Everything you need to know about ranked-choice voting in one spot. Click to learn more!

Brandii Grace

From Ballotpedia
Jump to: navigation, search
BP-Initials-UPDATED.png
This page was current at the end of the individual's last campaign covered by Ballotpedia. Please contact us with any updates.
Brandii Grace
Image of Brandii Grace
Elections and appointments
Last election

March 3, 2020

Personal
Birthplace
Long Beach, Calif.
Contact

Brandii Grace (Democratic Party) ran for election to the California State Assembly to represent District 38. She lost in the primary on March 3, 2020.

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

Elections

2020

See also: California State Assembly elections, 2020

General election

General election for California State Assembly District 38

Suzette Martinez Valladares defeated Lucie Volotzky in the general election for California State Assembly District 38 on November 3, 2020.

Candidate
%
Votes
Image of Suzette Martinez Valladares
Suzette Martinez Valladares (R)
 
76.1
 
149,201
Image of Lucie Volotzky
Lucie Volotzky (R) Candidate Connection
 
23.9
 
46,877

Total votes: 196,078
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.

Nonpartisan primary election

Nonpartisan primary for California State Assembly District 38

The following candidates ran in the primary for California State Assembly District 38 on March 3, 2020.

Candidate
%
Votes
Image of Suzette Martinez Valladares
Suzette Martinez Valladares (R)
 
31.8
 
39,481
Image of Lucie Volotzky
Lucie Volotzky (R) Candidate Connection
 
17.6
 
21,942
Annie Cho (D)
 
12.5
 
15,498
Image of Kelvin Driscoll
Kelvin Driscoll (D)
 
12.0
 
14,868
Image of Brandii Grace
Brandii Grace (D) Candidate Connection
 
11.6
 
14,387
Image of Dina Cervantes
Dina Cervantes (D) Candidate Connection
 
8.8
 
10,900
Susan Christopher (D) (Unofficially withdrew)
 
5.8
 
7,255

Total votes: 124,331
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

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

Expand all | Collapse all

I grew-up combating extreme poverty and homelessness with my grandmother, a disabled military veteran. As a video game designer, I overcame misogyny in the tech industry and built an award-winning company. As a respected STEM educator, I led a teacher union movement and went to D.C. to successfully pass federal worker protections. Now, I serves as a member of Porter Ranch's elected Neighborhood Council to end homelessness and ensure no other children have to suffer as I did.
  • Address homelessness head on, with the understanding that this is not one issue with a silver bullet solution - it's a failure of multiple issues at once, and they all need to be addressed.
  • Clean up our community's environment once and for all - that means fully closing down Aliso Canyon, cleaning up the Santa Susana Field Laboratory to background radiation levels, and more.
  • Fully fund our education system - including passing universal pre-K and ending the current program that ties funding to attendance and deprives our schools of resources when they're shut down or children are sick.
I'm passionate about my community, and I'm therefore passionate about every issue that impacts it. Homelessness is deeply personal to me, but so are eldercare and disability issues as someone who cars for my disabled grandmother, so are education and special needs issues as the mother of an autistic preschooler in public school, so are immigration and social justice issues as someone with a Mexican-American husband and in-laws, so are small business and technology issues as a video game entrepreneur - anything that means something to our community, means something to me, and I plan to carry that meaning with me to Sacramento.
A legislator needs to be able to carefully analyze the consequences of the bills they are passing and figure out how best to compensate for them. Look at all the problems that have arisen from AB5 not allowing freelancers to opt out of being reclassified as employees, or look at how the CA Consumer Privacy Act has hurt small businesses without providing accountability to the companies it was originally targeting.

As a STEM educator and video game designer, I excel in systems design and analysis. I also know how to communicate complicated concepts to many different types of people - even children.
I am the only one in this race who has done the research, taken the time to listen to our constituents, and figured out the policy solutions we need, as outlined in our Day One agenda:

https://www.facebook.com/GraceForAssembly/posts/164592854992862

Find more information at www.graceforassembly.com
My first job was working as a janitor at age 8. That's not a typo; I was a small child working with dangerous chemicals labeled, "Keep out of reach of children." My family never knew how intense the job really was. I knew it was the only way we could afford to buy required school supplies, school clothes, and very frequently - food.

