April 16, 2026 • 10 mins
Jeff Thomas sits down with Jake Levine, a candidate running for Congress for the 32nd district. Jacob Caplan Levine is an American lawyer and politician who served as senior director for climate and energy on the United States National Security Council during the presidency of Joe Biden.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Meet the Candidates.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hi, this is Jeff Thomas, Division President with iHeartMedia. It's
time for another edition of Meet the Candidates. Our candidate
today is Jake Levine, who is candidate for Congress District
thirty two, which is.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
It's the most beautiful district in the country. We go
from Malibu on the west coast to Laurel Canyon and
then imagine the West Lava in Brentwood all the way
up to Porter Ranch. So we've got most of the
San Fernando Valley west of the four or five and
we also have Simi Valley after Prop fifty, huge diverse,
beautiful district.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
You have from the mountains to the ocean, anything in between.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, when you look at that district, when you look
at the constituents and the people living there, like as
you are, you know, running for office, Like what do
you see as the as the number one priority.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Bringing down the cost of living so that people who
live in our district can afford to live and work there.
And we've got a whole host of challenges on that front.
We're really focused right now in housing. Put a proposal
together for a National Housing Development Bank that will bring
down the cost to actually build new housing supply and
catalyze private sector investment in new housing. We're also supporting
(01:11):
the demand side with support for first time home buyers
to do down payments and assist them with those, and
also a national renter's tax credit because so many people
When Bradsum and my opponent, was first running for office
in nineteen ninety seven, imagine that in nineteen ninety seven
you could afford a one bedroom apartment in our district
(01:31):
for seven hundred dollars a month. Today it's twenty eight
hundred dollars. So we've got to allow young people who
want to live the dream of home ownership to.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Save for that. But it's also across the board.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
We've got to bring down prices for childcare, for education,
for insurance. Now, our district has Pacific Palisades in Malibu,
which of course experienced the devastation of the wildfires, and
that's caused insurance prices to spike everywhere.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
We've got a strategy to do that.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Unfortunately, our incumbent member of Congress is take hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the insurance industry, the very insurers
who are denying claims to people like my mom in
the aftermath of that fire.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
So when you say you have a plan, give me
a few specific things that you would do.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
You know, the impetus for me to get into this
race was losing my childhood home and the Palisades fire.
And I've been walking that roadway with my mom along
the way, dealing with property contents, loss of use, reconstruction,
and in addition to the need for federal funding, which
we have not gotten, insurance is the single most important
(02:32):
thing happening right now in our recovery. And we have
an industry that is jacking up prices due to the
perception of increased risk, but they're not providing discounts for
people who are actually going above and beyond and building
resilience into their own reconstruction. We know that by using
different materials, by using defensible space, by thinking about our
(02:53):
use of public lands, that we can actually mitigate risk,
and that should bring premiums down. But we also need
a better system than the State Insurance Commission, which has
failed to hold insurance companies accountable to allow for people
to not only get the claims for which they've paid
their premiums that many of them are being denied to
this day. But we also need to provide a pathway
(03:16):
for people to issue complaints and for the insurance companies
to have to be accountable to that. So we're proposing
a federal Claims Advocacy Center for people who are experiencing
losses of these kinds of wildfires that sadly are now
part of the new normal in terms of the climate
reality that we're living in.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
So, if I'm an insurance company, conceivably I had to
pay out a lot of you know, premiums for people
that had damage, lost their houses, et cetera, my business
has to be profitable as well, Like, how do you
balance that?
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Well, what they're experiencing in California is a crisis of liquidity.
They have got too many premiums that are paying out
too much, and they have not calibrated the to the
pricing of their premiums. And that's a part of the
reason why you have that is because the Insurance Commission
has sat on rate cases for claims sort of indefinitely. Now,
(04:12):
ultimately this does not benefit consumers because the end state
of that is that the insurance companies leave the state
and so people can't actually get insurance at all, and
the people who are still here with their insurers are
seeing their premiums rise, in some cases five hundred percent.
