California secretary of state Alex Padilla to fill Kamala Harris’s Senate seat

California’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, has been appointed to fill Kamala Harris’s seat in the US senate.

The child of Mexican immigrants, Padilla will be California’s first Latino senator, giving a new level of representation to the demographic group that makes up nearly 40% of the state’s population.

“Through his tenacity, integrity, smarts and grit, California is gaining a tested fighter in their corner who will be a fierce ally in DC, lifting up our state’s values and making sure we secure the critical resources to emerge stronger from this pandemic,” Gavin Newsom, the governor, said in a statement on Tuesday.

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California law left the appointment of a successor for Harris following Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election to Newsom. A range of politicians had pitched themselves for the position. Newsom this summer joked with a reporter who asked if candidates had approached him: “You may be the only one who hasn’t – unless you just did.”

Newsom faced competing pressures to appoint a Latino to the seat and to appoint a Black woman, as Harris was the only Black woman in the chamber. Top contenders for the seat included Padilla, Xavier Becerra, the state’s attorney general, whom Biden picked this month to become health secretary, as well as the US representatives Karen Bass of Los Angeles; Barbara Lee, who represents the eastern part of the Bay Area, and Ro Khanna, who represents the Silicon Valley area.

But Padilla, a longtime political ally of Newsom’s, was widely considered the frontrunner.

“I am honored and humbled by the trust placed in me by Governor Newsom, and I intend to work each and every day to honor that trust and deliver for all Californians,” Padilla said in a statement.

As a senator from the nation’s most populous state, Padilla will have a chance to shape legislation in key areas, including housing and immigration. Harris played a major role in the hearings of two supreme court justices, and brought her sharp, prosecutorial style to interrogations of several Trump administration officials.

Padilla, 47, was first elected to serve on the Los Angeles city council in 1999, at age 26. He represented a Los Angeles-area district in the California state Senate from 2006 to 2014, where he chaired the committee on energy, utilities and communication. While in Sacramento, he authored a wide range of legislation, including a law to make restaurants list their calorie counts and another to create California’s earthquake early warning system.

When Newsom first ran for governor in 2009, Padilla chaired his campaign. Since 2015, he has been California’s top elections official, overseeing California’s vast elections apparatus, including the rollout of a more robust vote-by-mail system. In the November election, California mailed a ballot to every registered voter. Before that, he oversaw the implementation of the Voter’s Choice Act, a 2016 law that allowed counties to mail all registered voters a ballot.

He will hold the Senate seat through 2022, when he will have to run for re-election. Harris hasn’t given a date for her resignation, but she will be inaugurated as vice president on 20 January.

As a Los Angeles resident, Padilla will bring geographic diversity to California’s representation in Washington. Dianne Feinstein, California’s other senator, is from San Francisco, and politicians from northern California have held some of the state’s highest political offices for decades. Harris built her political career in San Francisco before moving to Los Angeles.

Feinstein, whom Padilla once worked for, announced her support for his nomination in early December.