Dhillon is a Republican running in San Francisco. If that doesn’t mean much to you, consider this: 9 percent of registered voters in San Francisco are Republican, and that number is only getting smaller. Voter registration figures show the California Republican Party is fast losing ground in the nation’s most populous state, where GOP voter registration lags behind Democrats by more than 13 percent. As Dhillon herself describes it, “to be a Republican [in San Francisco] and wear that label proudly is to attract people to key your car.” So why is she risking her car’s paint job and bothering to run at all? She wants to help change the face of her party. “I do my best to present a different face of the party than what they’re used to seeing. My job is to bust a lot of stereotypes about the Republican Party—that we’re all old, white men who want to control women’s bodies.” Not only is she a gutsy politician, she is also an accomplished business litigator at Dhillon & Smith LLP (of which she is a founding partner), dealing with issues of commercial and intellectual property, elections, and civil rights. She has won numerous awards for her pro bono legal services in cases involving domestic violence and religious liberty, and she was named a “Northern California Super Lawyer” by the publishers of American Lawyer magazine and one of the Recorder’s 40 “Women Leaders in Law.”
