Richard Pan, Kevin Kiley make final pitches ahead of tight race for Congress

The Abridged version:

• In exclusive interviews with Studio Sacramento, former Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan and independent U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley described their plans if elected.
• They’re in a tight race to represent Congressional District 6, including north Sacramento and areas surrounding Rio Linda, Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova.
• Pan, a pediatrician, is known as a vaccine advocate; Kiley, formerly a Republican, has nearly four years of experience in the House of Representatives.

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With Election Day approaching, U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Rocklin, and former state Sen. Dr. Richard Pan made last-minute pitches to voters in exclusive interviews Friday.

Locked in a tight race to represent Congressional District 6, the candidates spoke on topics from healthcare to the economy and high-profile arrest campaigns by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in their conversations with Scott Syphax on PBS KVIE’s Studio Sacramento. The full episode is available at the bottom of this story.

A Democrat and veteran of California’s Assembly and Senate, Pan is challenging incumbent Kiley, who’s served in the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly four years and in the state Assembly before that.

Some recent polling puts the two neck-and-neck in the race to represent District 6 — which includes north Sacramento and areas around Rio Linda, Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova — while other sources put Pan four points ahead, according to The New York Times.

The contenders sat down separately with Syphax at PBS KVIE, with Pan kicking the day off with a conversation about the threat President Donald Trump’s administration poses to healthcare, border security and the candidate’s immediate plans if elected.

‘Work to solve problems’

Pan, a pediatrician, made his reputation as an advocate for childhood vaccinations, and wrote California’s strict school vaccination laws after pertussis and measles outbreaks in the state.

“We have an administration that is actually providing a lot of disinformation, a lot of confusion,” Pan said when asked to diagnose the problem with the Trump administration’s approach to healthcare.

When it comes to issues like vaccination guidelines, where federal laws already exist, Pan’s strategy if elected would focus on oversight, he said.

The former state senator elaborated on his strategy in comments to Abridged by PBS KVIE after his interview.

“There are laws we do need to reverse, and then there’s other parts where they’re basically not following the law, and we need to have the oversight,” he said.

In those cases, “it’s less about changing the law, it’s about enforcing the law,” Pan said.

When asked about immigration and border security, the candidate said he supports reining in ICE to within constitutional bounds. “ICE has a culture now of not following the law, not following the constitution,” he said.

In the final moments of his conversation with Pan, Syphax asked the candidate: Why do you believe voters deserve your trust?

“I’m here to try to work to solve problems, and I think my record is very clear in what my approach is,” Pan said.

“People may agree or disagree, that’s fine. But I’m always straightforward about who I am and what I’m going to do.”

‘Maps purely for partisan advantage’

Friday afternoon, Kiley pitched voters on a different range of topics in response to Syphax’s questions, including his March decision to change his party affiliation from Republican to independent.

There was no single moment that led Kiley to decide to formally leave the Republican party, he said.

Instead, “it was a series of things,” he said, including being in Congress during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history and “just seeing how extreme partisanship had gotten” while in Washington, D.C.

Kiley also pointed to what he called “the redistricting war, where you have state after state redrawing its maps purely for partisan advantage.”

When Abridged asked Kiley after his interview if there’s anything he’d change about his past Congressional voting record as a newly-minted independent, Kiley said of his office, “I think we got a record we can really be proud of. I think folks can see that.”

During the interview, Syphax also asked Kiley to describe his vision of economic opportunity for ordinary people, pointing out the representative’s opposition while in the California Legislature to Assembly Bill 5.

Signed into law in 2019, the bill enshrined a test for determining whether a worker is a regular employee or independent contractor and extended it to almost all workers.

Kiley reiterated his stance on AB5, saying what he sees as California’s lack of economic opportunity “is because there have been some measures, maybe they were well intended, maybe they weren’t, that have served to undercut the ability of people to work or to pursue their vocation, pursue their dreams.

“AB5 was a good example of that,” he said.

Overall, in summarizing his identity as a candidate, Kiley said, “I’m fighting to lower your costs and … I will always put our community first … what informs my decisions on all of these matters is not some special interest or partisan agenda,” he said.

The representative also said he won’t caucus with either party if he returns to Congress.