California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s term ends next year. If she runs for re-election, her opponent just might be Caitlyn Jenner.
Jenner told New York’s AM 970 yesterday that she has “considered” running for Senate to represent the state of California. “I like the political side of it,” she said. It is unclear which part of being a senator is not political.
“I gotta find out where I can do a better job,” Jenner said. “Can I do a better job from the outside, kind of working the perimeter of the political scene, being open to talk to anybody? Or are you better off from the inside, and we are in the process of determining that.”
Jenner said in April that she was considering running for public office, without mentioning the US Senate. No other prominent Republican has thrown their hat in the ring for this election.
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Jenner is a Republican who famously supported Donald Trump during the 2016 election, claiming that a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women “would be very good for women’s issues.” She has spoken at Republican events and appears to hold standard Republican positions on everything besides LGBTQ issues, and even there her support is lukewarm.
“I hope to change the perception of the Republican Party and make it the party of equality,” Jenner said in the radio interview, not understanding that it will take more than a transgender woman losing an election in California to make LGBT people believe that the Republican Party has changed in any significant way.
Just this past week, House Republicans tried to pass a bill to take away medical care from transgender troops, the Republican Attorney General spoke to an anti-LGBTQ hate group, the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee approved a federal judiciary nominee who casually uses the word “faggot,” and both houses of Congress are trying to pass a bill that would take away health care coverage from people living with HIV/AIDS. That’s just one week, and just federal Republicans – the GOP’s problems with LGBTQ voters are far deeper than a “perception.”
The last time California had a Republican US Senator was in 1992. John Seymour, who was appointed to replace a senator who resigned, lost his seat in a special election to Feinstein before he could even complete his appointed term.
California’s other US senator is Kamala Harris, who as attorney general of California refused to defend Proposition 8, the ballot measure in 2008 that banned marriage between two members of the same sex. Harris said she refused because she believed the ban was unconstitutional.
