This conversation aired in the October 29, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Election day is next week, and here at KALW we’ve been bringing you all the Bay Area ballot info you may need.
The race for California’s next Insurance Commissioner – a role that regulates the largest property insurance market in the country – doesn’t typically get much hype.
But the vote to determine who will fill that boring-sounding job could be the ballot issue that most impacts your wallet this year.
As wildfire risk grows in California, insurance companies have dropped – or refused to write – home insurance policies across the state, leaving many homeowners underinsuredor without coverage at all.
Meanwhile, the FAIR Plan, the state's disaster insurance of “last resort,” is strained after years of devastating wildfires. And renters have struggled to get insurance companies to pay for health testing on homes and property damaged by toxic wildfire smoke.
All of this has turned the race for an otherwise dry regulatory role into one that’s grabbing attention this November.
KALW’s personal finance reporter Francesca Fenzi tells us more.
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CONVERSATION TRANSCRIPT
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HANA: Hey, Francesca.
FRANCESCA: Hey, Hana.
HANA: The governor's race. We've got big city mayoral races. Those are the kinda races that get people, you know, excited and fired up in California. But insurance commissioner? You know, it's a little… wah-wah. Doesn't have the same hype or fanfare, right?
FRANCESCA: It might seem like a pretty wonky, obscure job – and it can be – but the insurance commissioner really has a big impact on your monthly bills. If you have home insurance, auto insurance, life, pet, or renter's insurance, maybe even insurance for your business. It's their job to regulate most forms of insurance in the state and to advocate on behalf of Californians who buy insurance, in what is the largest market in the country.
HANA: It seems like this role is totally underrated and needs to be getting more hype. So with such a huge role, it seems like this would be appointed by the governor, but actually we get to hire this person?
FRANCESCA: Yes, we are interviewing for this job. This is an elected role in California. We're one of only eleven states that elects our commissioner. In other states, this is usually a position, like you said, that's appointed by the governor. And that was the case in California until the 1980s when there was this really big insurance reform act that was passed.
Very similar to now, people were fed up with high premiums. They passed a ballot measure that lowered insurance premiums by 20% across the board. It expanded what the insurance commissioner could regulate, and then they made that an elected position going forward.
HANA: So why are people getting fired up or more passionate about all of this? What's the difference between this year and previous years?
FRANCESCA: Well, top of mind for a lot of people this year is the home insurance crisis. We have had, in the last ten years, seven of the state's most costly and damaging wildfires. With climate change, that fire risk is still high, even growing in parts of the state.
And after a series of fires in the North Bay a few years back, which you may remember, lots of homeowners had to file expensive claims on their home insurance after they lost their houses. Some of those companies, the insurance companies, stopped writing or renewing policies at that time.
It was a big issue in the state. Companies were saying that they needed to charge people more on their premiums to cover the risk of paying out after a big wildfire, but the state limits from some of those earlier reforms on insurance were holding them back. So instead, the insurance companies just said, ‘We're out. We're leaving California.’ They stopped writing policies. They dropped people from existing policies.
HANA: But isn't that the precise time when an insurance company should rise to the occasion?
FRANCESCA: Yeah, you're thinking like an insurance commissioner! And like a lot of the public.This was super frustrating for a lot of people. It was a big mess. Home buyers can't get a mortgage loan without insurance often, and people who've already invested their life savings sometimes into a home can face total financial ruin if something happens to their property while it's uninsured.
HANA: Right.
FRANCESCA: It’s very high stakes. So to address this, state lawmakers were trying to pass bills to give the insurance companies more leeway to raise their premiums. Consumer advocates and people who pay insurance were saying, "We can't afford higher insurance costs."
HANA: So now, Francesca, who are the candidates? What are our choices this time?
FRANCESCA: Yes. So we have two candidates for insurance commissioner. Both of them are Democrats, and they are actually aligned on a lot of issues, but seem to have pretty different approaches.
Ben Allen is a current state senator who represents West Los Angeles, including the Pacific Palisades. Here he is talking at a debate hosted by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters in Sacramento earlier this month.
Ben Allen: The fires hit my community really hard last year, and I ended up spending so much time walking the ashes of people's homes in the wake of the fires. And it got us to work helping people get the payouts that they deserve, running a whole slate of legislation, taking on the industry on claims denials and claims delays, and giving more enforcement powers to go after bad behavior.
This is an area where I've spent a lot of time working, trying to make the system actually work for people. I've got a bold plan that's focused on creating more competition and making sure we bring insurers back while we also hold insurers accountable and we reduce risk around our state.
FRANCESCA: He also says that he wants to step up wildfire mitigation and prevention, and that he'll balance industry interests with the needs of everyday Californians.
HANA: And who is running against him? Someone we know here in San Francisco very well.
FRANCESCA: Yes. Jane Kim is a former San Francisco city supervisor. She went on to manage the California operations for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign for president back in 2020.
Like Sanders, she represents a more progressive side of the Democratic Party and is running on what she's called a platform of change. Here she is at that same debate hosted by CalMatters.
