The race for an open North Coast Assembly seat is set to become highly competitive ahead of March primary

The race to replace Assemblymember Jim Wood, who has represented the North Coast in Sacramento since 2014, was always going to be competitive.

An empty statehouse seat with no incumbent is rare, even with term limits, and Northern California politicians had been eyeing 2026, when Wood and North Bay Sen. Mike McGuire would be at the end of their legislative tenures.

Then came Wood’s announcement Nov. 10 that he would not run for reelection in 2024 to spend more time with his elderly mother. Within weeks, six Democrats and one Republican had filed to run for his seat.

A combination of factors — namely the district’s demographics, which include a considerable chunk of Republican voters, and California’s 2020 switch to an early primary contest for presidential election years — has set up a fast-paced, high-dollar sprint for votes in the March 5 primary.

Of the six Democrats, four are raising considerable cash and lining up endorsements: Santa Rosa Councilman Chris Rogers, Yurok tribal Vice Chairman Frankie Myers, Healdsburg Councilwoman Ariel Kelley and Rusty Hicks, chairman of the California Democratic Party.

Mendocino County Supervisor Ted Williams and Cynthia Click, a former community radio host from Willits, are the other two Democrats. The lone Republican candidate is Del Norte school board trustee Michael Greer, of Crescent City.

The contest has been quiet so far but is expected to unleash a flurry of ad spending, and at least some of those ads could go negative as Democrats who are aligned on most issues seek to distinguish themselves.

The top two vote earners will advance to the general election in November. However, the conventional political wisdom of the district, and the belief of all four leading Democrats, is that only one of those spots will go to a Democrat.

So with just about seven weeks left until Election Day, the race comes down to several key questions:

Can Myers, an unprecedented candidate as leader of one of the region’s largest tribes, turn out Native American voters in decisive numbers? Can Rogers, who served on the Santa Rosa council through the deadly 2017 firestorms and subsequent rebuild, leverage his political connections and reputation in the district’s biggest population center? Will Kelley follow the path of McGuire and Wood as the next Healdsburg mayor to become North Coast lawmaker?

Can she or Hicks, who have both demonstrated access to considerable campaign funds and expressed the willingness to invest heavily, spend enough to sway voters? And can Hicks’ overcome being a newcomer — the party leader moved to Arcata in 2021 — and convince voters his statewide connections and experience are an asset to the North Coast?

These questions will play out in one of California’s largest Assembly districts, geographically speaking, in the state. Assembly District 2 stretches from Highway 12 in Santa Rosa, up the coast to the Oregon border.

Historically, Republican voters in the northern counties of Del Norte, Trinity and Humboldt have accounted for around 30% of the vote in primary elections — giving the Republican Greer a potential steppingstone into the general election.

But while that block of Republican voters has a significant impact on the primary, it’s an underwhelming force in the general election. Meaning that whichever Democrat secures the second seat out of the primary — if past voting trends hold true — has a very good chance of being elected in November.

Money flows into race

With a compressed time frame for candidates to travel the sprawling district, money for print, television, radio and social media ads will be critical. At this point, the public has limited insight into the race’s campaign financing.

Candidates have only had to report donations over $1,000, and independent expenditures are only beginning to trickle in.

Hicks is showing financial strength early. He has raised more than $486,000 in large donations, $300,000 more than the next closest candidate, which is Kelley.

In a Jan. 10 meeting with The Press Democrat editorial board, Hicks said he would report $518,000 in money raised. And he intends to raise $727,000 for the primary campaign — the spending limit candidates agree to in order to have a personal statement printed on the ballot in March.

“My intent is to raise and spend every last penny,“ Hicks said.

The vast majority of the money he’s raised so far came from outside the district. With the exception of donations from his wife and a Sebastopol vintner, many of Hicks’ donors are statewide labor organizations. Before being elected chair of the Democratic party, he was head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and he has deep ties to the state’s unions.

Other donations come from political consultants, strategists and lobbyists, many clustered in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

Hicks’ opponents are already criticizing his out-of-district fundraising, which feeds into the idea that he is a political “carpet bagger” who moved into the district knowing there were statehouse seats coming open.

“It is really easy to ask constituents in the district: ‘Why should you think that your voice is going to matter if it didn't matter in electing him?’” Rogers said during his own Jan. 12 meeting with the editorial board.

When a Press Democrat reporter asked Hicks to respond to some version of that question, he had a ready answer. “There is not a lot of money in the district broadly speaking for political activity,” Hicks said, noting that both Wood and McGuire often raised most of their campaign cash outside the North Coast. (Though McGuire has never been considered a prolific fundraiser).

“I think a voter who gets a piece of mail or (an ad) is not connected to whether the check came from the Central Valley or came from Sacramento or whatever. It's the ability to communicate a message,” Hicks said. “So yeah, I've got a statewide network. And I'm putting that statewide network to good use to raise the resources to communicate a message.“

An outside committee supporting Hicks has also filed to participate in the campaign, showing a $50,000 contribution from education and health care labor unions.

For Hicks, that’s all part of his pitch. “I have something that is worthy of consideration by the voters of this part of the state,” he said, “based upon the experiences that I have, based upon the leadership that I've carried out.”

Behind Hicks in fundraising — for now — is Kelley. The Healdsburg council member has disclosed around $166,000 in large donations so far but told The Press Democrat her campaign is willing and able to compete with Hicks by spending to the limit. Kelley, an attorney, said her history as a nonprofit director, both with Corazón Healdsburg, which she founded, and more recently leading a nonprofit that distributed millions to small businesses in the Pacific Northwest, has given her fundraising prowess.

