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Agatha Bacelar

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Agatha Bacelar
Image of Agatha Bacelar
Elections and appointments
Last election

March 3, 2020

Education

Bachelor's

Stanford University

Contact

Agatha Bacelar (Democratic Party) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent California's 12th Congressional District. She lost in the primary on March 3, 2020.

Bacelar completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.

Biography

Agatha Bacelar was born in São Paulo, Brazil. She earned a B.S. in product design engineering from Stanford University.[1] Bacelar's career experience includes working at Emerson Collective, where she focused on design, documentary filmmaking, and political advocacy.[2]

Elections

2020

See also: California's 12th Congressional District election, 2020

General election

General election for U.S. House California District 12

Incumbent Nancy Pelosi defeated Shahid Buttar in the general election for U.S. House California District 12 on November 3, 2020.

Candidate
%
Votes
Image of Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi (D)
 
77.6
 
281,776
Image of Shahid Buttar
Shahid Buttar (D) Candidate Connection
 
22.4
 
81,174

Total votes: 362,950
Candidate Connection = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
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Nonpartisan primary election

Nonpartisan primary for U.S. House California District 12

The following candidates ran in the primary for U.S. House California District 12 on March 3, 2020.

Candidate
%
Votes
Image of Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi (D)
 
74.0
 
190,590
Image of Shahid Buttar
Shahid Buttar (D) Candidate Connection
 
13.0
 
33,344
Image of John Dennis
John Dennis (R)
 
7.7
 
19,883
Image of Tom Gallagher
Tom Gallagher (D) Candidate Connection
 
2.0
 
5,094
Image of DeAnna Lorraine
DeAnna Lorraine (R)
 
1.8
 
4,635
Image of Agatha Bacelar
Agatha Bacelar (D) Candidate Connection
 
1.5
 
3,890

Total votes: 257,436
Candidate Connection = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey.

Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team.

Campaign themes

2020

Ballotpedia survey responses

See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection

Candidate Connection

Agatha Bacelar completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Bacelar's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.

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I am a Brazilian-American immigrant, Stanford engineer, and social justice advocate running for U.S. Congress in San Francisco (CA-12). I am challenging Nancy Pelosi-and the status quo-in order to tackle systemic inequalities and the conditions that brought us President Trump. I am a progressive Democrat whose platform includes a Universal Basic Income, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and campaign finance reform.

For the past five years, I have worked on documentary filmmaking and political advocacy at Emerson Collective. There I collaborated with leading nonprofits, activists, artists, and policy makers to advance education, immigration, criminal justice, and environmental reform.

I am also a founding member of Democracy Earth, a nonprofit building blockchain-based voting and governance software. I am passionate about how technology can upgrade our political system to be more participatory and representative of everyday people.

I studied engineering at Stanford University with a focus on anthropology and social impact. At Stanford, I helped start one of the country's first collegiate jump rope teams, and competed nationally. In my free time and sometimes on the campaign trail, I can be found leading double dutch circles in the Bay Area.
  • With family in San Francisco for nearly 30 years, a sister in a San Francisco high school, and as a resident of the Mission District, I am proximate daily to the two faces of San Francisco-the great civic shame of homelessness in the midst of enormous wealth. This long standing problem spotlights a political status quo that is not serving all citizens. For a democracy that serves the 100%, we're going to need new design thinking, and Representatives who will listen to the people over the apparatus of power.
  • Half of my family is from Brazil, which is home to the Amazon Rainforest, and this is, for me, a deeply personal connection to the urgency of the climate crisis. We must rapidly transform our economy to a regenerative one.
  • San Francisco has some of the youngest, most diverse, and technologically advanced residents of any district in the U.S. The technology dreamt up here ripples out to the entire world, and will continue to do so as another four billion people connect online in the next decade. Artificial Intelligence, automation, and social media will continue to impact every aspect of our lives. Yet, only 3% of Members in the House of Representatives today have a science or technology background. I'm running for Congress to change this. I'm running to update our political system to the times we live in.
The areas of public policy I am most personally passionate about are immigrant and racial justice. I am a first-generation immigrant and grew up with many undocumented friends. My earliest activism was with Dreamers advocating for the Dream Act. I have personally been inside five immigrant detention centers and am haunted by what I have seen there. But I know that the cruelty of our immigration system has its roots in our country's history of racial inequality. The U.S. was founded on, and prospered from, the myth of racial difference. The pillaging of Native American land, slavery, and our "tough on crime" mentality have all set the stage for today's over policing of black and brown communities and our expanded deportation apparatus. Instead of addressing structural causes of crime, we get distracted and waste resources on policies that don't make us safer or more whole.

