California voters decided to put a socialist in charge of the state’s insurance industry — not even two years after fires tore through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

California homeowners are still opening non-renewal letters. Premiums keep climbing. Companies that once competed for business here have pulled back.

Apparently, voters decided the answer was to put a radical in charge.

Jane Kim, the former San Francisco supervisor who served as Bernie Sanders’ California political director in 2020, has declared victory in the race for insurance commissioner.

Her opponent, Democratic State Senator Ben Allen, who actually represents Pacific Palisades, called to congratulate her, although the count isn’t final.

After working for Sanders, Kim went on to run the California Working Families Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America recommended her for this job.

Even the California Democratic Party wouldn’t go there. It endorsed Allen. Voters went further left anyway.

The DSA’s objective is to replace capitalism. The organization’s platform calls for democratic control over private resources such as insurance and credit. Now a candidate it backed will regulate every private insurer in California.

The San Francisco Chronicle said that Kim would be a “disaster.” She won anyway.

In declaring victory, Kim said that “insurance was created as a shared promise.”

Most of us think of insurance as a contract. You pay a premium, a company takes on your risk, and it pays your claim. For a democratic socialist, the trouble is that a private company is making that promise at all.

Kim spent the campaign complaining that insurers’ “blockbuster profits enrich shareholders and CEOs, not customers.” Her single-payer disaster proposal would put the state in charge of coverage now provided by private insurers.

Push that idea far enough and the private market shrinks to whatever the state leaves behind. I can’t tell you whether Kim expects to replace private insurance. That is where I think her ideology points.

Her disaster proposal, Natural Disaster Insurance for All, would provide universal disaster coverage. Every homeowner would be in the same pool, with premiums based partly on property value rather than simply the risk of a particular home burning down.

She also wants a public auto insurance option and minimum payout rules that limit how much of each premium dollar private insurers can keep.

She hasn’t put a price tag on the disaster program, saying only that the cost would need to be studied. During the campaign, Allen called the plan “unmoored and unresearched.”

Today, the worst-off fire victims are those insured by the “California FAIR Plan,” the state-backed insurer of last resort. Kim wants to expand that kind of coverage.

The more premiums track property value instead of risk, the more the homeowner who clears brush and replaces a wooden roof ends up covering the one who doesn’t. That weakens the incentive to make a home safer.

California desperately needs more companies willing to write policies here. Every insurer that leaves means one fewer company bidding for your business. Kim’s plans would move more and more of that business into the public sector instead. She never has to announce that she wants private insurers gone.

A wildfire doesn’t get cheaper because Sacramento writes the policy. Somebody still has to pay the claims.

California’s insurance politics have made the fire problem worse. Since voters passed Proposition 103 in 1988, insurers have needed the commissioner’s permission before raising rates. In 2023, State Farm, the state’s largest home insurer, stopped taking applications for new homeowners’ policies here. Allstate had already stopped writing new home policies the year before.

The FAIR Plan already carries close to 700,000 policies, about 2.5 times what it held in 2022. Its customers face an average 29.1% rate increase this fall.

A private insurer that charges less than its claims eventually runs out of money. Government can shift the bill through assessments, borrowing or taxes.

Kim can’t create a public disaster program on her own. She would need the legislature and the governor. She can still do plenty without them. The commissioner approves rates and writes many of the rules insurers live under. Her proposals tell you how she intends to write them.

Outgoing Commissioner Ricardo Lara spent his final years coaxing insurers back by letting them price in catastrophe models and reinsurance costs. Kim has criticized the higher prices that followed.

Lara’s department says those rules are starting to work. In August, the Department of Insurance reported that FAIR Plan growth had slowed for a third straight quarter.

I expect her to expand public insurance and restrict private carriers, shifting more of the cost onto everyone else. She can sell those changes as fixes for the insurance crisis.

Kim may be constrained by California law. But she can chase private insurers away.

That’s what the electorate chose. And elections have consequences.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.