It was a big month for the San Diego City Council. It was December of 2022, and the swearing in of Councilmember Kent Lee meant all nine representatives were Democrats for the first time.
News organizations marked the milestone, but the body was also going through a less obvious change. Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, in his second year in the gig, had just shuffled the leadership roles on the council’s committees.
Councilmember Marni von Wilpert, generally stoic to that point in her term, issued a direct, public criticism over the perceived slight of being flipped from leading the city’s infrastructure committee and switched over to the public safety committee instead.
“I know politics is rough and tumble, and I know politics can be kind of a bloodsport — we all ran really hard-fought campaigns to get here and we have the scars to prove it,” she said, measuring each word. “But it doesn’t have to be that way… One thing I’m trying to do in this political world is to treat all of us with kindness and respect and come into each other’s offices— and tell each other before we make big changes to programs they worked on, and not find out in memos sitting alone at your desk.”
It was not obvious at that moment that in four years, von Wilpert would be the councilmember on that dais running to flip a congressional seat from red to blue, in one of the most closely watched races in the country as Democrats sought to retake the House of Representatives.
During an interview over the summer, von Wilpert minimized that moment, and her turn from frustrated second-year councilmember on the outside of an emerging power center within City Hall, to someone on the cusp of a seat in Congress amid a new Democratic majority.
“When I get to Congress, I will know, ‘Hey, sometimes people are going to argue over certain assignments’ … but we really need to keep our eye on the ball and all work together at the end of the day,” she said, noting that she and Elo-Rivera joinedto pass a law making grocery coupons available to those without access to store apps or mobile phones.
Outgoing Councilmember Jen Campbell — who was likewise outside the progressive coalition that worked with Elo-Rivera as council president — remembered it differently. She and von Wilpert felt left out of important decisions over the last few years, Campbell said.
Campbell, now 81, said she figured her eight years on the council would be the last chapter in her professional career after 40 years in medicine. She never considered running for mayor, and as Campbell put it, “only the egomaniacs [get to council] and immediately think they should be mayor.”
But inevitably, Campbell said, von Wilpert had to start thinking about what her next job would be. That that day in 2022 might have made von Wilpert face the fact that she was outside the emerging inner-circle on the new, all-Democrat council, but she had been positioning herself for 15 years as a loyal member of the Democratic Party coalition.
When she announced her congressional run just as it became clear Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to gerrymander a handful of seats into pickup opportunities was going to pass — it was a matter of recognizing an opportunity. And von Wilpert has always been good at recognizing opportunities, those close to her say.
In 2011, after finishing law school at Fordham University, von Wilpert started a civil rights law fellowship at the Mississippi Center for Justice. The legal clinic is based in Jackson, but she was working with Kimberly Jones Merchant in the organization’s Delta office in the northwest part of the state, about two hours from Memphis. She stayed for three years and worked as an advocate for AIDS patients facing employment, housing and healthcare discrimination.
When von Wilpert arrived, the office was still being built. So she and Jones Merchant set up at a nearby law firm in a room with a picnic table, a fax machine and two laptops. After one of their first days working together, the area was under a tornado warning. Von Wilpert, worried that her small apartment wouldn’t provide the right shelter, spent the night at Jones Merchant’s home and waited out the storm.
Jones Merchant is now the center’s president and CEO. They’ve remained close, and both visit each other once a year.
“When she left the Center for Justice, one of the reasons she left was because of funding, and she was looking for another job in Mississippi,” Jones Merchant said. “I think, initially, her plan was to stay in Mississippi, but it just didn’t work out that way. Then she started looking outside of Mississippi, and that’s when she found a job around labor in D.C.”
Indeed, after leaving her civil rights work in Mississippi, von Wilpert became a staffer for Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), where she began crafting labor-related legislation — including the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
By then, Von Wilpert was starting to see herself as a lawyer building a long career in D.C. She pursued a job on Hillary Clinton’s staff leading up to the 2016 election.
“Who knows what a world of difference it would have been had Donald Trump never been the president. But we are where we are,” she said.
Trump took office in 2017, and von Wilpert returned to Scripps Ranch, where she grew up. She was licensed to practice law only in Mississippi so she studied for the California Bar exam in her childhood bedroom.
The choice in 2017 to come back home, von Wilpert said, was easy, even though she could have leveraged her early experience to go into consulting or corporate law.
“I’ve spent my entire career in public service. Even growing up in San Diego County I got my Gold Award as a Girl Scout,” von Wilpert said
It wasn’t strictly a calling that dictated her path. Public Service Loan Forgiveness, started by President George Bush’s administration in 2007, permits graduates to have their loans forgiven if they work in public service and make 10 years worth of loan payments.
“And that’s enabled me to help our country in so many ways, whether it’s being deputy city attorney and prosecuting corporate lawbreakers like Monsanto, or standing up for civil rights in Mississippi, or workers’ rights in the Obama administration,” she said.
Jones Merchant said each step seemed to follow the same logic.
“I think at some point … she was like, ‘Here’s an opportunity to do even more.’ I just think she sees a need and wants to fill it.”
After her first council term, party leaders asked Von Wilpert to consider running for state assembly she said, but she decided against it. Von Wilpert said she felt like she spent half of those four years helping the city manage the pandemic, and she wanted to work on more specific policy issues.
But when Donald Trump won reelection, she thought she needed to seek a higher office.
Initially that meant a run for state Senate, and last summer she declared her candidacy for the District 40 seat that partially overlaps with CA-48.
What made her pivot from a state office to a federal office? A veteran San Diego-area politician made the case.
Toni Atkins — a former San Diego council president, state assembly speaker and state senate pro tem — had become a mentor by this point, and had urged her to run for state senate. When passage of Prop. 50, last year’s redistricting measure, looked imminent, Atkins again urged her to make the move and run for Congress
“She said, ‘Marni, we need another Democrat in Washington, D.C. much more urgently than we need another Democrat in Sacramento.’”
