Adam Schiff

Background

Adam Schiff was born in Framingham, Massachusetts. His family later moved to Alamo, California, and he graduated from Monte Vista High School in Danville. He attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. He then spent almost six years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, where he prosecuted former FBI agent Richard Miller in an espionage case and started the office's first environmental crimes unit. Voters elected him to the State Senate in 1996, where he chaired the Judiciary Committee, and to the U.S. House in 2000. In the House he chaired the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, served on the select committee on the January 6th attack and led the House managers in President Trump's first impeachment trial.

In office

On November 5, 2024, Schiff won both the special election for the rest of Dianne Feinstein's term and the full term, defeating Republican Steve Garvey with 58.9 percent in the full-term race. He carried Alameda County with 76.8 percent and San Francisco with 82.4 percent, and took office December 9, 2024. He serves on the Judiciary; Environment and Public Works; Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; and Small Business and Entrepreneurship committees, and is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary subcommittee on intellectual property and the Environment and Public Works subcommittee on fisheries, water and wildlife.

In 2025 Federal Housing Finance Director Bill Pulte made a public criminal referral on Schiff's mortgages to the Justice Department, and President Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute him. Schiff denied wrongdoing. CNN reported on November 20, 2025, that he had not been charged, that Maryland prosecutors had hesitated to proceed, and that a new inquiry was reviewing the case's handling.

On January 20, 2026, he and Senator Alex Padilla toured the California City immigration detention center. He said detainees most often complained about medical care and argued that ICE needed more oversight rather than more money. On February 18 he joined Padilla and Representative Mark DeSaulnier in asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem not to reopen the former federal women's prison in Dublin, Alameda County, as an immigration jail; an ICE spokesperson said the agency had no such plans. In March he cosponsored a war powers resolution on Iran, which failed in the Senate, saying the country was at war without a national debate.

At the Punchbowl News Tech Summit in San Francisco in October 2026, he called for federal oversight of AI developers, said industry self-policing is not enough, and said data center developers should pay for their power and grid upgrades.

On the ballot

Schiff is not on the November 3, 2026 ballot. His Class I term runs to January 3, 2031, and the seat is next on the ballot November 5, 2030. As a statewide senator he represents all nine Bay Area counties. Most voices on this page come from his 2024 campaign. The one from 2025 concerns the mortgage case; we found no published praise of his Senate record from 2025 or 2026 that meets our rules.