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The youngest member of the California State Assembly and its first openly bisexual member, Lee was just 25 when he beat Republican challenger Bob Brunton by a more than 2-to-1 margin in the race for District 25 in the November 2020 general election.
“We had no idea that we would get anywhere close to this,” Lee said on election night, according to San Jose Spotlight. “We were super counted out as the underdog when we started this campaign about two years ago … we were outspent 15 to one, and yet we came out on top.”
After redistricting, in the November 2022 election he ran for the District 24 seat, winning with 68.1 percent of the vote.
Background
A 2017 graduate of UC Davis, where he served as student body president and earned a degree in political science and communications, Lee previously interned in the legislature, including for his predecessor, Kansen Chu, and worked as a food deliveryman.
Lee campaigned for his seat for almost 18 months after Chu announced he’d leave the assembly to run for the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and lost. It was in keeping with Lee’s high energy, which Milpitas Planning Commissioner Timothy Alcorn witnessed when they knew one another in high school.
“He was … the kind of guy who would walk up to you at seven in the morning and be like, ‘Good morning!'” Alcorn told San Jose Spotlight. “And you’d be like, ‘Ugh, it’s too early.'”
Committees
Budget
Privacy and Consumer Protection
Rules
Subcommittee No. 2 on Education and Finance
Transportation
Select Legislation
AB 20: Despite his youth and lack of previous political experience, Chu has wasted no time in the assembly, introducing a bill on his first day, co-authored with Ash Kalra, to ban corporate donations to politicians. The bill has drawn some debate, with Loyola Law professor Jessica Levinson telling the San Jose Mercury News, “It’s not clear to me that in reality, it’s good to use our scarcest resource, which is taxpayer dollars, to fund campaigns when private money is still so available.” As of March 2021, the bill had been referred to the Committee on Elections.
District Boundaries and Office Locations
Lee’s district spans both Santa Clara and Alameda counties, including all or parts of the cities of Milpitas, Santa Clara, Newark, Fremont, and San Jose.
