A down-ballot race that matters! TL;DR - I did my homework and urge you to vote Patrick Wolff for Insurance Commissioner. He's the only one who has any clue what he's doing. California's insurance commissioner race doesn't get much attention, but it's actually one of the most important races on your June 2 ballot. It took me over a month to buy a car because insurers had paused new auto policies in the state and I needed insurance before being able to sign the lease papers. Many homeowners can't get coverage at all right now, and a lot of homes in the state are losing value because they can't get insured! We've had a series of fires over the last many years and folks who lost everything got screwed by the companies they'd been paying for decades. TBH It's crazy that we vote for insurance commissioner at all. This should clearly be an appointed role. Most states appoint someone with actual expertise. But we live in California and have this silly form of direct democracy. For this position, we've ended up with a conveyor belt of bad or termed-out politicians with zero relevant background trying to get into political office somewhere. That's how we got Ricardo Lara, who ran for the job on a platform of (I kid you not!) - being openly gay and "standing up to fight our bullying President, Donald Trump." This is the insurance commissioner. We elected a journalism major who had never worked anywhere near insurance because he's gay and promised to fight Donald Trump. WTF! The job is rate filings and claims oversight. Lara fleeced us. He took money from companies he regulated, and gave them preferable access, and spent tons of taxpayer money traveling around the world, while at the same time being too busy to accept rate filings from insurers who then pulled out of the state. Rate filings supposed to take 60 days routinely took over a year. Auto insurance rate approvals were frozen for two years. Seven major carriers paused or stopped writing policies in CA. The FAIR Plan doubled. Meanwhile, we've been in crisis mode with some of the worst crises in history during his term... The field to replace him is mostly more of the same. Has-beens who have no insurance background. Jane Kim wants to insurance run by the state, and is endorsed by Bernie Sanders. We have a bunch of other career politicians in the race, hoping to become insurance commissioner because they failed at whatever else they were actually aspiring for. I'm voting for Patrick Wolff. He's a CFA who built an insurance brokerage, analyzed insurers for 20 years, and passed the property and casualty license exam during his campaign, the first candidate ever to do that. He's self-funded his campaign and won't run for another office. His plan is straightforward: allow real competition so no single insurer can gain enough market power to blackmail the regulator on pricing. Require subsidiaries operating in CA to have financial backstops from their parent companies. Publish claims performance report cards for every insurer so consumers can reward good actors and punish bad ones. Streamline rate filings so they actually get processed. The crisis in our state is the result of bad regulation... Good regulation can fix it. Vote Patrick Wolff, and enjoy this awesome video!