Republican State Sen. Ling Ling Chang and Democrat Josh Newman are again vying for the 29th Senate District seat, with both candidates — and the political parties backing them — hoping the third time is the charm.
Chang is aiming for her first win against Newman in a direct general election. In 2016, she lost to Newman by a slim 2,498 votes. In 2018, she handily won the seat during a special vote to replace Newman as he lost a controversial recall election.
This cycle, Chang hopes her experience and her record of passing bills even with Democrats holding a legislative supermajority will keep her in office.
Newman, known for connecting with voters in creative ways, is optimistic that he’ll win and, for the first time, hold the seat for the entire four-year term.
Several factors seem to be working to Newman’s advantage, and pundits are narrowly calling the race in his favor. Democrats hold a 7.4 point voter registration advantage in the district. And he’s well-financed, in part because the Democratic Party is focused on helping him reclaim the seat. Also, Chang failed to get a majority of the vote in the March 3 primary, claiming 47.4% of when she was the only Republican on the ballot.
But given Chang’s incumbency, and the complicated history at play, the 29th Senate District may well prove to be one of the tightest state races on the Nov. 3 ballot.
Chang relies on her record
If Chang pulls off a victory, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s won a race where the odds weren’t on her side.
Her political career started in 2005, when, at 29 years old, she defeated a 21-year incumbent to become the first woman elected to the Walnut Valley Water District.
“I’ve always believed in stepping outside your comfort zone in order to grow as a person,” Chang, 44, said, crediting her parents for leading the way.
Chang was born in Taiwan. When she was 3, her parents moved the family to Walnut. They later settled in Diamond Bar, where Chang still lives with her husband and three dogs.
She’s been obsessed with computers since middle school. Chang said her mom worried it wasn’t healthy for a young girl, so she had Chang’s brother put a password on the family computer. When Chang found a way around that, her mom took the keyboard away. But the passion stuck, and much of Chang’s professional career, and many of the bills she’s championed in the senate, have focused on technology.
Chang studied biology at UC Riverside but said family issues prevented her from finishing her degree. During the 2016 campaign, an article stated Chang had graduated from the university, and she was soon hit with her first accusation of padding her resume. Chang insists the reporter made an assumption when she told him she’d attended UCR and that she never claimed to have graduated.
As she worked on technology projects for health-related industries, Chang also served two terms on the Diamond Bar City Council and was president of the nonprofit Youth Science Center. In 2014, soon after she won the 55th Assembly District seat, Chang said people started asking her to run in the open 29th Senate District race. So she walked away from what was then considered a safe GOP Assembly seat to take a run at the Senate, where she felt she could have a bigger impact.
Though it was “painful” to lose that 2016 race to Newman, Chang said, she doesn’t regret her choice. She’d made peace with her decisions and was getting ready to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro when Republicans again approached her with talk of recalling Newman and running her as his replacement.
Months after entering office, Newman was one of the 81 state legislators who voted to raise the California gas tax to help pay for transportation projects and road improvements. Republicans used that vote as a hook to launch a recall effort against Newman, in hopes of regaining the district and possibly breaking Democrats’ supermajority in the state Senate. During the 2018 primary, 58% of voters in SD-29 chose to recall Newman, and 33.8% voted for Chang to take his place.
Since returning to Sacramento, Chang has worked on legislation touching public safety, veterans, animal welfare and technology. She introduced a bill that makes it a crime to send unsolicited nude photos online. She also pushed for an audit of the California Lottery that showed payments to schools weren’t increasing in tandem with revenues, and then introduced a bill that would mandate back payments and more regulation going forward.
Her views on many major issues fall largely along party lines. She opposes universal healthcare, expanded background checks for gun ownership, and sanctuary laws to protect undocumented immigrants. She does support some additional regulations to address climate change, and has been more vocal about following health recommendations during the coronavirus than some of her GOP colleagues, insisting “we need to follow the science.”
In a second Senate term, Chang said her primary focus will be on economic recovery, including finding ways to help local businesses, such as Disneyland, safely reopen. She wants to help make California more affordable through tax breaks for renters and boosting paid family leave. And she wants to address homelessness by focusing on housing and mental health.
