Today I’m announcing that I’ve formally entered the race for California Assembly District 23.
As a conservative in California, I’ve watched with dismay as so many people have voted with their feet and moved out of our state. And it’s hard to find fault with their reasoning:
California lost a Congressional seat for the first time in its history in the 2020 redistricting.
California has 11.8% of the US population but over 30% of the nation’s homeless population.
California’s schools have left our 8th graders anywhere from 45th to 38th in reading and 43rd to 30th in math over the last 8 years, according to NAEP scores.
And all of this occurs even though we as residents carry the 5th highest state and local tax burden in the country, after other noted blue states New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Vermont.
But hey- at least we’re #1 in *something*:
California led the US in one-way outbound UHaul rentals for the third year in a row last year.
Still, for all that, California will always remain to me what it was that day in 1990 when I first stepped off the train in Los Angeles. For a wide-eyed boy from Missouri, California was, is, and always will be the promised land. So I say to you today:
California is worth fighting for.
That’s why I’ve entered this race: I believe that our future doesn’t have to be subpar schools, open air drug markets, and spiraling homelessness. It doesn’t have to be a place people mostly leave. We can chart a new course, and once again be the state that leaves the rest of the country “California Dreamin’.”
I look forward to discussing over the next several months the many, many challenges we face as a state and my thoughts on how to address them. But my main campaign themes will be Education, Entrepreneurship, and Engagement.
Education: I grew up in inner-city St. Louis in a relatively poor neighborhood with a failing public school. Of my neighborhood friends who went there, none graduated. My parents made enormous sacrifices to give me and my siblings access to a better education, and it’s in part because of those sacrifices that I am here today. Quality education makes social mobility possible, and if you truly care about equity, if you truly care about improving the lives of those less fortunate, then improving our schools is the single most powerful lever you can pull. I’ll be talking a lot about that over the coming months.
Entrepreneurship: If education makes social mobility possible, entrepreneurship is what makes social mobility actually happen. It’s certainly a key part of my own story. Efforts to build intergenerational wealth in underserved communities typically over-focus on home ownership. While home ownership is certainly an important tool, in the best of circumstances it creates wealth at a rate of a couple percent per year. Entrepreneurship can create wealth at a far faster rate, and it makes communities more economically resilient. Encouraging entrepreneurship, especially in underserved communities, will be a key policy focus of mine.
Engagement: Like so many of you, I’ve found our politics to be extremely disheartening over the past several years. All too often, people react to that by withdrawing, and that’s completely understandable. But from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party, from Black Lives Matter to MAGA, we’ve seen over and over the powerful changes that become possible when regular people get engaged. Getting regular folks like you more engaged in our democracy is a core mission of mine.
Those will be the central themes of my campaign, but of course there will be many other issues to discuss as well. There’s only 334 days left until the March 5th primary, and we have a lot to do. So in the spirit of engagement, I’d love your help: reach out to me and my team, and we’ll put you to work!
I’m excited about this race; there’s a brighter future ahead- if we choose it. Join me in making that brighter future happen.
Wishing you some California love,
Gus