Written by Nicholas Vetrisek
State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez is running for California Secretary of State. She is the author of the infamous Assembly Bill 5, and she will likely attempt to further her radical agenda as Secretary of State.
Gonzalez’s two landmark pieces of legislation are AB5 and the Motor Voter Act. The former has destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, while the latter resulted in over 23,000 errors and numerous other issues that have yet to be resolved. If she becomes the Secretary of State, she will prove that Democrats fail upwards.
The campaign for Prop 22, a partial repeal of AB5, was the largest in state history and severely hurt her reputation. Her competitors can point to the fact that she has destroyed entire industries and the fact that Prop 22 passed by a large margin, signaling that voters aren’t on the same page as her either.
In addition to her damaging legislation, the causes she has championed are nail salon workers’ rights, protections for professional cheerleaders, and farmworker overtime pay. She has built her career on promising things to obscure interest groups, and while this may have worked for her district, it probably won’t work for a state election.
Lorena is a former labor organizer, and this shows in her approach to politics. Her strategy works for neighborhoods and districts but is more likely to fail at the state level. In the book Profiles in Courage, former President John F. Kennedy presents an example of a congressman he served with that tried something similar, hoping to coalesce many special interest groups into a large voting bloc. Kennedy also noted that that same congressman was voted out.
Lorena Gonzalez must lose if Californians want to make sure that disasters like AB5 and the Motor Voter Act don’t continue happening. We do not want a Secretary of State that works for unions and special interest groups. What we need is a Secretary of State that will work for everyone.
