I don't know what I was expecting from Barbara Lee when an assistant handed her the phone, but the laughter I heard certainly wasn't that.
It's been just a few hours since the longtime Oakland congresswoman issued a statement conceding her U.S. Senate primary and congratulating her fellow Democrat, Rep. Adam P. Chef from Burbank.
Lee came in fourth place, more than a million votes behind Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, and hundreds of thousands of votes behind Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who came in third. Votes are still being counted, but the Senate race was announced minutes after polls closed on Super Tuesday.
It was, by all accounts, a crushing defeat.
Especially since Lee, and a committed sisterhood of politicians, activists, academics and lobbyists across California, have spent nearly four years working behind the scenes to advance the representation of Black women at the highest levels of the federal government.
Now Schiff and Garvey will face each other in the general election in November – and Schiff is certain to win this heavily Democratic state. He will be a senator for years to come.
So I wondered, why was I laughing?
“I was persistent, and every step of the way there were barriers and obstacles,” she told me, becoming serious. “But again, this is an example of a black woman’s life.”
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It is worth thinking about how we got here. At least, that's what California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has been doing.
“It all started with the belief that African Americans deserved a seat,” she told me.
Back in 2020, Weber was serving in the state Assembly and as a leader of the Legislative Black Caucus. Joe Biden had just been elected president, with no small amount of help from Black women, and Kamala Harris had just vacated her Senate seat to become the nation's first Black and South Asian vice president.
Weber and a long list of black politicians, activists, academics, and lobbyists decided that black women needed to continue to be represented in the Senate. It would be a loss not to have someone with such intersectional life experiences when the state and country become more diverse with each passing year.
“The ability across the country to recognize and support Black women in statewide office is very bleak,” Weber told me in 2020. “You have 100 people in the Senate and you don’t have a single black woman.”
The “Keep the Seat” campaign was born, and the words became a rallying cry. Supporters urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to do so by selecting Lee or then-Rep. Karen Bass, both eminently qualified longtime legislators, as Harris' successor.
Lee, in Santa Rosa last month, stuck to her progressive stances and “hold the seat” message as she campaigned for Senate in cities and counties across California.
(Josh Edelson/For The Times)
Newsom ended up choosing then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla instead, Lee stayed in Congress and Bass, of course, became mayor of Los Angeles. But the rallying cry has not disappeared. Rather, it returned alongside calls for Sen. Dianne Feinstein to step down over concerns about her health, prompting Newsom to promise to appoint a Black woman to her seat if it came to that.
Then Feinstein died last year, setting off days of political chaos, much of it of the governor's own making. At issue was a clear warning in Newsom's promise. He said he would make a “temporary appointment” because the campaign for the Senate seat had been underway for months.
Lee and other black women — myself included — felt resentful, wondering why they were good enough to be in charge of Schiff, who had been at the forefront until then. Newsom said his words were misunderstood, and he resisted calls to appoint Lee immediately.
Ultimately, the governor appointed his political ally LaFonza Butler, the black woman who led Emily's List and ultimately decided not to run for a full term.
Given all the back and forth, it was a surprise to Weber that Lee would stick with her Senate campaign and give up her House seat. This is especially true because, even without Lee, the Senate is likely to get another Black woman in November, with Angela Albrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware also vying for seats.
Some people, looking at the poll, were quietly pressuring Lee to withdraw.
“But this is Barbara, you know? She does what she believes in, and you can never question her heart,” Weber told me. “Someone else might have figured, ‘Well, if I run and lose, it’s this versus that. “. Hence it was not calculated that way. “I decided we needed to have a black woman in this seat.”
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I doubt Lee would ever admit it, but she should have known she would probably lose.
For months, polls consistently showed her trailing her opponents, even after receiving a majority of delegate votes at the California Democratic Party convention. Many of these delegates, like voters in the Bay Area, tend to lean more progressive than voters in other parts of the state.
Lee also lacked statewide fame — unlike Schiff, who rose to fame by leading the first impeachment of Donald Trump; Or Porter with her notes on the whiteboard during congressional hearings; Or even Garvey, with his star turn on the Dodgers and Padres.
Perhaps most importantly, Lee did not have tens of millions of dollars to buy a statewide profile with a television ad campaign. Before deciding to run for Senate, the 77-year-old never needed a complicated fundraising operation, and fiercely guarded her private life rather than publicizing it on social media to boost her popularity.
“If you don't have money coming from all directions, it's very difficult to introduce yourself to voters,” she admitted.
So, while Lee's campaign had only raised about $5 million, according to its most recent FEC filings, it was competing against two of the most prolific fundraisers in Congress. Both Schiff and Porter have amassed war chests approaching $30 million, and Schiff, with the blessing of the Democratic Party establishment, has long been at the forefront.
That's why it's ironic that Porter, of all the candidates — with nearly as much money left in her campaign account as Lee raised throughout her campaign — is the one who chose to complain about the influence of money in politics.
“Because of you, we have made the establishment afraid, with a 3-to-1 take on TV spending and an onslaught from billionaires spending millions to rig this election,” she wrote to her followers on X. It was a poor choice of words, because the election was not “rigged,” of course. The ballot papers were not tampered with illegally.
But it is true that our political system is “rigged” in the sense that societal biases and structural inequalities often work against women and people of color who run for office. This has been proven in study after study, including a recent study by the Pew Research Center.
We don't have a lot of white men in elected office because most white men are political geniuses and most women and people of color are terrible candidates. We do this because women of color, in particular, have always had a harder time raising money because they have less access to quality donors, and therefore have a harder time winning elections.
“This is a reality when you're in a poor community, and you're just a regular activist and working hard in your community and getting results,” Weber said. “You're not in the business of raising $30 million.”
Lee, on the left, stayed in the race despite issues including systemic fundraising challenges and low polls against her leading challenger, Adam B. Schiff, Katie Porter and Steve Garvey, from left, at the January debate.
(Damien Dovarganis/Associated Press)
But Lee's decision to run despite these challenges is what she said inspired many of the people she met on the campaign trail — including several Black women who were organizing fledgling campaigns to run for office.
They were exchanging stories about the difficulties ahead. Racism and sexism are embedded in the system.
“A lot of them would come up and whisper to me, 'I know what the deal is.' “It's a common conversation among black women,” Lee told me. “When you go out and do something that other people didn't think you should do as a black woman, you get a lot of rejection.”
I saw that too. At her campaign events in cities and counties, where she never had a reason to spend so much time, black women and people of color hung on my every word:
How she mustered up the courage to travel to Mexio to have an abortion when she was a teenager. How did you work with the Black Panthers? How, as a member of Congress, she was among the first to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the only one to resist the war after 9/11.
Before running for Senate, Lee was unknown to many. She is now an underappreciated heroine with a cult-like following.
So I agree with Weber when she says that Lee's loss in the primary does not diminish the struggle for representation that began with the “Keep the Seat” campaign. Or even lobbying for Harris to be elected to the Senate in the first place.
“Nobody's saying we shouldn't do this again. Nobody seems to be saying, 'Well, we missed our shot.' 'We missed our shot,'” Weber said. “But a lot of women I've talked to recently are saying, 'You know, When this is over, we have to organize ourselves.”
Raising money will always be a problem. As well as racism and sexism. But in the end, the Senate campaign may have been more important than the election. In this way, Lee has the last laugh.