And this is happening all over our district, not just
in the wildland urban interface. We have high wildfire risk,
(04:34):
so we actually do need to normalize and speed up
a process for processing rate cases for the insurance companies.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
But that has to.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Be paired with common sense discounts on premiums that people
can achieve by reducing their relative risk. We have an
insurance commission in the state that has been sitting on
its job to process these administrative decisions, and we need
them to speed up.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
So you worked a lot in climate, energy, et cetera. Right,
I talk to people all over the country, right, They're
always asking about the weather here, which is awesome and beautiful,
But in your district specifically, like we talked about, there's wildfires,
there's mud slides, there's weather events either catastrophic or ongoing
(05:18):
that are happening. And we had a ton of rain
this past season, which you know, amps up the possibility
for you know, events like that to happen. Like what
do we do? What are you proposing we do to
kind of not just you know, go after you know,
some of the challenges that you've talked about once things
have already happened, but mitigate those or stopped those events
(05:40):
from happening.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, well, we have a few.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
First of all, I see this as the biggest economic
opportunity for our country in a generation. And what I'm
talking about is addressing the climate crisis by accelerating a
clean energy transition and deploying just endless, abundant wind solar
battery store. This is now if you look at the
private market, and I'm not talking about government funding, but
(06:04):
just what the private sector is doing. More than ninety
percent of new energy generation around the world is wind,
solar and batteries. And the reason that that is is
because it's the least expensive and the most reliable. In
our own district, we are doubling down with ineffective leadership
on fossil fuel resources that are dangerous and expensive. Exhibit
(06:26):
A is Aleiso Canyon. Now, this is in the northeast
part of my district. This was the site of the
largest natural gas explosion in our country's history. I helped
when I was working for fran Pavy and the state
legislature to articulate a pathway to actually shut that facility down,
to transition it to battery storage, and to transition the workforce.
(06:46):
We got SoCal Gas and Edison and DWP around a
table to talk about a future for the workforce to
have jobs in the clean energy economy, and we should
be investing in that kind of innovation.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
All over the world.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
When I served in the last administration at the Development
Finance Corporation, I invested billions of dollars in this type
of clean energy, and everywhere I went and around the world,
I always saw one other player at the table, and
that was the government of China. They were investing in
these countries in clean energy because they know that that
represents the economic opportunity of the next generation. It represents
(07:20):
job creation, and it represents opportunities to build alliances with
people overseas that we need to have as partners in
really important parts of the world. So I would say,
even though here in this district we're starting to see
the effects, we also can bring our ingenuity and innovation
and young people to bear on the solutions, and that's
what we're focused on doing this thinking about it as
(07:42):
an opportunity.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So your district is very diverse, not just the ocean
to the mountains like we talked about earlier, but the population. Yeah,
the people, Like how do you serve you know, people
that live in the Malibu the same way you're serving
people in Porta Ranch Like, Yeah, very different.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
You've got to be out there and you have to
understand the issues that animate all of the different communities. Now,
there are some unifying concerns. You know, the cost of
living is too high everywhere, and so the predominant story
across this district is one that is struggling economically. Whether
you're in Semi Valley, whether you're in the San Fernando Valley,
(08:22):
whether you're on the West side of LA people need
more economic opportunity. That's why we're going to focus on
supporting our small businesses, which are really the engines of
job creation. It's why we're fighting for a national tax
credit on film and television production, which, as we know,
this isn't this is like our version of the Detroit
auto industry. In Congress, we have an opportunity to actually
(08:44):
solve that problem. We also can be addressing that with
copyright reforms to protect against the unintended consequences of artificial
intelligence technology and what that's going to do to that industry.
So there are sort of unifying themes. But at the
end of the day, you're right. You know, someone in
port A Ranch is live in a really different life
than someone in Malibu or someone in See Me, and
you got to just get out there and talk to
(09:04):
those people and get to know them.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
What separates you from other candidates in the race?
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Effectiveness? You know, I hadn't need to be elected to
Congress to know that we needed to shepherd a community
effort to lead a recovery in the Palisades. I started
a nonprofit called Department of Angels that's serving people to
this day. I didn't need to wait until the opportune
moment to support a green new deal. I helped to
start one in California, the California Climate Action Corps, which
has put twenty thousand young people to work. I didn't
(09:31):
need to wait to know which way the wind was
blowing on ice and immigration. We started a petition to
make sure that this city is not allowing unlawful and
unconstitutional ice atentions on city property. We need members of
Congress who deal with problems with the urgency that they require,
and that is what will distinguish me from other candidates.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Jake Levine, candidate for Congress District thirty two, Thank you
for joining us today. Appreciate it. On Meet the candidates.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Thanks Jeff, It's wonderful to be here. Appreciate it.