Kelley distinguished her fundraising from Hicks by saying the vast majority of her donations come from within the district.

“They're all people who have seen the work that I've done and are ecstatic about wanting to elect me to do this on a higher level,” she said. Beyond that, Kelley is also backed by her family, and her financial disclosures as an elected official show she has resources to tap into should she choose to.

An independent committee to support her has disclosed $125,000 so far. The first $100,000 came from Kelley’s sister, Shoshana Ungerleider, who is a physician and producer of TED Health. Another $25,000 came from Bay Area financier Chris Hansen, founder of Valiant Capital. Hansen gave $5 million to begin Pillar, the economic development nonprofit Kelley led from early 2021 until it finished distributing all of its funds in mid-2023.

Rogers has disclosed $125,000 in donations so far. Much of it comes from labor organizations or individuals. The Press Democrat found no evidence of an outside committee supporting Rogers, but one could materialize in the weeks to come.

Myers has disclosed $95,500 so far. He counts donations from eight tribes, the Yurok included. The Press Democrat found no evidence of an outside committee supporting Myers yet either.

If Myers is elected, he noted in an interview with The Press Democrat, he would be one of just two Native Americans in the California Legislature, joining Assemblymember James Ramos, a Democrat and member of the Serrano Cahuilla tribe who took office in 2018 representing San Bernardino and parts of the surrounding county. Ramos donated $5,500 to Myers’ campaign.

Myers touts his experience working in a tribal government that has broken new ground with criminal justice, economic and environmental initiatives, including a successful high-profile push to remove dams from the Klamath River.

“What is different for me is my perspective and where I come from,” he said. “How we have addressed homelessness, how we have addressed environmental protection, how we have addressed health care, mental health, (missing and murdered indigenous people) is different because I come from a different perspective.”

With the money he raised, Myers hopes to introduce himself to the large population of voters in Sonoma County, he said. But he also hopes to drive significant tribal voter turnout throughout the district — awakening a political force that hasn’t fully expressed itself in statehouse elections. By his campaign’s calculations, there’s 15,000 to 18,000 Native American votes in the district which he believes could put him over the top in the primary.

“If all things are equal and the Republicans vote the way they do,” Myers said, “if our tribal community stepped forward for the first time in this district, possibly the first time in the state, it will be the tribal community who decides our next representative.“

Though the voting block remains significant, Myers’ calculation is based on around 100,000 people voting in the primary, with around 30,000 of those voters going Republican. Recent history suggests that his turnout estimate is low. Hicks suggested his campaign is estimating turnout more around 150,000 voters.

As of April 2022, the California Secretary of State reported 313,173 registered voters in Assembly District 2, with 159,173 registered Democrat.

While primary turnout is lower than general elections, the district’s most recent primaries have seen larger voter turnouts than Myers’ estimate. In the hotly contested presidential election of 2020, for example, 159,278 people voted in the primary, according to Ballotpedia, with Wood getting around 71% of the vote and a Republican candidate taking the rest.

As incumbent, Wood did not face any significant Democrat competition that year. Same as in the 2022 primary, when 130,047 people voted, with more than 37,000 going for the Republican candidate.

Viewed one way, the race could be seen as a contest that has two strong Democratic candidates representing the top half of the district, and two strong candidates coming from Sonoma County, which holds 52% of the registered voters. Through that lens, Myers and Hicks could be seen as drawing from each other’s base while Kelley and Rogers square off for Sonoma County’s votes.

But in interviews and editorial board meetings, the four candidates all expressed that they were on the move and campaigning in the district writ large, not focusing on one area or the other.

Kelley seeks to distinguish herself as someone who has succeeded both in local government and in the private and nonprofit sectors. She is also one of two women in the race and the mother of an 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter. And she also says her time governing in Healdsburg, a smaller city, gives her an experience that will connect with many of the small communities that dot the district.

“They're small cities, a lot of rural unincorporated areas, agricultural communities, environmental challenges, and those are things that are all my wheelhouse,” she said.

Rogers is describing his campaign as a grassroots effort, and he believes his long tenure governing the district’s most populous city demonstrates his quality.

“Our calculus was on a shortened timeline, where people perhaps don't know the candidates, but at least can be reminded of my track record and the issues that I've worked on in the most populous area of the district,” Rogers said. “That would set us up with a hard base that in a short amount of time it's hard for somebody who doesn't have those credentials to break into.”

He also says he got to know the district during his time working for McGuire, the popular state senator known for his continuous travel from the Oregon border to Golden Gate Bridge. Rogers is vocally promoting his endorsement by McGuire, who takes over leadership of the state Senate next month.

Wood has endorsed Hicks. The assemblyman, who also moved into a leadership position last fall as Speaker pro Tempore, told The Press Democrat he has known and worked with Hicks for years in the candidate’s capacity as party leader. He has been impressed by Hicks’ work ethic and pursuit of consensus and is not perturbed by his short time living in Assembly District 2, he said.

“I don’t know that there’s some sort of a litmus test for how long you need to be here,” Wood said. If Hicks had moved solely to run for statehouse, Wood added, “you wouldn’t pick this one because it is so big and so diverse.”

Click, the former radio host, said she entered the race when she thought Wood was running as an incumbent, disliking the idea of the Democrat going unchallenged and undebated. She has pitched herself as a progressive candidate.

Williams, the Mendocino County supervisor, says he’s running to ensure the issues of his county are heard during the race. He conceded in a meeting with the editorial board that he has little chance of winning in such a difficult field. But “stranger things have happened,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88