Incumbent Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva and Republican Soo Yoo, a school board president, are neck and neck Tuesday night in the contest for the district spanning Los Angeles and Orange counties. Yoo had only a very narrow lead over Quirk-Silva late Tuesday night after a few batches of election returns had been reported in both counties.
AD-67 encompasses about half a million residents, covering Cypress, Buena Park, Fullerton, La Palma, and Cerritos.
Sharon Quirk-Silva
A Fullerton native, Quirk-Silva has been re-elected to her Assembly position three times, first beating out an incumbent for the position in 2012. She has served on the Fullerton City Council, including as its mayor, and has worked a teacher.
Her top priorities, if reelected again, are addressing housing affordability and homelessness as well as bolstering access to quality education.
“I believe in our public school system, and we need to figure out how to ensure a first-class education is available for all students,” Quirk-Silva said in response to a survey posed by the Register. She also said she supports “allowing local educators to focus resources on the needs of local students” and expanding access to early education.
She supports efforts to increase the state minimum wage, is in favor of limited and well-regulated sports gambling, and wants to ensure roadblocks are in place to prevent guns from ending up in “the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.”
Soo Yoo
President of the ABC Unified School District’s board, Yoo is a Korean immigrant who is trilingual, speaking English, Spanish, and Korean. A Republican, Yoo is focused on lowering inflation and combatting crime if elected to the Assembly seat.
“Career criminals are almost incentivized to continue to re-offend at the expense of public safety in our neighborhoods,” Yoo said in response to a survey posed by the Register. “Our soft-on-crime policy experiment in California has failed us, and I want to turn the corner so that there are real consequences for criminal behavior.”
Yoo pointed to pandemic-related learning loss, declining enrollment, and a lack of focus on “core academic subjects,” such as math, science, and English, as the top three issues facing California’s education system today.
Her political philosophy is: “Public servants should serve their residents, not special interest groups.”
