From the outside, Mike McGuire seems like exactly the type of person who would rise to the top of the California Senate.
The Healdsburg Democrat was student body president in high school, according to Sonoma Magazine, and his classmates voted him “most likely to become president” in the senior yearbook. After winning a seat on the local school board at just 19, McGuire then served on the Healdsburg city council and Sonoma County board of supervisors before his election to the Senate, where he already spent the past two years as majority leader.
But at his swearing-in Monday as the next Senate president pro tem — a powerful role heading the upper chamber of the Legislature that gives him a direct hand in guiding budget and policy decisions for 39 million Californians — an emotional McGuire marveled that he had made it at all.
“In other places in this country, a kid like me would have been forgotten,” McGuire said, recounting a modest youth in Sonoma County where his divorced mother scraped to put food on the table, he helped out on his beloved grandmother’s farm and he struggled to finish school.