This is Meet the Candidates.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hi, this is Jeff Thomas, Division President with iHeartMedia. It's
time for another edition of Meet the Candidates. Our candidate
today is Jake Levine, who is candidate for Congress District
thirty two, which is.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
It's the most beautiful district in the country. We go
from Malibu on the west coast to Laurel Canyon and
then imagine the West Lava in Brentwood all the way
up to Porter Ranch. So we've got most of the
San Fernando Valley west of the four or five and
we also have Simi Valley after Prop fifty, huge diverse,
beautiful district.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
You have from the mountains to the ocean, anything in between.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, when you look at that district, when you look
at the constituents and the people living there, like as
you are, you know, running for office, Like what do
you see as the as the number one priority.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Bringing down the cost of living so that people who
live in our district can afford to live and work there.
And we've got a whole host of challenges on that front.
We're really focused right now in housing. Put a proposal
together for a National Housing Development Bank that will bring
down the cost to actually build new housing supply and
catalyze private sector investment in new housing. We're also supporting
(01:11):
the demand side with support for first time home buyers
to do down payments and assist them with those, and
also a national renter's tax credit because so many people
When Bradsum and my opponent, was first running for office
in nineteen ninety seven, imagine that in nineteen ninety seven
you could afford a one bedroom apartment in our district
(01:31):
for seven hundred dollars a month. Today it's twenty eight
hundred dollars. So we've got to allow young people who
want to live the dream of home ownership to.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Save for that. But it's also across the board.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
We've got to bring down prices for childcare, for education,
for insurance. Now, our district has Pacific Palisades in Malibu,
which of course experienced the devastation of the wildfires, and
that's caused insurance prices to spike everywhere.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
We've got a strategy to do that.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Unfortunately, our incumbent member of Congress is take hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the insurance industry, the very insurers
who are denying claims to people like my mom in
the aftermath of that fire.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
So when you say you have a plan, give me
a few specific things that you would do.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
You know, the impetus for me to get into this
race was losing my childhood home and the Palisades fire.
And I've been walking that roadway with my mom along
the way, dealing with property contents, loss of use, reconstruction,
and in addition to the need for federal funding, which
we have not gotten, insurance is the single most important
(02:32):
thing happening right now in our recovery. And we have
an industry that is jacking up prices due to the
perception of increased risk, but they're not providing discounts for
people who are actually going above and beyond and building
resilience into their own reconstruction. We know that by using
different materials, by using defensible space, by thinking about our
(02:53):
use of public lands, that we can actually mitigate risk,
and that should bring premiums down. But we also need
a better system than the State Insurance Commission, which has
failed to hold insurance companies accountable to allow for people
to not only get the claims for which they've paid
their premiums that many of them are being denied to
this day. But we also need to provide a pathway
(03:16):
for people to issue complaints and for the insurance companies
to have to be accountable to that. So we're proposing
a federal Claims Advocacy Center for people who are experiencing
losses of these kinds of wildfires that sadly are now
part of the new normal in terms of the climate
reality that we're living in.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
So, if I'm an insurance company, conceivably I had to
pay out a lot of you know, premiums for people
that had damage, lost their houses, et cetera, my business
has to be profitable as well, Like, how do you
balance that?
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Well, what they're experiencing in California is a crisis of liquidity.
They have got too many premiums that are paying out
too much, and they have not calibrated the to the
pricing of their premiums. And that's a part of the
reason why you have that is because the Insurance Commission
has sat on rate cases for claims sort of indefinitely. Now,
(04:12):
ultimately this does not benefit consumers because the end state
of that is that the insurance companies leave the state
and so people can't actually get insurance at all, and
the people who are still here with their insurers are
seeing their premiums rise, in some cases five hundred percent.