Because I was so young, I can't remember exactly how long I held that job, but the janitor position was just one of a series of part-time jobs I had throughout my childhood in order to keep my family fed and clothed (and keep the lights on when we had a roof over our heads). At the time, the child labor laws in our city allowed kids to work on commission so they could legally hold paper routes. For that reason, most of my other jobs involved sales or deliveries. Some jobs I did on my own and some I did alongside my grandmother.

My first post-childhood job was working part-time at an arcade while I attended college. I was quickly promoted to assistant manager, but I eventually quit as part of a deal to prevent the unfair firing of a colleague who, like me, was being sexually harassed by management. My first post-college job was as a video game design intern at Warner Bros. I then went on to work at Microsoft Game Studios helping to launch the renowned Xbox360 game console.
Sailor Moon. She wins by turning her enemies into allies, just like I do, but she also gets to look like a 24-year-old for eternity.
As the only candidate currently sitting on an elected board, I know, firsthand, the importance of being in position where you are held accountable to a constituency. I have proven experience bringing diverse groups of people and organizations to the table, listening to everyone, and making the tough calls. This is why staffers who have gone on to become elected officials often speak about how much easier it was before their name was the one on the line. At the end of the day, it is my name on the vote and I am accountable to my community. Someone who has never experienced this can't know what its really like until they are the one in the hot seat and, unfortunately, we as voters can't really know what a candidate will do until they've developed a track record. This is why I think we are best served when state legislators start by running for local offices in their communities, like neighborhood or city councils. Once they get their feet wet - and develop a track record voters can look to - then they
will have better experience to do this job reliably and well.
California has the highest poverty rate in the country. Almost HALF of our children live at or near poverty in California. Our homelessness crisis continues to explode all across our state. And yet, we are the fifth largest economy in the world. That is the true scope - and horror - of income inequality in our state. Yet this is not a single issue, it is many.

So our greatest challenge will be putting policies in place that help people and communities over huge special interests. We need to promote wage and job growth. We need to build affordable housing. We need to cut healthcare costs. We need to support small businesses. We need to better fund public colleges to eliminate crushing student debt. We need to reform our prison system to help good people recover from their mistakes while keeping our communities safe. We need to ensure access to affordable child and elder care. We need to fully-fund our classrooms so our children receive a proper education. We need to

provide for those with special needs. And we need to do all of this while maintaining a respectful open dialog with people and communities that disagree with us.
I've held too many constituents as they've cried over the deaths of their children, parents, siblings, and spouses - all clearly attributable to environmental disasters in our community. The radiation from the Santa Susana Field Lab, groundwater contamination, and the leaks from Aliso Canyon are all atrocities that create an ever-present threat to ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. I support necessary legislation at the state level to hold our state's EPA accountable and provide them with the necessary tools, funding, and oversight to clean up ALL of our state's toxic waste sites - including Santa Susana Field Lab. I support the expedited shut down of Aliso and the appropriate allocation of funding to build renewable energy infrastructures and create worker transition funds.

It is my dearest hope that no mother will ever again be forced to bury her child in an early grave because we failed to do our part.

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


Current members of the California State Assembly
Leadership
Majority Leader:Cecilia Aguiar-Curry
Minority Leader:James Gallagher
Representatives
District 1
District 2
District 3
District 4
District 5
District 6
District 7
District 8
District 9
District 10
District 11
District 12
District 13
District 14
District 15
District 16
District 17
District 18
Mia Bonta (D)
District 19
District 20
District 21
District 22
District 23
District 24
Alex Lee (D)
District 25
Ash Kalra (D)
District 26
District 27
District 28
District 29
District 30
District 31
District 32
District 33
District 34
District 35
District 36
District 37
District 38
District 39
District 40
District 41
District 42
District 43
District 44
District 45
District 46
District 47
District 48
District 49
Mike Fong (D)
District 50
District 51
Rick Zbur (D)
District 52
District 53
District 54
District 55
District 56
District 57
District 58
District 59
District 60
District 61
District 62
District 63
Vacant
District 64
District 65
District 66
District 67
District 68
District 69
District 70
Tri Ta (R)
District 71
District 72
District 73
District 74
District 75
District 76
District 77
District 78
District 79
District 80
Democratic Party (60)
Republican Party (19)
Vacancies (1)