Kevin de León

Kevin de León couldn’t have hoped for a cleaner opening when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told an audience this summer it could be possible for Donald Trump to become “a good president.”

Feinstein got booed by a hometown crowd, and de León, sensing a break in California’s Democratic old guard, soon mounted a campaign to unseat her.

By his own account, De León, California’s state Senate leader, is a long shot. Feinstein is one of the wealthiest members of Congress and a decades-old institution in California’s Democratic Party. But she is also a centrist, and de León is running against her from the left. The Los Angeles lawmaker is testing the proposition that in the era of Trump, moderation is behind the times.

“This is about a change for the future,” de León said over dinner recently in Rome, where he had traveled for the first time to speak about climate change at the Vatican. “This has to do with a higher calling for Californians, which is a need to have a leader that will represent the values of California that … have changed quite significantly over the past 25 years.”

De León, raised in poverty by an immigrant mother in San Diego, worked for the powerful California Teachers Association before winning a State Assembly seat in 2006. In the years since, he piled up a mountain of progressive legislative victories in Sacramento, advancing significant bills on issues ranging from climate change to health care and immigration.

With term limits chasing him from office in 2018, the safe move for de León would have been to run for lieutenant governor or state treasurer, statewide offices from which he could have launched a future campaign for U.S. Senate or governor. But the low-profile — and in the case of lieutenant governor, nearly powerless — positions held no interest for de León. And in his sharp contrast with Feinstein, he viewed her as vulnerable.

“You could replace me with somebody else,” de León said. “It’s that contrast, a different choice.”

De León, at 50, represents a rising class of young, Latino Democrats in California. And the party’s progressive wing has become a growing force in California since Trump’s election.

De León will almost certainly run at a large fundraising disadvantage to Feinstein, and many prominent Democrats, including Sen. Kamala Harris and former Sen. Barbara Boxer, have already announced their support for her reelection.

“It will be David and Goliath,” de León said the day he announced his campaign. “I’m under no illusion.” — David Siders

Main page photo by Jae C. Hong/AP Photo. Story photo by Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo.