For political progeny, family business can be a balancing act

WASHINGTON — Adelita Grijalva grew up seeing strangers approach her father, the late Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, who spent more than 50 years in elected office, including two decades as a congressman from Arizona.

“Anywhere we’d go, we’d go to a restaurant, the people would be standing there, staring.”

She and her sisters became a part of his entourage.

“We were, like, staffing him all the time: ‘Yeah, that guy wants to take a picture’ [or] ‘That lady wants to talk to you,’” she said. And he’d talk. “That’s just the way he was.”

Grijalva says her father modeled how to stay humble in office, a lesson she plans to put into practice once she’s sworn in to represent Arizona’s 7th District. But when that will happen still remains in question.

More than a month after winning a special election to replace her father, Grijalva has not yet been seated, the byproduct of rising Hill tensions amid a partial government shutdown. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has suggested she will be sworn in only when the government reopens.

Once she joins the 119th Congress, she will be among a growing list of lawmakers who followed their parents to Capitol Hill, bringing the total to at least a dozen. They include Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was appointed by her father Frank H. Murkowski when he was elected governor. And House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, the daughter of powerful Baltimore Democrat Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., who served in the House from 1939 to 1947.

Candidates have congressional connections

Already more than a half-dozen congressional progeny are seeking office in the 2026 midterms, including Stefany Shaheen, daughter of New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen; Jim Kingston, son of former Georgia Republican Rep. Jack Kingston; and Jake Levine, son of former California Democrat Rep. Mel Levine.

Pelosi has declined to confirm that her own daughter, Christine Pelosi, may run to succeed her. Asked whether she has advice for her or for Grijalva, she replied, “Well, my daughter … that isn’t anything that is a reality yet.”

Pelosi added, “In terms of Adelita, the advice I give all women who come here: be yourself, the authentic you, and know your power.”

Political observers note the clear benefits of being a politician’s child while running for office.

“A huge barrier to entry for a lot of folks is access to certain networks and just simply name recognition,” said Casey Burgat, director of the legislative affairs program at the George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.

At the same time, Burgat says, there’s the risk of being pigeonholed as a copy of your parent or associated with their flaws, pointing to New Jersey Democrat Rep. Rob Menendez, the son of former Sen. Bob Menendez. His father was well connected on Capitol Hill and chaired the Foreign Relations Committee before his political career came to an ignominious end. The senior Menendez was convicted in a sweeping corruption case in 2024 and is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence.

“It’s tough to walk the fine line of ‘I’m going to be as effective as my father proved to be,’ and then all of a sudden you need to distance yourself,” Burgat said.

For congressional progeny, that distance can be political or personal. Grijalva says people have accused her in the past of parroting her father: “My dad always said, ‘You have to be the best prepared. You have to do your homework all the time. You have to know everything that’s going on, because people are going to discount you all the time.’”

Casting their own political identity

Stepping out of a parent’s political shadow can take some time. When Murkowski was first appointed to the Senate, her record closely resembled that of her father – a staunch conservative who almost always voted with Republicans.

More than two decades later, she is known as a political maverick, with a voting record to match. In 2024, she broke with the GOP on more than half of all party-line votes. Once limited to issues like abortion and judicial nominations, Murkowski’s split with Republicans has been felt on a broader range of issues in recent years, including homeland security and foreign policy.

Pelosi, who rose to become the first woman to be elected as speaker, is such a titanic figure in the House that her own father’s congressional tenure is almost a footnote to hers. But she says that growing up it was her brother, Thomas D’Alesandro III, who was the presumed political heir.

“I always was a volunteer in politics later in life, and then one thing led to another, but I never had any ambition to run for office,” she said. “[My brother] was the one that people thought would be in politics. … That was where the expectation was, never with me, and nor was it anything I wanted.”

Her father lived long enough to see her sworn in after winning a 1987 special election to replace Rep. Sala Burton, who died in office.

Levine, speaking from the campaign trail in California, says it took him time to embrace who his father was.

“There was a time in my life when … [I] would shy away from letting people know that my dad had served because I wanted to stand on my own two feet,” he said. “But after a while, I kind of realized that actually this was quite special.”

Levine says his father never pressed him to run for office and was so modest about his own congressional career that it was only recently that he learned of one of his biggest policy accomplishments. The younger Levine, then a White House energy and climate official, had accompanied President Joe Biden on one of his last trips to name Chuckwalla National Monument, near Joshua Tree National Park.

They were talking about the trip when his father casually dropped that he had written legislation that eventually became the 1994 law establishing Joshua Tree as a national park.

“I just felt so proud of that, but also I sort of joke with my dad that he, of course, never shared that with me,” Levine said.

For her part, Grijalva has followed closely in her father’s political footsteps: Both served on the local Tucson school board, and both were elected as Pima County supervisors.

But she admitted that the timeline didn’t always suit the elder Grijalva: “My dad wanted me to run for office when I was 18. I’m like, ‘I’m going to college.’”

Now Grijalva is eager to embrace her father’s legacy and has her eye on his committee assignments: Natural Resources and Education and the Workforce. And she is already talking about making some of his policy proposals her own, including a sweeping bill to classify some environmental regulations as civil rights concerns under the law.

“I am my father’s daughter,” she said.