California Senate: Alex Padilla Will Replace Kamala Harris
As weeks passed after the presidential election, the back-channel advocacy that had gone on since Ms. Harris was chosen as the running mate of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. broke into the open with public endorsements, full-page newspaper ads and open letters. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus strongly backed Mr. Padilla. The L.G.B.T.Q. community and Equality California lobbied for Robert Garcia, the mayor of Long Beach. Black Women United, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and a range of Black elected officials pushed for Ms. Bass or Ms. Lee.
California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, endorsed Mr. Padilla, who had worked in her field office early in his career. But other interest groups wanted Ms. Feinstein herself to step down — a call that gained traction after a New Yorker article this month suggested that Ms. Feinstein, 87, was experiencing cognitive decline.
The elevation of Mr. Padilla leaves Mr. Newsom with a vacancy in the secretary of state’s office, a potential consolation prize for at least one disappointed contender. He will also have to appoint a new attorney general if the Senate confirms Xavier Becerra’s nomination as Mr. Biden’s secretary of health and human services.
The attorney general post, in particular, has in recent years served as a springboard for higher office; besides Mr. Becerra, recent attorneys general include Ms. Harris and California’s previous governor, Jerry Brown.
Alex Vassar, a legislative historian at the California State Library, said the last California governor to fill three statewide offices was Earl Warren, who in December 1952 and January 1953 appointed a new senator, a state controller and a member of the state Board of Equalization. Pat Brown also made three appointments in 1964 and 1965, Mr. Vassar said, but one was simply to speed up an incoming senator’s arrival.
In sending Mr. Padilla to the Senate, Mr. Newsom chose a Democrat from his own generation who stood by the governor and shored up his Latino support in several critical races. He also chose an experienced candidate who has twice been elected statewide and whose work since 2014 has considerably expanded the ease of voting in California and the size of the electorate.
The middle child of a short-order cook from Jalisco, Mexico, and a housekeeper from Chihuahua, Mr. Padilla was raised in Los Angeles and graduated in 1994 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working his way through school with janitorial jobs and work-study programs. Though his degree was in mechanical engineering, his plan to become an aerospace engineer was derailed by the anti-immigrant politics gripping his home state during the 1990s.
