Listen to the full interview below, and check out our profiles with Barbara Lee, Steve Garvey and Katie Porter.
California Rep. Adam Schiff is currently the leading contender for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Dianne Feinstein, having raised twice as much money as any other Senate candidate in the entire country, according to Politico.
But what sets him apart from his opponents? And what does he plan to do if he wins the race? In a wide-ranging discussion with KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman, Schiff emphasized his track record defending democratic institutions.
“There are two really big issues that I think are intertwined that we're running on. Democracy is one of them, the economy is the other,” he said. “And the two, in my view, are really deeply entangled, because when an economy isn't working for millions of people when they're working harder than ever and still struggling to get by, or they see their parents' life as somehow better or easier than theirs, they start to entertain a demagogue who comes along promising they alone can fix things.”
The former House Intelligence Committee chair was the lead prosecutor in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. He said he’s proud of the work he did “holding a corrupt president to account,” but also proud of reaching across the aisle to get things done for his constituents.
“Even during the worst of the Trump years, when I was chairing the Intel Committee and I had Devin Nunes as my ranking Republican, we got the annual intelligence authorization bills done,” he said. “We got new privacy protections, we got new funding for different agencies to keep the country safe. You have to, at times, compartmentalize and say, okay, I'm gonna fight you to the teeth on this, but also we need to work together and get this other part of our work done.”
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As for the other big issue Schiff is campaigning on – the economy – he’s focused on bringing down the costs of housing, child care, and other necessities. He said that while the stock market is doing well and productivity has been rising for decades, the prosperity isn’t being passed down to workers.
“There's been a decades-long effort to marginalize labor and make it hard to negotiate and hard to form a union and hard to get a contract,” Schiff said. “And so we've seen the very wealthy do super well, and we've seen working-class families really struggle, and we've seen the middle class feel like the floor is dropping out from under them.”
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