It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

State Sen. Chris Cabaldon knows this well. On Friday he was expected to spend his Freshman session discussing issues like land use and environmental protection. Instead, he and his fellow Democrats in the legislature are forced to shore up California’s protections to weather the storm of a second Trump administration.

“This wasn’t exactly the job I signed up for,” Cabaldon told a League of Women Voters audience in Vallejo on Friday.

Cabaldon said he was already frustrated working with the new administration, saying he was weary of putting the true hopes and dreams of voters on hold to combat a federal executive that is hostile towards them.

Locally in Woodland, Cabaldon, along with Congressman Mike Thompson and Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, will host a town hall at the Woodland Community & Senior Center on Thursday, Feb 20, starting at 5:30 p.m.

Cabaldon, a Democrat representing parts of Solano and Napa counties, spoke to a crowd of about 90 — smashing expectations for organizers who planned for about 25.

Cabaldon immediately addressed the Trump Administration in his opening remarks. He said that helping to run the most powerful state in the union under an administration that is hostile to it has already been stressful.

“I slept for very little of January,” he said.

Cabaldon also pointed to the Los Angeles wildfires, noting that they serve as a reminder to prepare for natural disasters statewide. As much of his district suffered from the LNU fires a few years ago, Cabaldon said he knows the impact that fires can have over the course of years.

“Real policy change has been a struggle,” he said. “The tragedy in Southern California, if nothing else, has now gotten the attention of the entire state.”

The freshman senator said he has jumped in headfirst, pledging to stand up for undocumented immigrants in his district and across the state. Cabaldon voted to fund the attorney general to combat the Trump administration, which he thinks is much more organized than eight years ago.

“I was appointed to the budget committee, which sounded like a good idea at the time,” he joked.

Cabaldon called California the nation’s largest defender of democracy, but also the Trump administration’s largest target. He thinks the Trump administration wishes to sow discord across the state and cause infighting among Californians. He noted that one of every three Californians receives federal healthcare funding.

“We will be in both a moral and financial crisis.” He said if federal funding is frozen or pulled from the state.

Cabaldon said some liberals in the state will be called upon to stand up for democracy in ways they are not used to. While often they are standing up for the most vulnerable, he said, Californians now have more to lose themselves than ever before.

“Right now the most vulnerable is all of us in California,” he said. “Every single one of us.”

While the volume of initiatives from the administration has been profound and overwhelming, Cabaldon said, Democrats need to take each one seriously and combat them one by one. He referenced immigration reform, water rights, the funding freeze, LGBTQ+ rights, and more as policy areas under threat.

“With all of these threats, each one of them is maybe a 50-50 chance that it happens,” he said. “But with 1000 threats, the chance that one of them or five of them or ten of them will break through is very high.”

Cabaldon said people will need to put their individual issues and wishes aside to be strategic and achieve goals that are good for the entire state.

“Part of the point of collective action is to win,” he said.

Cabaldon said it’s time for Democrats to get aggressive about fixing housing policy, land use, and healthcare in the state, among other issues.

Asked why Democrats look so weak nationally, Cabaldon said that his time at the Democratic National Committee taught him that salvation in tough times will not come from the party apparatus.

“There’s no such thing as the Democratic Party,” he said. “And what I mean by that is there’s no coach or quarterback in a room somewhere.”

Many people, not just national politicians, need to put their action behind their convictions, Cabaldon added. Still, he said he would like to see more action from his party in Washington.

“We don’t know where the breakthrough moments are going to come,” he said.

When a voter asked if the military could arrest Elon Musk, Cabaldon demurred but said Musk is broadly unpopular.

“I don’t know, that one’s out of my pay grade,” he said.

Democrats, said Cabaldon, need to change their playbook to make the changes they want to see.

“I think they learned more from 2018 than we did,” he said of Republicans.

Asked about California Forever, Cabaldon said he is unsure of what is happening. He said his first bill introduced is about the asymmetric power of billionaires. He said he wants communities to have control and vision over what happens near to their homes, and claimed his first bill introduced in the legislature addresses the issue.

“Don’t go look it up, because the bill just deals with one small financing mechanism,” he said.

The bill, SB 5, currently only references Infrastructure Financing Districts and changes the way that taxes are levied on them. It is currently in committee.

Cabaldon said he expects to expand the bill to adapt LAFCO’s authority, and he wants the state law to allow and induce local decisions rather than leaving communities to the whims of “15 billionaires.”

“We’ve learned a lot about what is wrong with our existing regulatory and legal framework,” he said of the situation with California Forever.

Cabaldon said the party needs to do more to reach out to men of color, young voters and union voters. He described Democratic losses among those demographics as a “collapse.”

On water rights in the state, Cabaldon said, the Colorado River and Sacramento Delta are critical to protecting the vitality of the state. He said that the federal government can divide and conquer the state along regional lines, as representatives in Northern California are in the “fight of our life” against Southern California water interests.

“Water protection isn’t partisan, it’s regional,” he said.

The Woodland Daily Democrat contributed to this report