In the midst of all the jockeying for election visibility, one local candidate took a different path: James Gore announced in October that he was suspending his campaign for the state senate’s 2nd District to spend more time with his family. Not long thereafter, he made it clear he would not run for his County Supervisor seat again, either.
“When I made the decision not to run for state senate, I immediately knew that I also wouldn’t reenter the race for supervisor. I know that the main reason I explored the run for senate was because I felt I had completed my chapter as supervisor,” Gore told The Healdsburg Tribune.
The announcements made a bit of a stir at the time, with skeptics suggesting Gore recognized he might not win the lengthy, wide-ranging campaign—and doubting the sincerity of his stated reason: “I have worked relentlessly to embrace this campaign, but I cannot commit to be everywhere all the time at the expense of my life, as a father and as a husband.”
The reason seemed too familiar to political pundits, but Gore’s public activities and private communications since make his sincerity clear.
“Now I’m going to my daughter’s sporting events and I’m doing Boy Scouts with my son,” he told The Tribune last week. “And fishing and hunting and hiking and getting in better health.” His daughter, Opal, is a freshman at Healdsburg High, and his son, Jacob, is a fifth grader at The Healdsburg School. Elizabeth Gore, his wife, is co-founder and president of Hello Alice, which provides access to capital, connections and education for women in business.
He currently still serves as supervisor for the county’s 4th District, which includes Healdsburg as well as Gore’s hometown of Cloverdale, and that job will continue to keep him busy until the end of the year.
“I’ve always challenged myself to live as a public servant, not as a politician, and to do this work in that way,” he said. “I’ve never been somebody who’s been absolutely loved by the political extremes on either side, because I’m too practical and rational and I want to get too much stuff done.”
Before he returned to Sonoma County in 2014, he had a policy role in the Obama administration as the assistant chief for conservation in the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the sister agency of the Forest Service. “So the Forest Service runs all the public lands, and the NRCS runs all the private lands conservation work,” he said. It’s an area that still interests him, and which he never fully left behind.
“You know, I was the president of the National Association of Counties. I just finished that. I was president of the California Association of Counties. I’ve been county supervisor, and I was president of the CSAC, the California State Association of Counties,” he said.
“I’m currently also the co-chair with a tribal member of the North Coast Resource Partnership, which is seven counties and 35 tribes deploying hundreds of millions in state funds from Sonoma to the Oregon border,” he added. “And so I think I’ll work at that level for a long time. I really love counties and how they work.”
But once he threw himself into the race for state senate—he had built up momentum and financial support—he discovered his heart just wasn’t in it. “I feel honored to have been a servant leader in my community through tumultuous times, especially through the fires and the pandemic,” he said in retrospect.
“I’m 47, and my kids are 14 and 11,” he said. “I came to the realization that I didn’t want what I was running for. I raised $400,000—I had two consultants and two full-time staff. I was running up and down the district, and I loved the district. I was going to Sacramento once a week, meeting with what they call third house, all the lobbying organizations …”
He continued, “I really love the district. I love going north, to Crescent City and the other communities in the district. But the reality is, with my kids in school I would be an absentee father.
“I would talk with my wife; we’d go through it every couple of months. I kept having these, not just like little doubts, but dread moments where I’d be sitting with my kid Jacob at night, sitting on his bed talking about Boy Scouts and stuff. And I’d have these thoughts that would just sink me: ‘Am I going to give this up?’ Or with my daughter, going to a volleyball tournament—I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be able to come to this if I’m running.’”
Meanwhile another local politician is embracing the chaos and challenge of running for a different office, a step up to the national stage: Mike McGuire. After terming out as state senator—the seat Gore was in the run for—McGuire leapt at the chance to run for Congress when Prop. 50 passed last fall, redrawing the 2nd district to include Sonoma County.
“Mike’s an amazing representative, and God bless him for leaning in on these chaotic times,” Gore said. “And also for the sacrifice it’ll take to travel back and forth from California to D.C. You can’t make everybody happy, but you know, he’s the hardest working man in ‘show business’ for sure.”
Then Gore turned reflective. “If you do this work, you have to feed off of it. For me, I’ve always fed off of the public service, but not the politics. You have to feed off both if you’re going to be in it long term.
“And once again, I don’t condemn anybody who makes their own choices about their own life and their own family. But for me … it was a dread that I was going to miss all that.”
