After a decade of wildfires, an overlooked election could shape California’s climate future

California's home insurance market has been in trouble for years, and the person who runs it is about to change. The state's insurance commissioner, an elected official, oversees the companies that sell fire, home, and auto coverage. After wildfires between 2015 and 2020 burned about 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, insurers paid out more than they'd earned in two decades of premiums. When the state limited how much they could raise prices in response, companies like State Farm dropped tens of thousands of customers or stopped writing new policies in California altogether.

That's pushed many homeowners in fire-prone areas onto the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed "insurer of last resort" meant to be a small backstop but now covering up to 80 percent of homes in some high-risk ZIP codes. One Los Angeles homeowner whose house survived the Palisades Fire with heavy smoke damage spent 18 months fighting the FAIR Plan for repair money, eventually relying on a nearly $200,000 federal loan instead. Her regular insurer later dropped her remaining coverage too.

Two Democrats, Ben Allen and Jane Kim, are running for insurance commissioner this November with different fixes: Allen wants to rebuild the private insurance market, while Kim wants to move away from it. Nearly half of households in high-fire-risk areas lost insurance between 2018 and 2024, premiums could rise 16 percent this year, and the problems are starting to spread beyond the most fire-prone zones. If you own a home in California, especially in or near a wildfire-risk area, this race will likely shape what insurance costs and how hard it is to get in the coming years.