EXCLUSIVE: Anna Caballero speaks with KION after State Senate victory

“It feels terrific,” Anna Caballero tells KION about her State Senate District 12 win.

Eight years after losing the race for the district 12, it was redemption for Caballero. The District 30 Assemblymember defeated Republican Rob Poythress in a race that was too close to call on election night.

“It was really tough,” Caballero said. “And that’s very difficult. Especially when you have everyone calling you, asking ‘is it over? Is it over’.”

Caballero says her team ran a grassroots campaign, holding smaller meetings with voters. They also benefited from people being more politically active.

“Things happened with the federal government that they don’t like. And they want to be active and involved. That made it a lot easier to go out and have town hall meetings.”

This was, at times, an ugly race with a barrage of aggressive campaigns ads on both sides. Caballero will now have to represent the 90-thousand Poythress voters along with her own. She tells KION, after election, people move on.

“I’ve got a lot of experience in getting past that. When you serve in government, you serve as a non-partisan participant.”

She says the three biggest issues people mentioned on the campaign trail were water, healthcare, and affordable housing. People moved to the rural district because they were priced out of other California cities.

“There are state resources to start building affordable housing. And so we need our local governments to start working with us so that we can have the property available, the permits available, (and) so that we can start building housing for people that actually maintain our workforce.”

Caballero says there needs to be a way to bump up income for workers already here. This would include adapting to an agriculture industry that is seeing increasing mechanization and automation. She wants to push for more funding in vocational education.

This is a solution echoed by her opponent, Poythress.

Democrats will have nearly all the power in Sacramento during the next session. Caballero’s win completed a veto-proof super-majority in the state senate.

“Are there things that are going to be easier to pass because of a two-thirds, maybe,” Caballero said. “Some of these issues are just not partisan issues. Whether you have clean drinking water coming out of your faucet, is not a partisan issue.”