Senate leader Toni Atkins joins 2026 race for California governor

State Sen. Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) introduced a 2026 run for California governor Friday morning, making the legislative chief the most recent entrant in an more and more crowded race to exchange termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Atkins serves as Senate president professional tem and is a former Meeting speaker. She is the primary feminine and first out LGBTQ+ president professional tem in state historical past and additionally the primary legislator since 1871 to carry each management posts.

She is terming out within the Legislature and had been broadly anticipated to make a bid for governor.

Atkins’ expertise operating the Meeting and the Senate makes her “uniquely ready” to steer the state, as does a private narrative that’s taken her from a childhood in poverty in rural Appalachia to the corridors of California energy, she mentioned.

“I don’t actually match the mould of previous governors and even a number of the fellow candidates,” she defined. “Clearly I’m not a person. I wasn’t born into wealth or privilege. And I wasn’t appointed to my first huge political workplace. My story is far more just like the Californians that I meet every single day.”

Atkins’ time because the Senate chief ends in February when Sen. Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) takes over the publish.

Atkins started her political profession on the San Diego Metropolis Council after serving as a ladies’s clinic administrator. As Meeting chief, she championed a $7.5-billion water bond that was authorised by voters in 2014, fought again in opposition to deliberate tuition hikes on the College of California and battled for a brand new state tax credit score for the working poor.

She touted the truth that she has “negotiated eight on-time budgets with two completely different governors,” saying she’d been in a position “to go toe-to-toe and help the packages and insurance policies that matter most in folks’s on a regular basis lives.”

Atkins has been a champion of inexpensive housing whereas serving in Sacramento. Her partner, Jennifer LeSar, additionally has labored for 2 profitable housing and financial corporations whereas Atkins has been in workplace.

Atkins has practically $2.3 million in a marketing campaign committee for lieutenant governor that she opened a number of years in the past, in response to submitting data with the California secretary of state’s workplace, and can be capable to use these funds for her gubernatorial marketing campaign. Main donors to the committee embody constructing trades unions, nurses and firefighters associations, and the California Actual Property PAC.

Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis jump-started the gubernatorial race when she introduced her candidacy final spring. Newsom, who is suggested by the identical political consultants as Kounalakis, adopted an analogous timeline earlier than his 2018 bid for governor, asserting three years early.

California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond launched his bid in September. Former state Controller Betty Yee has additionally mentioned she plans to run, however she won’t formally launch her candidacy till after the March main, she mentioned Wednesday. Yee opened a marketing campaign committee this week, she mentioned, and despatched a fundraising e-mail this week saying she was “formally laying the groundwork” forward of her marketing campaign.

Kounalakis has raised $3.7 million in her marketing campaign committee, and Thurmond has raised greater than $665,000 since he launched his marketing campaign committee.

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has mentioned he’s “critically contemplating” however has but to formally throw his hat within the ring.

A number of ladies, together with former Hewlett-Packard chief Meg Whitman and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, have run previously, however California has by no means had a feminine chief govt earlier than — placing Atkins, Yee or Kounalakis in place to interrupt the governor’s mansion’s glass ceiling, ought to any of the three prevail.

“You’re speaking about 5 candidates, every of them having notable strengths, every of them on the face of it very completely different from each other,” veteran Democratic strategist Darry Sragow mentioned of the group. “However for those who step again for a minute, that is an unbelievable tribute to what the political system — or a minimum of the Democratic Celebration in California — has develop into.”

The truth that the make-up of the sphere of contenders — or, in Bonta’s case, potential contenders — contains three ladies, three folks of shade and a member of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood reveals a management pool that’s much more consultant of the state’s inhabitants, Sragow mentioned.

Employees author Taryn Luna contributed to this report.