And this is happening all over our district, not just
in the wildland urban interface. We have high wildfire risk,
(04:34):
so we actually do need to normalize and speed up
a process for processing rate cases for the insurance companies.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
But that has to.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Be paired with common sense discounts on premiums that people
can achieve by reducing their relative risk. We have an
insurance commission in the state that has been sitting on
its job to process these administrative decisions, and we need
them to speed up.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
So you worked a lot in climate, energy, et cetera. Right,
I talk to people all over the country, right, They're
always asking about the weather here, which is awesome and beautiful,
But in your district specifically, like we talked about, there's wildfires,
there's mud slides, there's weather events either catastrophic or ongoing
(05:18):
that are happening. And we had a ton of rain
this past season, which you know, amps up the possibility
for you know, events like that to happen. Like what
do we do? What are you proposing we do to
kind of not just you know, go after you know,
some of the challenges that you've talked about once things
have already happened, but mitigate those or stopped those events
(05:40):
from happening.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, well, we have a few.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
First of all, I see this as the biggest economic
opportunity for our country in a generation. And what I'm
talking about is addressing the climate crisis by accelerating a
clean energy transition and deploying just endless, abundant wind solar
battery store. This is now if you look at the
private market, and I'm not talking about government funding, but
(06:04):
just what the private sector is doing. More than ninety
percent of new energy generation around the world is wind,
solar and batteries. And the reason that that is is
because it's the least expensive and the most reliable. In
our own district, we are doubling down with ineffective leadership
on fossil fuel resources that are dangerous and expensive. Exhibit
(06:26):
A is Aleiso Canyon. Now, this is in the northeast
part of my district. This was the site of the
largest natural gas explosion in our country's history. I helped
when I was working for fran Pavy and the state
legislature to articulate a pathway to actually shut that facility down,
to transition it to battery storage, and to transition the workforce.
(06:46):
We got SoCal Gas and Edison and DWP around a
table to talk about a future for the workforce to
have jobs in the clean energy economy, and we should
be investing in that kind of innovation.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
All over the world.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
When I served in the last administration at the Development
Finance Corporation, I invested billions of dollars in this type
of clean energy, and everywhere I went and around the world,
I always saw one other player at the table, and
that was the government of China. They were investing in
these countries in clean energy because they know that that
represents the economic opportunity of the next generation. It represents
(07:20):
job creation, and it represents opportunities to build alliances with
people overseas that we need to have as partners in
really important parts of the world. So I would say,
even though here in this district we're starting to see
the effects, we also can bring our ingenuity and innovation
and young people to bear on the solutions, and that's
what we're focused on doing this thinking about it as
(07:42):
an opportunity.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
So your district is very diverse, not just the ocean
to the mountains like we talked about earlier, but the population. Yeah,
the people, Like how do you serve you know, people
that live in the Malibu the same way you're serving
people in Porta Ranch Like, Yeah, very different.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
You've got to be out there and you have to
understand the issues that animate all of the different communities. Now,
there are some unifying concerns. You know, the cost of
living is too high everywhere, and so the predominant story
across this district is one that is struggling economically. Whether
you're in Semi Valley, whether you're in the San Fernando Valley,
(08:22):
whether you're on the West side of LA people need
more economic opportunity. That's why we're going to focus on
supporting our small businesses, which are really the engines of
job creation. It's why we're fighting for a national tax
credit on film and television production, which, as we know,
this isn't this is like our version of the Detroit
auto industry. In Congress, we have an opportunity to actually
(08:44):
solve that problem. We also can be addressing that with
copyright reforms to protect against the unintended consequences of artificial
intelligence technology and what that's going to do to that industry.
So there are sort of unifying themes. But at the
end of the day, you're right. You know, someone in
port A Ranch is live in a really different life
than someone in Malibu or someone in See Me, and
you got to just get out there and talk to
(09:04):
those people and get to know them.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
What separates you from other candidates in the race?
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Effectiveness? You know, I hadn't need to be elected to
Congress to know that we needed to shepherd a community
effort to lead a recovery in the Palisades. I started
a nonprofit called Department of Angels that's serving people to
this day. I didn't need to wait until the opportune
moment to support a green new deal. I helped to
start one in California, the California Climate Action Corps, which
has put twenty thousand young people to work. I didn't
(09:31):
need to wait to know which way the wind was
blowing on ice and immigration. We started a petition to
make sure that this city is not allowing unlawful and
unconstitutional ice atentions on city property. We need members of
Congress who deal with problems with the urgency that they require,
and that is what will distinguish me from other candidates.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Jake Levine, candidate for Congress District thirty two, Thank you
for joining us today. Appreciate it. On Meet the candidates.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Thanks Jeff, It's wonderful to be here. Appreciate it.
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