OC Political

Senator Joel Anderson (R-Alpine)

State Senator Joel Anderson (R-Alpine) has entered the race for Board of Equalization to succeed Diane Harkey (R-Dana Point), who is running for the 49th Congressional District seat after Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Vista) announced his decision not to seek re-election.  Anderson seeks to be the first San Diego County resident to win the BOE seat since Ernest Dronenburg termed out twenty years ago.

First elected to the Padre Dam Municipal Water District in 2002, Anderson was elected to the State Assembly in 2006 and re-elected in 2008.  He won a 2010 bid for the State Senate and was re-elected in 2014.  Anderson raised $332,000 for Assembly in 2006 and $466,000 for his 2008 re-election.  He raised $779,000 for his initial Senate election in 2010 and $200,000 in his re-election in 2014.

Anderson narrowly won a five-candidate Republican primary for Assembly in 2006, defeating Santee Councilman Jack Dale by just 858 votes.  He won a four-candidate Republican primary for Senate in 2010, defeating Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone by 14%.

Former Assemblyman Ken Lopez-Maddox also entered the race, but oddly did so as a Democrat, a party he only recently joined.  First elected to the Garden Grove City Council in 1996, he was elected to the State Assembly in 1998 and was re-elected in 2000 and 2002 before losing the 2004 Republican primary for State Senate to John Campbell 60%-30% (a third candidate got 9%).  He moved to South County and then won a seat on the Capistrano Unified School District during a 2008 recall election but would be recalled himself in 2010, as the CUSD majority flipped back and forth.  In 2014, he was preparing for a bid for Orange County Public Administrator, but then the Board of Supervisors consolidated the position into the office of Orange County District Attorney-Public Administrator.  Instead, his wife, Monica, then ran for Clerk-Recorder, coming in second in a four-candidate field, winning 18% of the vote to Hugh Nguyen‘s 61%.  One week after his wife’s defeat for Clerk-Recorder, Ken Lopez-Maddox left the Republican Party.  He was registered as No Party Preference from then until becoming a Democrat in recent days.