Barbara Lee’s idealism inspires loyalty in her district. Can it carry her to the Senate?

Barbara Lee has never lost an election.

That is quite a feat, given that she has built a career championing unpopular, even radical causes.

Two decades ago, she was famously the only member of Congress to vote against giving the president broad, open-ended war powers following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She received hate mail and death threats from all over the country in response. Before joining Congress, she was one of the only members of the state legislature to challenge California’s “three strikes” law, which escalated sentences for people with prior felonies. She got death threats then, too.

Through it all, her congressional district in Oakland and Berkeley, which Lee calls “the wokest district in the country”, has remained loyal to her, repeatedly re-electing her with more than 80% of the vote. In more than two decades in the House, Lee, 77, has become the highest-ranking Black woman in the chamber. As her aspirations turn to the US Senate, however, she may be poised to lose an election for the first time.

Lee’s campaign has consistently lagged behind those of two House Democratic colleagues – Katie Porter of Orange county, and Adam Schiff of Los Angeles. More recent polls have also found her trailing the Republican Steve Garvey, a former baseball star of the LA Dodgers. Schiff entered 2024 with $35m in campaign funds and Porter had $13m – Lee has lagged, with just $816,000 in the bank as of January. In the state’s no-partisan primary system, only the top two candidates will advance to the general election in November.

As millions of Californians start filling out their primary ballots, Lee said she has given “no thought at all” to the possibility that she might lose.

“I have a record of being on the right side of