Election Results: Jane Kim Has Slight Lead Over Ben Allen In Race To Be California Insurance Commissioner

Jane Kim, a populist candidate running for insurance commissioner who wants to cap executive pay in the industry, narrowly led the vote count Tuesday over her Democratic opponent Ben Allen, after a months-long campaign saw the candidates clash on potential ways to reduce homeowners’ insurance premiums.

The election became a bit of a high-profile contest in which a range of policy ideas were floated in the primary, as increasingly frequent disasters have rocked the private homeowners insurance market in California.

At 11 p.m. Tuesday, Kim said in a statement to the Southern California News Group that she was cautiously optimistic about winning the election where she was ahead of Allen by roughly 168,000 votes with a total of 5.8 million cast statewide. Roughly 76% of the precincts had partially reported.

“Californians want an independent Insurance Commissioner who will fight for them, not for billionaires and corporations,” said Kim who gathered in a neighborhood bar with supporters in San Francisco. “There has never been a statewide campaign like this one in California, and we are so proud of the race we ran.”

Kim said that she pushed her vision for insurance reform during the campaign —  “one where people come before profits, and where elected officials answer to the public instead of the industries they’re supposed to be regulating.”

In the past, the job of insurance commissioner has been one of the lower-profile statewide positions, charged with regulating the insurance industry — everything from auto and life insurance to property and casualty.

The race, which has attracted more attention and money than usual, comes amid concerns over last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles County, which led to higher insurance premiums for homeowners throughout the state.

California’s secretary of state’s office will continue to tally votes daily until all are counted. The office has until Dec. 11 to certify the results. Continue to check back here for updates.

Allen, when reached in Venice where he gathered with supporters to watch the results of the race, said that the contest was essentially “a dead heat.”

“There’s literally still millions of votes that are yet to be counted,” Allen said. “It’s a 51% to 49% race, and I’d obviously rather be at 51%, ahead of Jane Kim. But, you know, I’m at 49% and that’s OK. We’re going to just keep hitting refresh for the next week and see where this goes.”

The race is a first for candidates going against each other from the same political party since the office became an elected position in 1990. For the 2026 race, a field of 11 candidates vied to replace term-limited incumbent Ricardo Lara, the eighth person in the commissioner role since it became an elected position in 1988.

The next commissioner will inherit a range of political problems, including industry demands to raise premiums amid rising wildfire risk and maintaining distance from insurers accused of getting too cozy with the current commissioner.

The winner has plenty of tough decisions to make, including addressing the state’s overburdened Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort. Nearly two weeks ago, the FAIR Plan raised rates 29.1% for certain homeowners starting Oct. 15.

Pushing climate-change fixes

Allen, 48, a state senator who represents parts of Santa Monica and Los Angeles that were badly damaged in last year’s wildfires, wants to bring his legislative expertise to “reduce risk” and depopulate the FAIR Plan.

The lawmaker wants the state to reduce risk by investing in wildfire mitigation and help reduce the need for pricier insurance coverage through the FAIR Plan. He says the policy of bringing more insurers to the table also will eventually depopulate the FAIR Plan.

In his dozen years in the Legislature, Allen carved out a reputation focused on environmental protection — including reducing plastic pollution, safe drinking water, wildfire prevention, drought preparedness and clean air.

Since last year’s L.A. fires, Allen has been knee-deep in authoring legislation to improve the state’s insurance marketplace, including consumer protections, wildfire catastrophe, oversight and accountability and ways to prevent sudden coverage drops.

Allen wants to lower insurance costs by working on policies with the state legislature to update building codes to require more fire-resistant materials, revise land-use policies to minimize building in flammable areas near wildlands, and disincentivize oil companies from exacerbating climate change.

Unlike Kim, Allen opposes capping executive pay. He wants to ensure “excessive executive pay is not being passed on to consumers and that insurers cannot plead financial hardship while rewarding executives at levels that are inconsistent with those claims.”

No reliance on profits

Kim, 49, a former San Francisco supervisor from Lakeport, is proposing a single-payer model to tackle the state’s home and disaster insurance crisis that doesn’t rely on profits.

She plans to stop the growth of the FAIR Plan, which acts as a backstop for homeowners who can’t get insurance elsewhere due to fire zones in which they live, or have filed claims too high for their private insurer to absorb.

To do this, Kim wants to replace the current multipayer, private home insurance market and the FAIR Plan with a centralized, state-managed system to cover wildfire and flood risks.

The proposed single-payer, state-run “universal disaster insurance for all” would make coverage automatic and universal, with everyone in the same risk pool and premiums based on property cost and risk.

By pooling premiums into a public system, she argues the state can directly fund home-hardening (using fire-resistant building materials), community fireproofing with low interest loans or tax credits, more fuel management (clearing or cutting back vegetation and brush around homes) and community resilience (evaluating neighborhood-level risks rather than just individual properties, by upgrading drainage or building codes).

Kim supports capping insurance executive pay, arguing the current insurance market pads executive pay while leaving families stranded when disasters strike.

Kim was formerly the California political director and national political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. The populist isn’t running publicly on the back of the senator’s Democratic Socialist viewpoints — though the movement is experiencing a political surge bolstered by the groundwork laid by the politician in cities like Denver, New York, Seattle and Los Angeles.

She also is former California director of the Working Families Party, a progressive political party aligned with Sanders. Kim has held other elected offices, including the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee; the San Francisco Board of Education (2006-2010); and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (2011-2019)

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