein’s office.”
Feinstein told The Chronicle in a statement at the time that the past year “has been extremely painful and distracting for me, flying back and forth to visit my dying husband who passed just a few weeks ago.” Her husband, financier and philanthropist Richard Blum, died in February 2022.
Other episodes disappointed even her most loyal supporters. She shocked colleagues at the end of the contentious 2020 Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett by unexpectedly praising Republicans for having conducted a great process. Critics howled when she hugged Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., at the close of the hearings.
“This has been one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in,” Feinstein told Graham, the Republican chair of the committee. “I want to thank you for your fairness.”
If that was a snapshot of Feinstein at the tail end of her five-decade career, Pelosi preferred to focus on the complete arc of her time representing the state.
“Dianne Feinstein is a titan in the United States Senate, with a record that stands among the finest in history. For the past 30 years, California and our country has been magnificently served by the leadership of Senator Feinstein,” Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday after Feinstein announced her retirement. “Senator Feinstein has not only accomplished a great deal, but is determined to do even more in the last two years of her term.”