Senator Anna Marie Caballero is a woman of firsts. She was not only the first female Mayor elected in the 126-year history of the City of Salinas, but the first Latina elected to represent the 28th Assembly District in 2006. In 2011 she was hired by Governor Edmund G. Brown to serve as a member of his cabinet where she served as the Secretary of the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. Secretary Caballero’s mission mirrored her 34-year career fighting for working families. Caballero’s responsibility as Secretary included the oversight of departments charged with funding affordable housing, civil rights enforcement, banking and financial transactions, consumer protection, and the licensing of three million working professionals.

Prior to her appointment, Ms. Caballero served as a member of the California State Assembly for four years and Mayor of Salinas and council member for fifteen years; she carries with her local and state government expertise that made her uniquely qualified to help the Governor achieve his goals: to transform state government to be more efficient, open and transparent, and consumer, service oriented. In 2016 she ran for and won once again the position of Assemblymenber representing the 30th Assembly District. In 2018 she was elected to represent California’s 12^th Senate District.

A graduate of UCLA law school and UC San Diego, Caballero has dedicated her professional life to families in rural California. She first put her legal acumen to work representing farm workers as an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance. Dedicated to representing working families at a price they could afford, Caballero and two colleagues formed the law firm of Caballero, Matcham and McCarthy, opening offices in Salinas and Hollister. The firm received numerous awards for excellence during its 25-year history, and Ms. Caballero personally received the Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce’s most distinguished award, the Athena, for Entrepreneurial Excellence and commitment to the community.

Born to a family of copper miners from Arizona, Caballero has dedicated her working life to empower working families and to create opportunities for them and their children to be successful. While in the Assembly she received numerous awards for her work in youth violence prevention, protection of local government, support for public school construction, and water reliability and sustainability.

Prior to her election to the Assembly, Caballero established a non-profit organization dedicated to youth violence prevention. Partners for Peace helped parents and youth develop stronger family bonds and encourage healthy behavior. PFP focused on supporting literacy, after school activities, early childhood development, youth employment and high school dropout prevention strategies in partnership with other organizations.

Anna Caballero is a wife, mother of three adult children and grandmother of six. She is married to Attorney Juan Uranga who is currently enjoying retirement after representing farmworkers for over 30 years.

Democrat

Born in Israel, Amnon Shor immigrated to the United States in 1980 following the woman he fell in love with. Shortly after, he married his wife Lynette, and together they have three children and seven grandchildren. They decided to settle in California and call it home. Shor began working in the jewelry business, owning his own wholesale and retail operations. In 1986 the family moved to Fresno, to pursue a passion for Arabian horses and bought a ranch for that purpose in the beautiful Central Valley.

Throughout his life, Shor was instilled with the conservative values that we all cherish. At an early age, he learned what it means to serve others and to serve a greater purpose. Shor served in the Israeli Defense Forces, where he defended his country during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In the early 90s, Shor went back to school to further his education in religious study, starting a new path by founding a congregation in 2004. He has served as the senior Rabbi until the present. He has, and continues to travel the world helping to advise religious institutions in other countries, and helping individuals in authoritarian countries to find religious freedom and practice their faith freely. Shor’s experiences have led him to an incredible appreciation of this country and our freedoms. He came to the United States with a dream, to raise a family, start his own business, pursue his faith, and help others pursue theirs.

Following this journey, he has lived in the Central Valley for decades. During this time, he has watched our great state deteriorate before our very eyes. From observing our freedoms diminish, our highways and freeways fall into disrepair, the uncontrolled influx of illegal immigration, and rampant crime. Today, California appears less and less like the ideal, prosperous state of its early years here. However, Shor believes that we can get our state back on the right track. He has always fought for what he believes in – from serving his home country of Israel in the Special Forces to fighting to give religious freedom to those in need across the globe. Now, he is ready to step up again and fight for the values and needs of the Central Valley.

