“That’s why it’s with such a heavy coronary heart that I’m stepping apart at present as a candidate for governor,” she added.
Atkins launched her marketing campaign in early 2024, hoping her prolific legislative profession and humble roots would attraction to Democrats trying to find fixes to the state’s most intractable issues, reminiscent of housing affordability. However she struggled to achieve traction in a governor’s race consumed by a give attention to nationwide politics.
Born in rural Virginia to a seamstress and a coal miner, Atkins informed KQED’s Political Breakdown in 2018 that her early childhood dwelling had no toilet — simply an outhouse.
“We had no operating water,” she recalled. “My mother cooked on a wooden range.”
Atkins moved to California within the Nineteen Eighties and was elected to 2 phrases on the San Diego Metropolis Council. After two years as Meeting speaker, she turned the primary girl and first LGBTQ individual to function Senate president professional tem when she ascended to the put up in 2018.
Throughout her six years as chief of the Senate, Atkins wrote payments to ease housing development, ban state journey to states with anti-LGBT insurance policies and enshrine abortion protections within the structure — a measure that gained vast approval from California voters.
In her marketing campaign for governor, Atkins constructed up a hefty monetary warchest of over $4 million. Her assist of pro-housing payments within the Legislature gained her the early assist of the state’s carpenters union and San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener.
