Your guide to the California insurance commissioner race: Allen vs. Kim

The race to succeed Ricardo Lara as California insurance commissioner following the devastating January 2025 wildfires is a classic study in contrasts.

It pits a veteran legislator, state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), serving his third and final term in the Senate, against an upstart progressive candidate, Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor. They topped a packed field of candidates in the June 2 primary.

Kim was the leading vote-getter with 26.8% of the vote to Allen’s 19.6%, amid a progressive wave nationally that has led to Zohran Mamdani being elected mayor of New York and Abdul El-Sayed winning the Democratic nomination for senator in Michigan.

With widespread anger over how some insurers have handled claims stemming from wildfires in the state, Kim has stood out with a proposal to establish a nonprofit “single payer” insurance plan run by the state to cover catastrophic fire damage — something that never has been done.

Allen has pointed to a long legislative record seeking to reform the industry and make the home insurance market more attractive to insurers — something heavy on the details but hard to condense into a campaign slogan.

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Voter guide to the 2026 California general election

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Oct. 1, 2026

Allen, 48, represents the Palisades fire zone and has a lengthy history of insurance-related legislation, including leading the effort to put a successful $10-billion climate bond on the 2024 ballot, which he calls a key step in reducing fire risk and lowering premiums. A native and resident of Santa Monica, Allen attended Harvard and has a law degree from UC Berkeley. He previously served on the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board. He is endorsed by the California Democratic Party and leading elected party officials, including U.S. Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla.

Kim, 49, served as a San Francisco supervisor from 2011 to 2019. Her progressive credentials include leading a campaign to make the city’s community college tuition free and serving as California political director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she attended Stanford and also has a law degree from Berkeley. Though she ran as a Democrat, she is a former director of the Working Families Party and is endorsed by Sanders (I-Vt.) and the California Federation of Labor Unions.

Fundraising data will be updated regularly until the election.

The cornerstone of Kim’s platform is her call for the state-run property disaster insurance program, which largely would be funded by policyholders. Coverage would be universal, with policyholders automatically enrolled. With no need to generate shareholder profits, fund marketing or pay high executive salaries, she contends, the plan could better invest in fire prevention and make buildings and property more fire resilient. Such a drastic change in the insurance system would require legislation and support from the governor.

“Voters I’ve talked to don’t want to see the same old tinkering with the system, because most voters agree that it’s actually magical thinking that doing the same tinkering of the existing system is going to lead to a different result,” she said.

Allen is sharply critical of Kim’s plan, which he says is woefully short on details. Instead, he is focusing on the mechanics of improving the current system — for both homeowners and insurers. He wants to speed reviews of insurer rate applications, create a business office to attract more carriers to the state and work with elected officers at all levels to design programs that reduce fire risk of individual properties and at the neighborhood and community scale.

“I’m focused on what’s actually doable. The people who suffer from these terrible fires don’t need a 10-year experiment. Voters of all stripes, not just Republicans, are not interested in making the state a guinea pig,” he said.

With some insurers accused of delaying, underpaying and unfairly denying home insurance claims following the Los Angeles County fires, Kim wants to require insurers to immediately pay 100% of contents coverage in a disaster, stop rate hikes following a claim and conduct department probes of insurers with elevated complaint rates. She also wants guaranteed replacement costs for total losses.

“The way that I am approaching the framework of insurance is to really transform the insurance industry to work for consumers. I think my opponent and a lot of different political leadership has been fixated on how to make the market work for insurers,” she said.

Allen says he has sought to address those issues, including through a bill last year that increased up-front payouts in fire losses without requiring itemization by policyholders during states of emergency. He also cites a busy legislative session this year in which he was an author of bills the governor signed that give policyholders time to resolve issues that led them to be dropped by an insurer, require insurers to fix any deficiencies uncovered by department examinations and establish a low-interest loan program for residential fire-proofing.

“People are frustrated. I get it, and that’s why I’ve worked so intensely on taking on the industry through my time in the Legislature,” Allen said.

Both candidates support creating a “dashboard” where consumers can check on a carrier’s claims record before buying insurance from it.

Kim’s platform includes a plan to expand the state’s low-cost auto insurance program, which offers limited policies written by private carriers to low-income drivers, to all drivers. Kim also wants to centralize authority over health insurance programs within the department and is proposing a plan to guarantee healthcare for every child in California — two ideas that would need extensive legislative authority.

Allen also has talked about expanding the low-cost auto insurance program and has a number of proposals to improve insurance department operations. They include investing in data and digital infrastructure to better handle rate filings, consumer complaints and disaster claims issues. He wants to improve the department’s communications with the public, create the office of a consumer advocate and bar top staff from immediately working for insurers after leaving the department.