Former California GOP Chairman George “Duf” Sundheim announced his candidacy Wednesday to fill California’s U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
The 62-year-old Stanford alumnus and former attorney is the third Republican candidate to announce his candidacy for the California’s Senate seat. Sundheim said Wednesday that he plans to run against the state’s “crushing” regulatory climate and to give the state’s residents “a voice in their government.”
“California has suffered an economic earthquake that has split our state in two,” Sundheim said during his campaign announcement in Palo Alto, Calif. “We have seen one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in history, but there are 8.9 million people living in poverty.”
“A major reason for this gap is bad laws that are choking job growth and causing costs to skyrocket,” he added.
Echoing the same rhetoric that has brought success to several Republican presidential candidates, Sundheim said Wednesday that Californians are dealing with a “professional political class that seems to be deaf to [their] concerns,” and one that prioritizes partisanship over people.
“That is the issue in this election: are we going to allow the professional political class to chip away at our rights or are we going to return to a government of the people, by the people, for the people?” he said.
For nearly a quarter-century Republican candidates attempting to oust Democratic Sens. Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have proved unsuccessful in the notoriously blue state, including current GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina who lost in a Senate race against Boxer in 2010.
But Sundheim says his track record of effective bipartisan reforms and four-year tenure as Chairman of the state’s Republican Party give him an edge as a candidate.
According to his campaign, the former Republican state chairman worked with a Democratic Mayor to pass pension reform in the Northern California city of San Jose, and served as an advisor to a local superintendent who oversaw one the city’s most underserved school districts.
“They tirelessly battled bureaucracy and special interests to ensure the district put the children first, doubling the number of students who earned grades that placed them on the Sylvandale Honor Roll,” Sundheim’s campaign wrote in a press release.
The Los Angeles Times describes Sundheim as a fiscal conservative who “diverges from party orthodoxy on many core issues.” According to the Times, Sundheim is pro-choice, believes in global warming, and endorses a pathway to citizenship for certain individuals residing in the state and country illegally.
Sundheim has until the state’s primary election in June next year to campaign across the state. Should he finish in first or second in the primary, he will be eligible to participate in a November 2016 runoff election which is likely to include California’s Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris who formally declared her candidacy less than a week after Boxer announced her impending retirement.
