Jane Kim, a Democrat, is running for California Insurance Commissioner in the November 2026 general election against fellow Democrat Ben Allen, for the open seat left by term-limited incumbent Ricardo Lara. Kim holds degrees in political science and Asian American studies from Stanford and a law degree from UC Berkeley, and began her career as a civil rights attorney and community organizer before serving as president of the San Francisco Board of Education and then on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2011 to 2019, the city’s first Korean American elected official. She later led the California Working Families Party and served as Bernie Sanders’s California political director during his 2020 presidential campaign.
Kim has campaigned on a “Disaster Insurance for All” proposal, a state-run authority funded by insurer premiums to guarantee wildfire and flood coverage, along with expanding California’s low-cost auto insurance program to all drivers and creating a public dashboard tracking insurer performance. As a San Francisco supervisor, she was the subject of a 2022 ethics complaint alleging she engaged in unregistered lobbying against a residential development project while being paid by an interested party; she disputed the claim, saying the work was done on her own time.
