WASHINGTON >> California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the U.S. Senate’s oldest member, tweeted this morning that she is running for reelection, ending the “will-she-or-won’t-she” parlor game that has riveted California politics for months.
“Lots more to do: ending gun violence, combating climate change, access to healthcare,” Feinstein wrote. “I’m all in!”
A former mayor of San Francisco first elected to the Senate in 1992, Feinstein has coasted to victory in past re-election races. Her decision to run for a fifth full term sets up a 2018 Senate race that many observers expect to be another cakewalk for her.
But the senior senator has faced withering criticism this year from some liberal activists who accuse her of not being tough enough on President Donald Trump, and she could draw a strong primary challenger from the left.
A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found that while Feinstein, 84, has high approval ratings, a majority of likely California voters would prefer her to retire and not run for re-election.
Some of the candidates who are seen as potential Feinstein primary challengers include State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, who criticized the senator after she urged patience for Trump, and Joseph Sanberg, a financial entrepreneur.
No major Republican elected officials in the state have publicly voiced an interest in running next year, but former Olympian and transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner has said she’s considering jumping in the race.
Her re-election announcement — from a campaign Twitter account that’s been dormant since 2013 — came amid raging Wine Country wildfires that are a frightening center of attention for her northern California base.
Longtime Feinstein campaign consultant Bill Carrick said the senator was always planning to make an announcement in October, and decided to make it public as she returned to California for a series of fundraising events this week.
“This will be fun,” Carrick said Monday morning. “She’s jacked up about it, she’s ready to go.”
She got a quick vote of confidence from her fellow California senator, Kamala Harris. “We are better off with her leadership and I look forward to continuing to fight together for California in the Senate,” Harris wrote in a Facebook post.
Feinstein returned to the front lines of the national gun control debate last week as she introduced a bill to ban “bump stocks,” a device the Las Vegas gunman used to drastically increase his rate of fire as he killed 58 people Sunday night. Her legislation got a significant boost on Thursday, when the National Rifle Association — a longtime Feinstein adversary — said it supported “additional regulations” on the mechanism. Bump stocks are already banned in California.
One quote you can expect to hear in any Democratic primary campaign: Feinstein saying that Trump “can be a good president” if he changes his approach, a remark that elicited boos at a San Francisco event in August.
“While Dianne Feinstein’s legacy is great in a lot of ways, the question is whether she’s the right senator in this moment,” said Aram Fischer, one of the leaders of Indivisible San Francisco, an anti-Trump group that has protested Feinstein at several events. “She’s a compromiser in a time of bomb-throwers.”
