Lateefah Simon, left, and Rep. Barbara Lee at their campaign headquarters in MarchCarlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
Inside a museum in Oakland, not far from where Kamala Harris launched her first bid for the presidency back in 2019, Lateefah Simon, a Democrat whom Harris mentored, declared victory in her congressional race on Tuesday night. Early ballot returns showed her with 63 percent of the vote, though results were still coming in Wednesday morning.
Simon is regarded as “a rising star within Bay Area politics and the Democratic Party,” and Oaklanders tried to celebrate her win as a bright spot while television screens around the room showed Donald Trump claiming more and more electoral votes. “We have no idea what our reality will be tomorrow: the threat of mass deportation…of women not having control over their bodies. Let’s keep organizing,” Simon told a crowd of supporters.
“Our fight has always been an enduring fight,” she added. “We have been in this place before of uncertainty.”
Simon’s political career owes much to two mentors: US Rep. Barbara Lee, whose seat Simon now plans to take in the House, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Simon met Harris more than 20 years ago. At the time, Simon was a young mother who’d been running a San Francisco nonprofit helping girls in the criminal justice system and organizing sex workers. Harris was a lawyer at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, and they both served on a task force that aimed to stop criminalizing young people who’d been sex trafficked. When Harris became DA in 2004, she asked Simon, who’d started running the nonprofit at age 19, to come........