California governor Gavin Newsom announced Sunday night that he will appoint Laphonza Butler to fill the United States Senate vacancy left in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s passing.
Butler, who since 2021 has overseen pro-choice fundraising group EMILY’s List, is a former union official and political consultant. A Mississippi native who attended the historically-black Jackson State University, Butler began her career as a labor organizer for nurses in Baltimore and Milwaukee before organizing on behalf of janitors in Philadelphia and hospital workers more broadly in New Haven, Conn. Butler moved to California in 2009, where she continued her labor activity and eventually became leader of a branch of the Service Employees International Union.
She was elected president of the California SEIU State Council in 2013, a position she used to push for a higher state minimum wage and income tax hikes, and endorsed former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential primary campaign in her capacity as union leader.
In 2018, former governor Jerry Brown appointed Butler to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California. That same year, she left the SEIU to join SCRB Strategies, a Democratic political consultancy firm now known as Bearstar Strategies, which lists Newsom as a marquee client. While at SCRB, Butler advised vice president Kamala Harris — with whom she had been allied since Harris’s 2010 attorney general bid — on her abortive 2020 presidential campaign. In fact, it was Butler’s marshaling of the organized-labor vote that may ultimately have put Harris over the top; she won that race with a razor-thin margin of 0.8 percentage points. In other words, Harris may not have risen to the vice president’s office without Butler’s help.
After a short stint as Airbnb’s director of public policy and campaigns in North America, Butler became the third president of EMILY’s List. Upon being named the organization’s leader, she wrote in an open letter to donors that the group would “recognize the inextricable linkage between reproductive health, economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and climate justice.” Butler argued that progressives “must connect the advocacy movements that are fighting for our rights, because we build power by working together to achieve our goals.”
Butler’s appointment has raised eyebrows given her place of residence. She has not lived in California since taking over at EMILY’s List, and her account on X listed Maryland as her location. Butler has since removed the location feature from her X account, but there are other indications that she lacks official ties to California. She is not registered to vote in California and her legal address on the Emily’s List FEC filing was Silver Spring, Md. Also, her official bio on the EMILY’s List website stated “she lives in Maryland” until last night when that sentence suddenly disappeared, NR’s Jim Gergaghty reported in today’s Morning Jolt.
Despite her change of residence, Butler has remained active in California politics. A Federal Elections Commission filing dated March 31, 2023, shows Butler having given $1,000 to Lateefah Simon’s campaign to represent California’s 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, which covers much of Alameda County, including the city of Oakland. The most Democratic district in the country, the California 12th’s current representative is Barbara Lee, who — alongside representatives Katie Porter and Adam Schiff — plans to vacate the seat in order to run for the Senate position to which Butler was just appointed.
Simon, the candidate to whom Butler donated, is a member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) board of directors, a position she used to change the public transportation agency’s law enforcement model. One of four sponsors to an amendment to BART’s 2021 budget, Simon introduced a plan to shift the BART’s focus from law enforcement to social services, eliminating police response to “calls related to homelessness, drug use and mental health crises as the transit agency heeds reform calls from the Black Lives Matter movement,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The move came amid a spate of violence on San Francisco’s public transit, and earlier this year, 46 percent of BART riders said they witnessed crime in the transportation system.
Butler, who fulfills Newsom’s pledge to appoint a black woman to the vacant Senate seat, said in a 2022 appearance on the popular radio program “The Breakfast Club” that she is a proponent of incremental reforms to counter what she sees as the nation’s problems: “I just say to my friends I grew up with in Mississippi, don’t try to do the most change, just do something.”