Capitol Weekly’s Top 100: Oscar Lopez

38. Oscar Lopez

Tia Orr and Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher understandably get most of the notoriety for labor’s big wins of late, but insiders know that SEIU state political director Oscar Lopez deserves a lot of that credit as well. In that role he heads up all of the union’s ballot measures and political campaigns, coordinates member-to-member communications and – maybe most important – controls the independent expenditures, almost always working behind the scenes. He is well known as a coalition builder who can galvanize sometimes widely disparate groups toward one encompassing goal. A recent example: Lopez, working in tandem with Tia Orr, was integral in coordinating the campaign against the California Business Roundtable’s Taxpayer Protection Act, helping to bring together numerous unions and labor groups and coalescing massive entities like CalPERS in opposition. While the decision on whether to allow the measure to go to the ballot ultimately belonged to the California Supreme Court, it was that kind of broad yet organized opposition that helped to inspire the lawsuit to begin with.