Jane Kim: We, as consumers, are required to have insurance. We are required to have insurance to drive to work or to school, to qualify for a mortgage, to buy a first home, to open a business or even a nonprofit of any kind.
We have to make insurance affordable, available, and fair, or we're shutting everyday Californians out of our economy, and that is already happening. The premiums are too high, they're canceling our coverage, and even when we have insurance, they fight us every step of the way.
FRANCESCA: The centerpiece of her campaign is a proposal for a new single-payer disaster insurance program that would be state managed and she says would be funded by the insurance premiums that customers are already paying to private insurance companies.
Jane Kim: Meaning you still get your home insurance on the market that covers the garden variety retail, the flood in your home because the pipe bursts, the fire in your home because your stove explodes, the burglaries – which they cover pretty well. But they don't cover disasters very well. So that levy would be paid to the state.
FRANCESCA: Kim's proposal is a pretty dramatic overhaul of the current natural disaster insurance system, and her plan has become kind of the focus of this race.
HANA: Why? What is she proposing and how is it different?
FRANCESCA: Kim says that she wants to create a true universal disaster insurance system. She's pointed to models like they have in other countries, like New Zealand and France, both of which have a version of this. And Kim has said that the state would take premiums from this universal insurance plan – not for profit – but to fund fire mitigation efforts elsewhere in the state and kind of bring down the risk that's leading to this home insurance crisis.
Her critics, including opponent Ben Allen, have pointed out that there isn't really a model of how this system would work for a state like California. She's pulling from a couple of different places. There's not exactly a template for what she's suggesting.
Kim has also said that she would incentivize insurance companies to keep offering home insurance policies, not by persuading them back to the state by allowing them to raise their rates, but by requiring that they offer home insurance if they also wanna sell auto insurance, life insurance, renter insurance policies.
HANA: Aha. Mm-hmm. So she's tying those worlds together
FRANCESCA: Yeah. So while Ben Allen's approach is a little bit like a carrot to bring back insurance companies, Jane Kim is very much promising the stick.
HANA: Right. Mm-hmm
FRANCESCA: She calls insurance a trillion-dollar industry in the state and says, and this is true, that insurers like State Farm have turned a profit in California for the past two years, even as they've complained about the costs of paying out expensive insurance claims on wildfires like the ones that happened in Los Angeles.
HANA: They're still making money.
FRANCESCA: Yes, they are in fact making record profits, and that information is publicly available. She says her universal insurance plan would be able to absorb and balance risk better than the current state-run insurance disaster plan, because it would have a more diverse portfolio of properties, both higher and lower risk, to help kind of balance out the insurance pool.
HANA: Okay, so that FAIR Plan that you mentioned, that's the state's current disaster insurance plan. If that's already there, why are they proposing a whole new plan?
FRANCESCA: The FAIR Plan, because it is the last resort disaster insurance plan, has mostly high-risk properties because the people who are taking out those plans live in high fire risk areas where they couldn't get insurance on the open market.
And so the more people who use it to insure higher risk properties, the greater the risk of that plan running out of money when a massive disaster hits. That was something that experts had been warning about for years leading into the L.A. fires, and we saw a version of it play out with those Palisades and Eaton fires.
HANA: So back to Allen. Allen is a critic of Kim's universal insurance proposal. What is he promising by comparison?
FRANCESCA: He says Kim's universal insurance plan is unrealistic and would take a very long time to implement, and that Californians need help with their home insurance right now.
Ben Allen: So look, I'm not against the idea of having a bold conversation about all sorts of different things we could do in the future. But I gotta say, my focus right now, after what I've experienced in my community and what I'm seeing around the state, is actually trying to fix the real problems right now.
FRANCESCA: He's also taken the approach of criticizing the current FAIR Plan as evidence that we shouldn't, as he says, allow the government to get into the insurance business. He's saying it's not working now, why would we create a new government-run insurance program?
As for what he would do instead, he's been a little more circumspect. He said that insurers are pulling out of California partly because the state takes years to rule on the premium or rate changes that they need to make – or they say they need to make. He'd change that review process so decisions would take months and not years.
Allen has said that he would scale up neighborhood fire prevention programs, he would put more state resources into mitigation. And since insurers price risk by community and not individual houses, he thinks this will have the greatest impact.
HANA: Okay. So it sounds like Allen is really focused on fire prevention as a way to mitigate insurance challenges down the line. That seems like a difference in their approach then, right? Between Allen and Kim.
FRANCESCA: Well, yes and no. Jane Kim says she has plans to do many of the same things that Allen has been talking about, in terms of fire prevention, but she also wants a long-term solution to the crisis.
Jane Kim: And again, I just come back to the fact that the insurance industry is only offering us two options, raise rates or they exit California. We need to look beyond that.
HANA: All right, Francesca, so the stakes are pretty high. Do you have any predictions on how this race might turn out? What's it looking like?
FRANCESCA: Kim secured more votes in the primary election this summer, and people seem to be resonating with some of her ideas.
But Allen has ultimately received more funding between now and then. And establishment endorsements seem to be largely on his side. So it's going to be a really close race.
