State Senator Dave Min, a progressive Democrat and former law professor, has announced his candidacy for the 47th Congressional District – and simultaneously revealed an endorsement from incumbent Rep. Katie Porter, who is now running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Min is the third major candidate to jump into the race since Porter decided to run for U.S. Senate on January 10. Former Assembly GOP Leader Scott Baugh – who narrowly lost to Porter in 2022 and was planning to challenge her in 2024 – announced his candidate later that day. Former Rep. Harley Rouda, a Democrat who served a single term before being defeated by Michelle Steel in 2020, entered the trace on January 11.
Little more than a month ago, Min had publicly declared he was running for re-election to the state legislature:
Min’s re-election announcement notwithstanding, the chatter among Orange County political insiders was his real aim was CA47: Porter had narrowly defeated Republican challenger Scott Baugh and was already making calls about running for the U.S. Senate.
Five weeks later, Min has essentially confirmed that speculation.
The former UCI law professor ran for Congress in 2018, finishing third in the primary behind Porter, who advanced to the November general election against Rep. Mimi Walters. Porter defeated Walters in what turned out to be a wave election in which Democrats won every Orange County congressional seat.
Two years later, Min ran against Republican state Senator John Moorlach, narrowly beating him 51.14% to 48.86% in a race where Min and Democratic special interests significantly outspent Moorlach.
There’s significant overlap between CA47 and the senate district from which he was elected in 2020:
The most recent redistricting put Min in the same Senate district as fellow Democrat Sen. Josh Newman. The two looked set to battle it out when Min opted to run for Congress, instead.
Progressive-Left Record In The Legislature
Min has pursued a standard progressive-Left policy agenda centered around issues like “climate action,” gun control and hostility to the charter and school choice movements. For example, Min routinely lambasted the OC Board of Education’s pro-charter school majority’s efforts to lift the mask mandate for children – a mandate the evidence strongly suggests has done more harm than good.
Senator Min has joined in the left-wing backlash against Elon Musk’s efforts to restore Twitter as a functional public square, calling the iconoclastic entrepreneur a “fascist twit:”
After Musk put an end to Twitter censorship of viewpoints about the COVID pandemic, Min suggested Musk is collaborating with Vladimir Putin:
While Min isn’t bothered by censorship of COVID “misinformation,” he is incensed by school districts and parents acting to remove sexually explicit books, and books they consider offensive and ideological indoctrination, from school libraries:
Min is also a vehement advocate of legalized abortion, equating it to a human right:
Following the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Min co-authored Proposition 1 – a state constitutional amendment that went radically expanded California’s already permissive abortion regime to virtual abortion-on-demand.
Senator Min believes that access to abortion trumps religious freedom – even going so far as to imply religiously-affiliated hospital systems that do not provide abortions “have no place in Orange County.”
Min frequently tweets his outrage over gun violence, but when a Colorado pro-life pregnancy counseling center was bombed following the Dobbs decision, Min tweeted the attack wasn’t “about abortion” while failing the condemn the violent attack:
