On November 8, 1966, future President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, wins his first bid for elected office, defeating incumbent Gov. Pat Brown. Reagan is the first professional actor to hold the job. He is succeeded in 1975 by Democrat Jerry Brown, Pats son.
In the same election, voters in Oakland send March K. Fong to the Assembly, where she leads the fight to ban pay toilets, arguing they discriminate against women since urinals are free. Fong is the first Chinese American woman elected to the Legislature. In 1974, March Fong Eu is elected Secretary of State, a job she holds until 1994.
Four hundred miles away, Los Angeles voters make Yvonne Watson Brathwaite an assembly member. She’s the first African American woman in the Legislature. Elected to Congress in 1972, she is the first member of the House to give birth while in office and the first to be granted maternity leave. She is elected a Los Angeles County supervisor in 1992 and retires from politics in 2008.
Her daughter, Autumn Burke, is elected to the Assembly in 2014.
Los Angeles voters also elevate Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally to the state Senate, which most historians say makes Dymally the first African American in the upper house. Born in Trinidad, Dymally actually is West Indian, making him the first Trinidadian to serve in the senate and later as California’s lieutenant governor. A Congressman from 1980 through 1992, Dymally returns to the Assembly in 2002. He is defeated in a bid to return to the state Senate in 2008 and dies four years later at age 86.
The 1966 general election is also the first that is subject to changes created by several US Supreme Court decisions that make equal population the determiner of legislative district drawing.
Of 40 redrawn state Senate seats on the ballot, only 18 see incumbents returned.
Californians also elect the state’s first woman treasurer. Ivy Baker Priest, the former United States Treasurer, is a Republican and Utah native. She serves until her death in June 1975.