Lateefah Simon, on Track to Be a New House Dem: “I’ve Never Shied Away From Any Fight”

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 over to the prosecutor’s office and try to make the system better.

Simon demurred—she’d spent time in the juvenile justice system herself and “never wanted to work for The Man,” she told my colleague Jamilah King in 2018—but Harris was persistent: “She was like…Do you forever want to be on the stairs yelling and begging for people to support you, your cause? Why can’t you fix it from the inside?” Simon recalled.

Together, Harris and Simon created a program called Back on Track that helped nonviolent offenders earn a diploma and get job training instead of going to prison. Today, Simon describes Harris as a mentor and “auntie”—Harris gifted Simon her first suit and urged her to go to college, even inspecting her report cards. “She saw me before I saw myself, in a lot of ways,” Simon told King.

It was at Mills College where Simon met Lee, who held her House seat for more than a quarter century before running an unsuccessful campaign to replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate after Feinstein’s death last fall. Over the weekend, Lee and Simon went together to cast their ballots at the former Mills campus. “Congratulations again, my sister!” Lee said from a video at the election night party, calling in from DC, as the polls showed Simon leading handily over her opponent, Jennifer Tran, a political newcomer who campaigned in part on getting tougher on crime.

The party continued, but no one could ignore the presidential results trickling in from outside this progressive enclave. Some people in Oakland had been hopeful that Harris, who was born in the city, would make history. But as the night went on, it was hard for the partygoers to mask their concern. “Shit, he improved his performance from 2020,” a woman said as she waited outside for a ride, looking anxiously at Trump’s results on her phone. A Trump presidency would be “devastating for disabled people, for women, for people of color,” Simon told me earlier in the evening, shortly after California polls closed.

Progressives in Oakland also appeared to be marching toward losses in other important races, including the recall of the Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price, both progressive women of color. Inside, I ran into Pastor B.K. Woodson, who’d opposed the recalls. “I’m very concerned,” for the nation, he told me, “because we have a large part of America that’s okay with retribution, violence, and intolerance.”

“We’re going to push forward, we’re going to organize,” Simon told me, bringing the conversation back to her constituents: “There are literally thousands of people tonight that are sleeping on the streets of Alameda County; they deserve leaders that are going to focus on shifting their material conditions.” During her campaign, Simon pledged to invest more in affordable housing, addiction treatment, and mental health care; close loopholes in federal gun laws; and push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Though Harris’ outcome in this election was not as rosy, Simon’s win is a sign of Harris’ impact, and the impact of other Black leaders before her. On the video at the event, Rep. Lee spoke of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run as a major party presidential candidate, who “opened that door for you and for me.” Months ago, before the primary, Simon told me that Simon’s oldest daughter, who as a kid spent time playing in Harris’ office, recently became a prosecutor in DC. “She saw Kamala do it, and she was like, I can be a Black woman and a prosecutor” who helps people.

Simon, herself, has left a legacy to uphold: After working with Harris, she led an organization focused on racial justice Oakland and was later elected to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors. (Simon was born legally blind and depended on BART trains to get to work and take her daughter to school.) She also co-chaired Gov. Gavin Newsom’s task force on police reform in 2020. And the nonprofit she ran in her youth, now called the Young Women’s Freedom Center, remains important to her. Several of the center’s staffers were there at the museum on Tuesday to support her, including Julia Arroyo, its executive director. “It means a lot for a lot of our young people to see her in this position of leadership,” Arroyo said.

“Lateefah was born in the revolution,” Simon’s uncle, Timothy Simon, told the crowd. “She was born of parents who believed in a Black economic agenda. She was born of grandparents who were part of the great migration here to California, seeking opportunity and fleeing those red states that Lateefah is about to take on in the House of Representatives.”

It’s a mandate that Simon seems eager to embrace. “I’m ready to go,” she told me. “Vitriol is poisonous to our democratic process,” she said, referring to Trump’s message, “but I’ve never shied away from any fight, and I’m gonna lead us forward.”