We Serve and Honor the Lord

Everything we do and say in our campaign as in our lives, is in service of the Lord.  We’ll seek his pulse in everything we do and for every person we meet.  Ours will be a campaign of blessings, and we pray that we leave our district and our valley better for our efforts.

Economy and Inflation 

The citizens and businesses of California are over taxed and our government spends too much.  Current state leadership believes there is no limit to what can be taxed and how much money can be spent.  They are constantly looking for more ways to raise and spend money, placing burdens on our economy that are dragging us down.  This kills opportunity and jobs.  Our state can’t survive when only the public sector is growing.  We are beginning to see the effects of these terrible policies as our state population is shrinking for the first time in our history, and we have lost a Congressional Seat and an Electoral College vote because of this population reduction.

If we don’t change these policies, we will destroy our beautiful California much faster than our prior generations built it.  We must return California to prominence as a business friendly state by reducing taxes and regulations.  We must first act by eliminating absolute Democrat party rule in this state by increasing the number of Republicans in the Senate.  Then we can act to return more conservative leadership to our state.  Amnon Shor will work every day to reduce costs of living including pressing for the elimination of California’s exorbitant gas tax, which forces us to live with the most expensive transportation costs in the nation.

Agriculture and Water

It’s time that leadership stop giving our farmers lip service instead of solutions.  Farming and the production of food is a critical infrastructure and national security asset.  Our infrastructure was built by visionaries to accommodate 20M people, but now we have nearly twice that population.  Our leaders claim to have budgeted for new storage, but they encourage their environmentalist allies to use any means to indefinitely delay these critical projects.  Further, it is not clear where these budgeted funds are being held.  We must locate these funds and make certain they are deployed as promised.

Shor will lead California to take advantage of technologies like desalination which are wetting some of the driest lands on our planet, we border the Pacific Ocean after all.  We must reform water allocation to put our critical farming first and not last.  We must lead the charge to increase the costs for those who stand in the way of bringing more water to our farms.

Amnon Shor brings a unique skill set and reputation of bringing people together and helping erase divides. This is crucial in governance. Respect must be part of the equation and brought back into our mix.

Crime and Public Safety

No one can honestly say that recent Democrat led leniency on crime has made our neighborhoods safer.  We are experiencing the largest crime wave in anyone’s memory, and all of our communities are suffering.  We need to change now, and enforce real consequences for bringing harm to our citizens.  We must pressure District Attorneys to enforce the law and not reduce serious crimes to minor infractions.  We must also recognize that more resources for  correctional facilities not only keep our streets safer, but provide more opportunity for those looking to reform and succeed with second chances.  We will engage our faith communities and leverage their records of success to help us improve our correctional rehab.

Education

During the Covid-19 shutdowns, we got a very close firsthand look at the education of our children, and it was even worse than we had feared.  Our schools are not successfully teaching what our children need to build the future.  Our curriculums have been infested with teaching our kids that they are different from each other and corruption of our history.  We intend to promote curriculums that teach all sides and promote critical thinking and open and honest dialogue. 

Further, we need to make certain the immense educational budget spent by our state is devoted first to our children.  Our teachers should be rewarded for excellence, and administrative budgets should be paired so these other priorities will be met.

Homelessness

Firstly, few people of good will can accept the growing homeless encampments choking our cities and even our rural areas.  This must end immediately.  There is no honor in allowing this to continue. We need to start by removing people from the streets and providing treatment for the addicted and the mentally ill.  We need to use the vast geography of our state to establish programs outside our population centers modeling successful efforts in our faith communities.  All new construction of homes and facilities must focus on cost effectiveness instead of political patronage.  We must yield the greatest value for all resources devoted to home building and development.  

Life

We follow the God of Life.  We can never support anything that destroys life.  Our position will never change.  But as importantly, we must always do everything possible to support life.  We will move to provide funds to encourage the preservation of life.