The East Bay’s congressional district covering Berkeley and Oakland has been represented for more than a half century by the late Ron Dellums and then his former chief of staff, Barbara Lee.
Now with Lee giving up the job to run for U.S. Senate, one would think that current legislators and local government representatives would be lining up for this rare election with no incumbent.
But, sadly, there are only two officeholders in a weak field of nine hopefuls — seven Democrats and two Republicans — seeking to represent District 12, which runs along the East Bay shoreline from Albany to San Leandro.
And only one of the candidates is mounting a substantial campaign. BART Director Lateefah Simon has dwarfed all the others with the depth of her support. We endorse her — not because the seat is essentially hers to lose, although it is, but because she is the best candidate.
We have disagreed with Simon on many issues — most notably her role on the failing labor-driven BART Board of Directors that has helped push the transit system toward a fiscal cliff. But when it comes to federal issues, Simon is thoughtfully conversant and the only candidate who has built the political connections critical for being an effective member of Congress.
For more than half a century, Oakland and Berkeley have been represented by two of the most liberal members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Simon will continue that legacy.
“I’m a radical pragmatist,” she said. “You’ll get nothing done unless you can create relationships.” That would mean tempering her progressive ambitions to match the political reality of Congress today. We hope she means it.
Simon would bring intellectual heft. In 2003, at age 26, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work directing a program to assist troubled girls in their transition from delinquency and poverty to healthy adulthoods.
From there, she became director of the re-entry division of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, led at the time by Kamala Harris, and then she was executive director of the Bay Area Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
Today she oversees a $67 million annual grant portfolio for the Meadow Fund to support social justice organizations focused on criminal system reform and racial justice. And she serves as a BART director and on the Board of Trustees for the California State University System.
The only other candidate in the race with elective office experience is Alameda City Councilmember Tony Daysog, who is in his third stint on the council, having served there 19 of the past 28 years. A city planner by training, he has been a private consultant and worked for public agencies.
While Daysog’s somewhat unpredictable approach to governing has brought a divergent perspective to the City Council, he has not built strong political alliances. That’s fine for local government, but it’s not the team effort Democrats need in this era of razor-thin congressional majorities.
The other candidate of note is Jennifer Tran, professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal State East Bay and the former executive director of the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. Tran has the potential for a solid political future, but she is not easily conversant on key state, national and international issues. She should start by seeking a seat on a local government board.
For the other six candidates in the race, the quest for Congress is a huge reach. None of them have elective office experience, and none seems to have laid the political groundwork necessary to seriously compete.
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Of the six, five have run for office before, never coming close to success. That includes four candidates who challenged Lee when she last ran for Congress in 2022. That year, Lee garnered 88% of the open primary vote and 90% in the general election runoff.
The Republican candidates this year are electrical engineer Stephen Slauson, who ran against Lee in 2022 and against then-Assemblyman Rob Bonta in 2018 and 2020, and Ned Nuerge, a former professional driver of trucks and passenger vehicles who ran against Lee in 2022.
Bar owner Glenn Kaplan, now a Democrat, was registered without party preference when he, too, failed badly in a 2022 effort to unseat Lee. Democrat Eric Wilson, who works as a project coordinator for a nonprofit, was the fourth candidate to split the crumbs in the 2022 congressional race and was barely a blip when he garnered 0.4% of the vote for Oakland mayor in 2014.
Democrat Abdur Sikder, a computer science instructor at San Francisco State University, lost badly when he ran for Berkeley school board in 2016 and 2018, and for the Alameda County Board of Education in 2018.
Finally, there’s former professional football player and naval officer Andre Todd, whom we were unable to interview.
The top two finishers in the March 5 primary will advance to the November general election. The line of candidates is long, but the political depth is shallow. Simon is the standout.
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