As my colleague Gabrielle Gurley notes today in her excellent interview with David Toscano, the former Democratic leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, state legislatures matter: They can be laboratories of democracy or, when controlled by today’s Republicans, of autocracy.

Even the most progressive legislatures, however, sometimes need a member or two who recognize unmet needs more immediately than their colleagues, and successfully prod those colleagues to do something about it. Over the past decade, both houses of the California legislature have seen the Democrats in control of between two-thirds and three-fourths of the seats, but the colleague who’s really pushed them to enact life-enhancing changes has been San Diego Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who announced earlier this week that she was stepping down from her post there.

A former labor leader who once headed the San Diego AFL-CIO, Gonzalez played a key role in pushing the state to set a $15 minimum wage. She authored the acts that grant part-time workers paid leave and enabled farmworkers to qualify for overtime pay. She authored AB-5, which forbade employers from misclassifying their workers as "independent contractors"—for which Uber, Lyft, and their ilk spent a couple hundred million dollars on an initiative campaign that hoodwinked California voters into repealing the act in 2020. She authored laws that strengthened protections against workplace harassment and gender discrimination, and laws that made it easier to vote. And when Tesla’s founder refused to temporarily shut down his factory during the first wave of COVID-19, she tweeted, "F*ck Elon Musk."

There’s a legislator with her head screwed on right.

Gonzalez isn’t about to vanish over the horizon, however. By all accounts, she’s preparing to succeed another notable California progressive—Art Pulaski—as head of the state’s two-million-member AFL-CIO. Since Pulaski took the helm of the state’s labor movement in 1996, he’s made it an election-season powerhouse. In tandem with the late Miguel Contreras, who headed the Los Angeles AFL-CIO from 1996 until his death in 2005, Pulaski devised election programs that not only prompted union members to go to the polls and vote for progressives, but also mobilized other potentially progressive communities whose rates of voter participation had been historically low. In particular, the state Federation was among the first groups to identify and devote considerable resources to mobilizing the state’s burgeoning Asian American communities, which today constitute roughly 15 percent of California’s population, and whose support for progressive candidates and causes has at times been as high as 80 percent.

California didn’t become the anchor state of Blue America simply due to demographic change. It took the efforts of many thousands of movement activists and the leadership of some visionary progressives like Art Pulaski and Lorena Gonzalez.