IRVINE, California — You don’t have to be a tenured law professor or state lawmaker to understand the threat to public safety, and legal consequences, of a DUI arrest. But there’s absolutely no excuse if you hold those legal and lawmaker credentials.
That’s the position Democratic state Sen. David Min finds himself in as he runs for California’s open 47th Congressional District, covering coastal Orange County and Irvine. With the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Katie Porter, running for the Senate, Republicans see the seat as a key pickup opportunity in a quest to expand their current 222-213 House majority. House Democrats are counting on holding the seat in their quest to regain the majority they lost in the 2022 elections.
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In California’s top-two primary system, Republican Scott Baugh, who lost to Porter in 2022 51.7% to 48.3%, was and is expected to gain a November ballot spot. Min was widely seen as the leading Democratic to run against Baugh since former Rep. Harley Rouda bowed out of the race amid recovery from a moderate traumatic brain injury.
But Min turned out to be his own worst enemy. He was arrested on the night of May 2 in Sacramento. Min was pulled over near the state Capitol by the California Highway Patrol when he drove through a red light with his headlights off, according to the arrest report.
Officers conducted a DUI test and arrested him on suspicion of driving with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit. He was booked into the Sacramento County jail and released on May 3.
Min, 47, tried to get out ahead of the bad news.
“To my family, constituents, and supporters, I am so deeply sorry. I know I need to do better,” he said in a statement. “I will not let this personal failure distract from our work in California and in Washington.”
Yet the episode is only the latest reminder that sterling academic credentials and some success in politics don’t come with good judgment and wisdom. Min is an alum of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business and Harvard Law School. He went on to be an assistant law professor at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on the law and policy of banking, capital markets, and real estate.
After losing to Porter for Congress in 2018, Min in 2020 won an overlapping coastal Orange County state Senate seat. Before Min’s arrest, he had been considered a strong candidate to hold the seat. (Porter has endorsed her former UCI law school professor colleague.)
Many area Republicans have called on Min to quit the race. But so have some Democrats. Or they’re at least strongly hinting that Min should exit.
Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, practically invited other candidates from his party to join the 47th District race.
“The filing deadline is in December,” Aguilar said at the California Democratic Party convention on May 27. Of Min, Aguilar added, “I think it was a terrible lapse in judgment, terrible decision-making.”
And Rouda, who held a differently configured pre-redistricting coastal Orange County House seat from 2019-21, is endorsing a different candidate, Joanna Weiss, an attorney and progressive activist.
Voters unforgiving of candidate DUIs
In addition to being a stark threat to public safety, DUIs can be politically tricky. For voters, it’s an easy-to-understand offense, unlike some complicated financial scandals. Before Min, the highest-profile recent DUI was committed by Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
In August 2022, Paul Pelosi was sentenced to five days in jail after being convicted Tuesday of misdemeanor DUI in Northern California, the Napa County District Attorney’s Office announced at the time. Pelosi, then 82, was arrested May 28, 2022, and later charged with DUI and causing injury — “based upon an automobile collision,” the DA said — and having a blood alcohol level above 0.08%.
Still, House Republicans, amid a hard-fought battle to win control of the chamber, nary said a word about Mr. Pelosi. That’s because several Republican lawmakers over the years have had DUI problems, though voters are a lot more forgiving of incumbent lawmakers.
In November 2005, then-Texas GOP Rep. Kevin Brady pleaded no contest to a drunken driving charge in South Dakota, where he grew up and was attending a college reunion. He was convicted and fined $350. Brady later had no trouble winning reelection and went on to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee before retiring from the House in 2023 after 26 years in office.
In December 2012, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) issued a public apology after being arrested for drunken driving in Alexandria, Virginia. Alexandria police said at the time that an officer noticed Crapo’s vehicle run through a red traffic light, and after the vehicle was stopped, the officer conducted field sobriety tests, which Crapo failed. Crapo, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who previously said he didn’t drink alcohol, was arrested for DUI and taken into custody without incident.
Crapo, like Min a Harvard Law graduate, in January 2013 pleaded guilty to DUI in court and was sentenced to 180 days, all of them suspended. He also paid a $250 fine and court fees, took a DUI course, and had his driver’s license suspended for 12 months.
The incident didn’t have a long-term effect on Crapo’s political career. Idaho voters easily returned him to the Senate in the 2016 and 2022 elections.
One of the most prominent cases of a DUI having an effect on a political race came in the frantic closing days of the 2000 presidential race. On Nov. 2, 2000, five days before Election Day, news surfaced that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, had been charged with DUI on Labor Day weekend in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976, when he was 30.
Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, said for years after the incident that it likely led to a loss of support among some evangelical and other socially conservative supporters — which became more conspicuous due to the extended 2000 post-Election Day legal and political maneuvering in Florida, where Bush ended up beating Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, by 537 votes out of more than 6 million cast.
“If Bush did drop 2 percent nationally in the vote because of the DUI revelation, then it probably cost him four additional states that he lost by less than 1 percent — New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oregon,” Rove wrote in his 2010 memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.
Had Bush won those states, it “would have allowed him to win the White House without Florida,” Rove recalled. “Of the things I would redo in the 2000 election, making a timely announcement about Bush’s DUI would top the list.”
Candidates like Min seem to have got that message, putting out the news on their own terms before journalists find out from law enforcement. And Min’s DUI episode came more than a year before the June 2024 primary for the House seat he’s seeking.
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But Min’s DUI arrest is likely to come back up, whether by his political rivals or outside supporters, particularly with court proceedings scheduled in the coming months. Three common punishments for a first-time DUI conviction in California include up to three years of probation, a fine between $390 and $1,000, and the mandatory completion of a 30-hour first-offender alcohol program, the price of which is $500.
Min, with his elite legal background and as a sitting officeholder, can’t argue he didn’t know better.
