Richard Pan Campaign Built on Explicit Lies

As a Sacramento resident who also reports on politics at the State Capitol, I am privy to local politics, including local congressional races. One of the hottest is between Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA-3) and Richard Pan. Both are former state legislators: Kiley served in the California State Assembly 2016 to 2022, and Pan served in the State Assembly 2010-2014, and the State Senate 2014-2022.

Kiley was elected to Congress in 2022, and was sworn in January 2023 representing California’s 3rd congressional district. In 2025, Kiley was “redistricted” and announced he would run for election in the redrawn 6th district rather than seeking re-election in the 3rd district. He also changed his party registration from Republican to Independent.

Richard Pan, a pediatrician, announced that he would run for mayor of Sacramento in June 2023. He dropped out of the race after coming in third in the March 5, 2024 primary.

While in the Legislature, Pan introduced Senate Bill 277 in 2015, which eliminated all personal and religious exemptions for state-mandated vaccines for California’s schoolchildren, after then-Assemblyman Pan promised parents he would not eliminate the exemption.

In January 2022 during the COVID lockdowns, Senator Dr. Richard Pan introduced the “Keep Schools Open and Safe Act, to close the personal belief exemption loophole for school-based vaccination requirements for COVID-19,” Sen. Pan’s website said. “My legislation will give parents great certainty that their child is unlikely to get seriously sick and their school will stay open during COVID.”

His legislation forced perfectly healthy children to take the covid injection, exposing them to numerous health risks.

FACT Check

Let’s fact-check the Rep. Kevin Kiley vs. Richard Pan race and address the outrageous lies spread by former State Senator Richard Pan.

But first, here is some professional psychological advice in dealing with a compulsive liar:

There is no point in confronting them. All they know is how to cover their tracks. Even when confronted with evidence they will find a story to validate their side. They cannot admit to wrongdoing so it is a pointless exercise. Instead, accept that you are dealing with someone who is dysfunctional and who does not think like the average person. Once you stop trying to change them and accept them for what they are they become easier to deal with.

Richard Pan hurls old disproven charges and fake facts at Congressman Kevin Kiley in first “hit” mailer of the campaign

Richard Pan might have checked with Congressman Kevin Kiley’s 2024 opponent Jessica Morse before launching his first attack mailer of the 2026 campaign. Morse’s false claims in that campaign and previous campaigns got her fact-checked by numerous newspapers and professional fact-checkers, the Globe reported.

In 2024, KCRA-TV and FactCheck.org rated as false Jessica Morse’s claim that Kiley wanted to reduce Social Security benefits and raise the retirement age. Last week, Pan used the exact same source to make his false claim. In the same mailer, Pan, using outdated data, alleges that Kiley has voted with President Trump 98% of the time—a charge easily disproven by actual statistics.

Here is a full analysis of the false attacks in Pan’s hit mailer:

Claim 1: Presidential alignment voting

The claim:  “Kevin Kiley votes 98% with Trump.”

No source is listed on the mailer, but the claim comes from the DCCC’s dossier, which cites Vote Hub and the Center for American Progress. The problem with these “sources,” even if considered credible, is that they only tally votes through 2025. The mailer therefore makes a quantitative claim about how Kiley “votes” while excluding every vote from the past year—well over half the relevant votes.

The reality

Even considering 2025 alone, Congressional Quarterly’s more credible tally has Kiley at 94%, ranking 211th out of 435 House members. For 2026, as shown in the table, Kiley’s vote alignment stands at 84.7%—217th out of 433 members. That places him literally in the middle, precisely what one would expect from the only Independent in the U.S. House of Representatives. Kiley is consistently ranked as one of the most moderate and bipartisan members of Congress, according to Congressional Quarterly. The 98% “statistic” is a made-up number with no basis in reality. The widely respected, nonpartisan organization GovTrack ranked Kevin 197th on its 2024 ideology scale—hardly a rubber stamp for Trump, and that was before Kiley became an Independent.

Claim 2: Social Security

The claim:  “Kiley’s Republican Study Committee plan raises the retirement age and cuts seniors’ benefits “one-fifth.”

The source: “Fiscal Sanity to Save America: Republican Study Committee FY 2025 Budget Proposal.” (Document below)

The problem: The document in question was produced by a group of 12 House members. Their signatures appear on pages 2 and 3; Kiley is not among them. He had nothing to do with it and has never even read it.

The Republican Study Committee is not “Kiley’s.”  FactCheck.org has rated the precise trick being attempted here—associating the Social Security proposals in this document with people who did not sign it—as “false.”

Last election, KCRA itself called out the same tactic, rating a claim by the Morse campaign as “false.”

The reality: Rep. Kiley opposes raising the Social Security retirement age or cutting benefits in any way. When Pan made this accusation during the Sacramento Bee forum, Kiley said it “could not be further from the truth. I have pledged that I will always protect Social Security and Medicare.”

Kiley has never sponsored or cosponsored a bill that would raise the retirement age or cut benefits. Instead, he sponsored successful legislation to raise Social Security benefits: the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R. 82), which increased benefits for more than 2.8 million former government employees and their widows and widowers who had previously been denied them. That bill was signed into law by President Biden on January 5, 2025.

Richard Pan sent out another mailer with some additional “inaccuracies.”

Pan falsely claims Kevin Kiley “voted to make us pay more for prescription drugs.” However, the vote he cites is from the Summer of 2022. Kevin Kiley wasn’t even in Congress yet.

As we said earlier, politicians like Richard Pan resort to lying when they cannot sell voters on their experience or their policies—or when they have no policies to sell.