Since 1997, Lois Capps has run for her congressional seat no less than 19 times. This Monday, Capps — the nine-term Democrat representing Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties in Congress — announced that she would not seek reelection. “For everything there is a time and season,” said Capps, a onetime Yale divinity student not to mention former high school nurse, during an interview at her Santa Barbara home. “Lo and behold, it’s been 17 years since I’ve been in Congress. If anyone told me I would be here that long, I would never have believed them.”
Capps, now 77, declined to offer many specifics as to what guided her announcement. “I don’t make decisions based on lightning bolts,” she noted. “I’ve been thinking on this a while, and it just feels right to me. No one called up and said, ‘You have to go now.’”
Since filling the Congressional vacancy created when her husband Walter died of a heart attack in 1997, Capps has emerged as a potent, abiding force in the course of Santa Barbara politics. The substantial get-out-the-vote efforts she’s waged, especially in Isla Vista, have helped not just her own campaigns but those of untold Democrats; to an unusual degree, Capps’s endorsements have always carried weight. Republicans, it should be noted, held a 47-year lock on the district until Walter was elected in 1996. Over the years, a string of Republican candidates have been quick to dismiss Capps as “a nice lady” only to have her clean their clocks.