We have been in a long slumber to the poor and vulnerable, but I am committed to being part of the democratic awakening that roots this evil out. Until we reach the promised land of racial justice, none of us are really free.
The two figures I look most up to are Bryan Stevenson and Martin Luther King Jr. Both recognized that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the the presence of justice; that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Dr. King provided me with a blueprint for a life of service. In 1957, by the time he was my age, Dr. King had already led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, his home had been bombed by segregationists, and he was traveling an average of 780,000 miles and giving over 200 speeches a year. We may think we have come a long way in fighting for the justice we so desperately seek, but in many ways the U.S. is more unequal and discriminatory than before the civil rights movement. Today we live in a well-disguised system of social control that spans immigration, mass incarceration, and homelessness. We have so much work to do.

I have entered this political race to change a well-entrenched status quo. Many people are affronted by this and much is made of a so-called generational gap among Democrats, in which more centrist members of the party tell young progressives to wait their turn and find satisfaction with incrementalism. MLK's words echo with the urgency we are facing today. He said, "there is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism," and that "now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."
"Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson. I had the honor of working with Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative and those experiences have remained a guiding light for me and how I chose to spend my limited time on Earth. I brought my entire campaign team and a group of volunteers-more than two dozen people-to watch "Just Mercy" together. The lessons from the book and the film are something I wanted the team to share at a visceral level. Until we achieve equal justice, we will not fully realize the promise of the American democratic ideal.
First and foremost, I am not burdened by corporate money and am free to represent the people and only the people.

Second, my work as a documentary filmmaker helped me be attentive listener and someone who takes great care in bridging gaps in understanding. Most of my career has been spent with the people and in the places where justice is most urgently needed-from immigrant detention centers to under resourced classrooms and communities that are unbanked. Every person I met and every story I heard helps ground my service to those who have been underserved by our democracy.

Third, with less than 10% of our Congressional Representatives trained in STEM fields, my scientific background makes me more unique than should be the case. I believe climate science denial wouldn't be a thing if we had as many scientists and engineers in Congress as we did lawyers and business people.
September 11th will likely be the defining event for people of my generation. I was only in 4th grade, but events of that day reverberated in every community, every household in America, and to this day are still shaping foreign and immigration policy.

The invention of internet search and email also changed my life. I remember when my mom first showed me (in Kindergarten) how an email could deliver a message instantly to a family friend on another continent. It was like discovering a magic power. These days we hear so much about how divisive tech platforms can be, so I'm glad to have this reminder that the internet as originally envisioned is a force for unity and connection too.
In high school I worked in the back-stock of an Abercrombie & Fitch store where I made a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Although that was my first paid job, I started working at a much earlier age, assisting my mom who was a small business owner. Throughout my childhood I helped her prepare press clippings and edit and translate documents in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
"Only the Young" by Taylor Swift
(It's a song about politically active youth.)
Like many women, I have a #metoo story. I am a survivor of sexual violence. Watching the Kavanaugh hearings and the trial of Brock Turner have only solidified my resolve to take the fight for gender equality to the halls of power.
Every elected official should have term limits. Systems and institutions inevitably get stale or become less effective over time. Term limits ensure a replacement mechanism so that power is not frozen among the few, leading to rule by oligarchy. The incumbent in our race, Nancy Pelosi, has been in office for 32 years-that's longer than I have been alive.

Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.

See also


External links

Footnotes

  1. Information submitted on Ballotpedia’s biographical information submission form on July 14, 2019
  2. Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on February 4, 2020


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