Two California Insurance Commissioner Candidates Are Left, and Reform Is Coming

Expect more efforts to reform California’s troubled homeowners insurance market from the state’s next top insurance regulator regardless of who wins a race that has now been whittled down to two candidates.

Democrats Jane Kim and Ben Allen are advancing to the Nov. 3 primary in the race for California insurance commissioner. The top two together garnered more than 45% of the votes cast in the June 2 primary. The winner will replace outgoing commissioner Ricardo Lara, who is term limited.

Kim, who raised more than $700,000 during her campaign, is pushing a publicly backed single-payer disaster insurance system.

Allen is a state Legislator who has authored several bills to address insurance affordability in the state, including creating new home-hardening incentives. He raised $977,000 for his campaign.

Insurance agent Stacy A. Korsgaden, a Republican, conceded the race earlier this week to Kim and Allen.

Ballots are still being counted, but latest figures from the California Secretary of State show Kim has 27.3% of the votes, with 2.2 million people marking the box next to her name. Allen has 19.4% of the vote, followed by Korsgaden, who ran a close third with 15.87% of the vote.

Related: Public Interest Groups Backing California Homeowners Insurance Bills

The race for insurance commissioner drew 11 candidates covering several parties, and backgrounds that included two insurance agents, a former insurance broker, a state legislator and a former state legislator.

Addressing the state’s “insurance crisis,” which took on a bigger priority following the devastating January 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires, was the loudest message coming from most of the field.

Kim, an attorney/consumer advocate, served on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors from 2011 and 2019. She has also ran for state Senate and for San Francisco mayor.

Her platform includes providing natural disaster insurance for everyone, ensuring that premiums go to paying for claims, increasing transparency from insurers and investing in safer homes and communities.

She was asked what she thought of the outgoing efforts from Commissioner Lara to get carriers to return to writing homeowners insurance in California through regulation changes that include enabling reinsurance to be used in rate-setting, the use of newer catastrophe models and expedited rate requests.

“Those have been solutions for the insurance industry, which is important because they’re one of the stakeholders, but it hasn’t done anything to make insurance more affordable for everyday consumers,” Kim said.

She argues that the property/casualty industry “is doing exceedingly well,” reporting its first full-year underwriting gain in four years, fueling a jump in net income to $170 billion, and that it’s the insurance consumers who need help now.

She called out Travelers as an example of how well she feels the P/C industry is doing. The carrier reported a strong enough profit for the first quarter of 2026 that it announced it was returning more than $2.2 billion of excess capital to shareholders during the quarter.

“And so, the insurance industry is booming, it is very profitable…and instead of sharing the success of their profits with their policyholders in the form of discounts or even just investing in resiliency to reduce everyone’s collective risk, they’re just distributing it back to their shareholders,” Kim said.

Related: Travelers to Expand Homeowners Insurance Offering in California

Kim believes the insurance commissioner’s office has “failed to exercise the full extent of its regulatory power,” and she is proposing a Disaster Insurance for All Program, a single-payer system similar to systems in other countries.

“I am interested in programs around the world, and we have looked at guaranteed whole disaster insurance in France and New Zealand, and we’ve also looked at earthquake insurance in Japan,” she said.

She sees an advantage in a publicly run nonprofit program or public-private partnership system, in which there’s incentive to use premium dollar investments and returns to address risk instead of the current system of trying to lower risk in portfolios by avoiding covering the riskiest homes.

“In New Zealand, for example, where they have single-payer home disaster insurance program, they claw back a percentage of the premiums and the returns from those premiums back into fire proofing, flood proofing, and resiliency measures that make the country as a whole safer and reduces the risk of portfolios being destroyed by climate disaster,” she said.

She also wants to “rein in some of the greed” by capping how much premiums can go to things like CEO pay and Super Bowl ads and instead ensure those dollars go back into the business and paying claims. She sees a framework for those efforts in the Affordable Care Act.

“One example is the ACA requires that 85 cents of every dollar premium dollar goes back into healthcare costs,” Kim said. “I want to propose that we look at at least 65 cents of home insurance premium dollars are going back into playing paying claims. Right now, it’s roughly hovering at about 49 cents a dollar.”

Allen appears to be taking more of a middle ground between finding ways to encourage carriers to write more business in California and lowering rates for consumers.

Allen, who has been as a member of the California state Senate since 2014, campaigned on plans that include restoring a competitive insurance market, ensuring people are treated fairly after disasters and building resilient communities.

His plan for Fire Mitigation Partnerships, SB 1297, brings together insurers, utilities, local governments and community organizations to pool resources and improve community-scale hardening efforts. He advanced SB 894 to support home hardening through low-interest financing.

“I want to invest in a stronger customer service infrastructure,” Allen said. “One of the things I saw in the wake of the (L.A.) fires was that there’s only 34 people handling these claims calls from around the state. That’s less than one per 1 million Californians.”

Smoke damage claims and claims paying practices following the L.A. wildfires has become a point of contention between the California Department of Insurance and some carriers. The CDI in May took action against State Farm over an investigation that reportedly shows the carrier has been mishandling insurance claims from the wildfires. A department filing alleges violations of the Unfair Insurance Claims Practices Act, including 398 violations identified in a market conduct examination.

Allen said he also wants to address rate review, following up on steps Lara has taken to speed up the process, as well as putting a greater focus on risk reduction.

“I really want to push us toward a mindset that focuses on risk reduction and trying to shore up the market in a way that is going to make it so that these kinds of disasters are less likely to happen in the future,” he said.

He is encouraged that some of Lara’s policies may have helped slow the rapid, unwanted growth of the California FAIR Plan. The insurer of last resort is still growing but fewer new policies are entering the system than a year earlier. The California FAIR Plan reported it wrote 98,677 new policies in the first half of 2026, averaging 16,466 per month. That’s a 26% decline in average monthly new business compared with 2025.

“Obviously the Sustainable Insurance Strategy is working to some extent,” Allen said. “We’ve seen a drop in the growth rate of the FAIR Plan, but we need to do more to make sure that it’s really focused on depopulating the FAIR Plan and helping to focus on shifting policies and practices to make it so that more of our high risk areas get the investment and the support and the help they need, but also the incentive and the push they need to reduce risk in return for more available and affordable insurance.”

He was asked how he plans to keep carriers writing homeowners insurance in California.

“I don’t think we can demand of the insurance industry that they cover all of the high-risk areas without us putting in the work to reduce risk in these communities,” he said. “But the flip side is I don’t think we can ask communities and individuals to do all this work to reduce risk without knowing there’s going to be affordable, available insurance on the back end.”

Related: ‘Nation’s First’ Smoke Damage Standards Bill Wending Through California Legislature

There was a drop off in support for the rest of the field of candidates from the top three vote-getters.

Sean Robert Howell, a cybersecurity CEO, had 8.7% of the vote. Merritt Farren, R, a consumer advocate/attorney, had 7.3% of the vote.

Patrick Wolff, a financial analyst, had 7.7% of the vote. Wolff built an auto and home insurance brokerage in 2001, and over the last 20-plus years, he’s spent time analyzing insurance companies and insurance markets as a financial analyst. Sean Lee, a financial services executive, had 5.4% of the vote.

Other candidates were Steve Bradford, who previously served in the California State Senate, the state Assembly and on the Gardena City Council. He had 4.9% of the vote.

Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas, Peace and Freedom, a science teacher had 2.9% of the vote. Eric Thor Aarnio, R., a contractor, had 1.9% of the vote. Keith Davis, American Independent, an insurance agent, had 1% of the vote.