More than two years before the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) promised to appoint a black woman to replace the senator should Feinstein resign. Predictably, the 90-year-old senator never did, instead dying in office last week, leaving the governor in the same predicament as then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020.
Considering that black women comprise fewer than 3% of the Golden State's population and a similar share of its state legislature, Newsom struggled to find the requisite candidate to check off his diversity boxes. In fact, Newsom struggled so much that he had to appoint a Maryland resident for the seat.
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Laphonza Romanique Butler, California's newest senator-designate, only spent about a decade in total living in the state. Born and raised in Mississippi, Butler moved to California in 2009 as a labor organizer, eventually leading the state's Service Employees International Union, its largest labor union. Butler left the SEIU in 2018 for a political consulting firm and to boost Kamala Harris's bid for the White House and served one year as an executive at Airbnb. Butler decamped California to become the president of the pro-abortion political organization known as EMILY's List in 2021 and has been listing her address as Silver Spring, Maryland, ever since.
Just as Biden boxed himself into the mandate of choosing Harris as his running mate, Newsom didn't have many options once he promised at the altar of identity politics to pick a black woman to replace Feinstein. Hispanic people, not black people, compose a plurality of California's population at nearly 40%, with white people making up another third and Asian Americans another sixth of the state's population. Only five black women occupy the state legislature's 120 seats. Only three members of the state's national congressional delegation are black women. Reps. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Barbara Lee (D-CA) are 85 and 77, respectively, and Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) of Los Angeles is not yet a full year into the job.
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The math gets even worse when you look at where the state's senators usually hail. According to California historian Alex Vassar, of the 45 people ever to represent California in the U.S. Senate, 15 served in the state's legislature and 12 in U.S. Congress. Another 17 hailed from statewide office, in which two black women currently serve. But one, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, was just appointed to replace Alex Padilla, who replaced Harris. The other, Malia Cohen, is the state controller, only two of whom in history have ever gone on to represent California in the U.S. Senate.
So Newsom did the truly unprecedented. Forgoing the nearly 40 million people living in California, Newsom went to Maryland to make a Mississippi-born union organizer a 1-in-100 member of the world's greatest deliberative body.