Kevin Patrick Kiley (born January 30, 1985) is an American politician, attorney, and former educator serving as the U.S. representative for California's 3rd congressional district since 2023. A member of the Republican Party, he represented the 6th district in the California State Assembly from 2016 to 2022. Kiley was a candidate to replace California governor Gavin Newsom in the voter-initiated recall election on September 14, 2021.
Early life, education, and career
Kiley grew up in the Sacramento area, where his father was a physician and his mother was a special education teacher. He attended local public schools, including Cavitt Junior High School and Granite Bay High School, where he was valedictorian.
He graduated with an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 2007, completing a thesis titled "The Civil Rights Movement and the Reemergence of Classical Democracy". Upon graduation, he became a teacher in Los Angeles through Teach for America, teaching for two years at Manual Arts High School while earning his teaching credentials at Loyola Marymount University. In 2008, he was recognized as a national debate champion while participating as a member of the Loyola debate team.
Kiley later attended Yale Law School, worked as an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and clerked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He returned to California to join the law firm Irell & Manella, where he helped prepare an intellectual property theft case for T-Mobile against Chinese technology company Huawei that was the basis for a federal criminal investigation. He was an adjunct professor at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.
He resides in Rocklin, California.
Political career
In 2016, Kiley was elected to the California State Assembly. In May 2016, Kiley told The Sacramento Bee that he supported then-Ohio Governor John Kasich in the 2016 United States presidential election. In 2018, Kiley authored legislation to make it easier for students to transfer school districts.
After winning a second term in the State Assembly, Kiley ran for the State Senate in California's 1st District. He finished second in the primary, but lost the runoff to fellow Assemblyman Brian Dahle. Soon after the start of the new legislative session, Kiley introduced legislation to close for private use a controversial DMV office that exclusively catered to state legislators and staff. In a statement to The Sacramento Bee, Kiley said: "This is supposed to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people, not an oligarchy where a gilded political class enjoys privileges that aren’t available to the people that we represent."
According to the Associated Press, Kiley is "a conservative who often flirts with the fringes of the GOP". He has said climate change is real, but opposed Governor Gavin Newsom's executive orders requiring all new vehicles in California to be zero emission by 2035 and banning oil-drilling by 2045. He is a supporter of charter schools. Kiley introduced legislation to ban local and state governments from implementing vaccine requirements. After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede while making claims of fraud, Kiley refused to say whether Biden won the 2020 election legitimately. Kiley has said his position is to "stay out of national politics altogether", and that "national politics is a distraction that is used frankly by those in power in Sacramento [as] kind of a smokescreen for their own failures."
2021 California gubernatorial recall election
Though he voted to authorize $1 billion of emergency pandemic spending for Governor Newsom in March 2020, saying "to trust in Governor Newsom’s leadership and listen to his guidance", Kiley later said Newsom "made a mockery of that trust" and, alongside fellow California legislator James Gallagher, successfully sued in June 2020 to remove Newsom's emergency powers (though the ruling was overturned on appeal), and was influential in the campaign to recall Newsom, publishing a book in January 2021 titled Recall Gavin Newsom: The Case Against America's Most Corrupt Governor.
On July 6, 2021, Kiley announced his candidacy for governor of California in the 2021 recall election. According to the New York Times, he was one of the "more moderate Republican recall candidates," while the Los Angeles Times deemed him and John Cox the "more traditional conservatives" in the election, which failed to remove Newsom from office.