Ready or not, the next generation of California politicians has arrived

OPINION – Nearly a decade ago I joined the Nehemiah Emerging Leaders Program, a yearlong fellowship created to bring more diversity to leadership in the Sacramento region.

I remember meeting NELP founder Scott Syphax one morning and sharing that, while I was impressed by each of my 16 classmates, two in particular stood out for whom the sky was the limit. One went on to become the first woman to lead the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce in its 129 year history.

The other, Dr. Flojaune Cofer, just shocked the California political establishment by defeating three well known politicians in the Sacramento mayoral primary – a race widely heralded as the most closely watched in the state due to its razor-thin vote margins in the early count.

The primary has not been verified but, as it stands, former state senator Dr. Richard Pan, current assemblymember Kevin McCarty, and former Sacramento city councilmember Steve Hansen (who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the Chamber, real estate and landlord lobbies, and police unions) all sit with under 22% of the vote.

Sitting above them by nearly 8,000 votes is “Dr. Flo,” heretofore an unknown quantity in California politics, despite her history of leadership on city and county commissions and committees, and her successful record of public health advocacy in the Capitol.

Most of California’s political establishment was shocked to see the primary results. But I’m not. And you shouldn’t be, either.

Flo represents a rising wave of unapologetically progressive Millennial women using grassroots organizing to win races throughout the state.

Down in Los Angeles, housing rights attorney Ysabel Jurado is positioned to remove longtime Democratic powerhouse Kevin de Leon from his council seat, outpacing two state assembly members to reach the November runoff. She’d join an expanding bloc of council “super progressives,” which includes Nithya Raman.

Raman, you might remember, was the target of a gerrymandering plan devised by de Leon and other conservative Democrats, as exposed in a leaked audio tape last year that included racist remarks from former city council president Nury Martinez and others present. Despite the successful gerrymander, the establishment underestimated Raman, who won her primary outright this month with a majority of the vote.

In San Francisco, Jackie Fielder launched her supervisorial campaign this month with a large canvassing event that included former state assemblymember and progressive trailblazer Tom Ammiano and socialist supervisor Dean Preston, who’d be ecstatic to have an ally on the dais to take on the city’s billionaire class.

Most of California’s political establishment was shocked to see the primary results. But I’m not. And you shouldn’t be, either.

At first glance one might consider Cofer, Jurado and Fielder to be part of what we’ve seen in previous generations in this state: a small but ineffective cluster of progressives in an otherwise moderate California ecosystem. But if you examine the leanings of voters 40 and younger, you’ll notice a seismic shift in the making.

Young folks in the Golden State show that they lean far to the left of the Democratic establishment on issues ranging from Medicare for All to a ceasefire in Gaza. And while it’s clear that they outright reject the dying California GOP, they’re also increasingly uninspired by the other side of the aisle. For the first time since the Secretary of State started tracking pre-registration data for California’s 16- and 17-year-olds, more teens are choosing to register as No Party Preference voters than as Democrats.

The challenge, as it’s been for generations, is getting the youth to the polls. But a surprising phenomenon has also arisen with candidates such as Cofer: some older voters have joined the youth in support of these candidates. In Sacramento, for instance, residents over 65 outnumbered those under 35 in the initial count of 30,000 ballots by a factor of over seven to one. Even so, Cofer still carried 20% of the early vote.

Since then, she’s taken one-third of the ensuing 70,000 ballots, while her strongest opponents have all struggled to muster 20%.

The scariest notion for establishment politicians funded by corporations in 2024 should be that the next generation of organizers and their candidates are fine-tuning a simple, reiterative template for beating them at the polls. As rank-and-file SEIU 1000 member and longtime organizer Jonah Paul wrote when Dr. Flo first pulled ahead in the mayoral race:

“Career politicians tend to think they can win on their name and institutional backing. True if all did the same. But if one candidate doesn’t? If they build an army. Forge alliances. Embrace the slow grind of organizing door by door. They can beat anyone.”

Dave Kempa is a freelance journalist who took a break from the industry to work as a paid Communications Director for Dr. Cofer’s primary campaign. His new project, A Schism in Blue, covers Democratic intraparty struggles in a state where the GOP has lost its power.