Chang declined to say much about Newman. But she did express frustration that one of his campaign fliers made it look like she was shaking hands with Trump, who she’s never met.
When asked about the challenge of being a Republican on the ballot with Trump in a blue-leaning district, Chang said, “I’m trying to prove, especially with my voting record and my relationships across the aisle, all the things I’ve been able to bring to the district that should transcend partisan politics.”
Newman’s unconventional path
The fact that Chang hasn’t disavowed Trump policies, such as separating immigrant children from their families at the border, is one of Rachel Kirk’s biggest complaints about her current state senator.
Kirk, a retired teacher who lives in Diamond Bar, wasn’t politically active until 2016. Now, the 72-year-old is volunteering for Newman’s campaign.
Kirk likes Newman’s stance on universal healthcare (he’s for it). But she also said Newman actively listens to constituents and takes their views seriously. And while she initially viewed some of his campaign strategies — such as buying an ice cream truck to drive around the district — as “silly,” she’s come to believe that such efforts help him connect with people from all walks of life.
Newman has a history of taking chances.
During spring break of his senior year at Yale, for example, Newman broke the news to his father, a doctor, that he’d enrolled in the Army. He’d been trying to figure out what to do after graduation when he saw an ad in “Sports Illustrated” saying he could join the Army as an officer. At the recruitment office, they said they’d never had a Yale student enlist.
Newman’s military career started in 1986. He worked with a nuclear weapons detachment in South Korea and conventional artillery units in Hawaii. He left the service in 1990, just before the Gulf War.
Newman had studied American government and politics at Yale. So when a friend asked him to help with Frank Jordan’s 1991 mayoral campaign in San Francisco, he jumped at the chance. And when Jordan won, he stayed on as an aide to the mayor.
Then came Newman’s first brush with political scandal. In 1993, he took heat for making critical comments about Jordan after he quit, unhappy with the direction Jordan’s office had gone. Then came news that Newman used Jordan’s letterhead to write a note to a woman he was dating, telling her, in the mayor’s voice, to go to a hockey game with him. Newman chalks it up to “bad judgment” but insists it was a joke and he wasn’t actually trying to deceive anyone. That joke still haunts him, with Republicans using it against him during the 2016, 2018 and 2020 campaigns.
He started fresh in Los Angeles in 1993, with stints in the film industry, then as a speech writer, and later as a vice president for the mobile company behind “American Idol” voting. In 2012, he decided he wanted to help fellow veterans find work and founded the nonprofit ArmedForce2Workforce.
Three years later, Newman was complaining to his wife about how tough it can be to cut through government bureaucracy and make real change. She suggested, offhandedly, that he should run for the 29th Senate District seat, which was open because Republican incumbent Bob Huff was termed out. A year later — after eking out a victory with an unconventional, grassroots campaign that included Newman wearing a bear costume to strike up conversations with voters — Newman was in Sacramento.
In office, he championed mental health resources, public education, job creation and infrastructure improvement. He said he’s most proud of securing funding for veterans resource centers in community colleges, creating a pilot program to address root causes of homelessness, and preserving Coyote Hills as a natural open space park.
Newman also voted in favor the gas tax. Soon, he found himself the first state senator to be recalled since 1914.
These days, Newman serves as executive director of the Veteran Employment Initiative. He lives in Fullerton with his wife, their 3-year-old daughter, and four rescue chihuahuas.
If he gets a second chance in office, Newman hopes to expand his program to address homelessness. He also wants to work on renewable energy, college affordability and reducing wildfire risks. But he believes much of the next couple of years will be focused on addressing fallout from Covid-19.
“It’s going to become more important than ever to have smart people who are willing to explore creative but proven solutions to some of these problems.”
In this election cycle, Newman has raised more than three times as much money as Chang. His biggest contributors include the state and local Democratic parties who hope to flip the SD-29 seat back to blue.
But Chang is getting more support in independent expenditures. A political action committee formed by gas and oil companies has spent nearly $2 million opposing Newman’s campaign, and more than $600,000 supporting Chang. A coalition of small businesses also is independently supporting Chang, while an education PAC has spent more than $600,000 opposing her reelection.
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