SAN JOSE, Calif. — East Bay Rep. Barbara Lee kicked off her U.S. Senate campaign Saturday before a few hundred supporters filling the risers and basketball hardwood at Laney College’s gymnasium in her hometown of Oakland — formally launching her bid for the seat Sen. Dianne Feinstein has held for three decades.
In her first speech of the campaign, Lee touted her career as the highest-ranking Black woman appointed to House Democratic leadership and her long progressive track record on issues from housing to health care.
“I will fight to back California in the United States Senate every single day because I believe that California’s next chapter can be one in which dignity, freedom and justice belongs to all of us,” she said to a cheering crowd holding green and gold campaign signs emblazoned with the slogan “Barbara Lee speaks for me.”
Lee — who officially announced her Senate bid Monday — has been a leading liberal voice over her quarter-century career in the House, often highlighting the fact she was the only member of Congress to vote against using military force after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“She is, and always has been, on the frontlines advocating for health care workers, reproductive rights, voting rights, working families and environmental justice,” Mia Bonta, an East Bay state assemblymember, said from the podium. Bonta was one of the more than half-dozen elected officials who spoke in support of Lee at the campaign rally, including Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.
Still, Lee finds herself at a disadvantage out of the gate in the race for the retiring Feinstein’s seat. A recent University of California, Berkeley poll found Lee trailing behind the other two declared candidates: U.S. Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter, both high-profile Democrats from Southern California with strong liberal credentials. Schiff and Porter announced their entry into the race last month, before Feinstein had announced her retirement.
Schiff led all candidates with 22% support, followed by Porter with 20% and Lee with 6%. Another 4% liked Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley and reportedly has toyed with the idea of running but hasn’t declared his candidacy.
David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University, previously said that Lee will need to work to differentiate herself from the rest of the liberal field and overcome the name recognition of Schiff and Porter.
“She has to lean deeply into her record when progressive politics, were both in favor and out of favor,” said McCuan, comparing her to star liberal congresswoman from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “She was AOC before AOC was born.”
Lee, who was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Los Angeles, has deep ties to the progressive politics of Oakland and Berkeley. She started out her political career working on Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale’s 1973 Oakland mayoral campaign and went on to become a staff member for liberal former U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums, who also served as mayor of Oakland.
Before that, she worked for Shirley Chisholm on her 1972 presidential campaign, the first ever launched by a Black woman.
Lee, 76, represented the East Bay in the California Legislature starting in 1990 until she was elected to Congress in 1998. She is one of the roughly two-dozen Black congresswomen in the House. But there are currently no Black women in the U.S. Senate since Kamala Harris became vice president in 2020 — a fact Lee made note of at Saturday’s rally.
“When someone tries to tell me that a Black woman of my age, with all the experience I bring to the table, can’t win a fight, I just smile to myself and I say, watch me,” Lee said.
Lee supporter Tanisha Rivera, 46, traveled to the rally from her home in Leemore — a Central Valley city in a deep-red district represented by U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, she was quick to note.
Rivera’s daughter is a staffer on the Lee campaign, but she said she’s long admired Lee’s political career, especially her lone vote against using military force in 2001. As important, she said, is Lee’s history of standing up for people like herself.
“As a Black woman that stands out for me, I think that our voices aren’t heard in America right now,” Rivera said. “I think that we’re a lost voice. And if we’re going to have a voice, we need a voice that’s going to speak, you know, and I think Barbara Lee will do that.”
