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City of Fremont · Statewide General Election

Fremont City Council, District 2

Draft candidate list — early preview until the state’s official list publishes on August 27, 2026.

This is one contest. Enter your address to see every race on your November ballot, and keep track of your picks.

On the ballot

This person would hold one of six district seats on the Fremont City Council -- Alameda County's largest city, with about 230,000 residents -- alongside a separately, citywide-elected Mayor, under a council-manager government with an appointed City Manager. A 4-year term, decided by whichever candidate gets the most votes -- no ranked-choice voting is documented for Fremont.

Incumbent Desrie Campbell, first elected in 2022, faces one challenger, marketing director Keith Parker, for Fremont's District 2 council seat.

This person would hold one of six district seats on the Fremont City Council -- Alameda County's largest city, with about 230,000 residents -- alongside a separately, citywide-elected Mayor, under a council-manager government with an appointed City Manager. A 4-year term, decided by whichever candidate gets the most votes; no ranked-choice voting is documented for Fremont.

The county's own candidate-filing system marks Campbell's "Incumbent" field "N," the same self-report quirk this dataset has found unreliable elsewhere in Alameda County -- Fremont's own city government page independently confirms she is the sitting District 2 councilmember, first elected to the council in 2022.

Desrie Campbell

Desrie Campbell moved to Fremont in 1996 and raised her four sons there; she was elected to the Fremont Unified school board in 2012 and served ten years, including as a California School Boards Association Delegate Assembly member, before winning this council seat in 2022. Earlier in her career she worked in Washington, D.C. city government and for a lobbying firm on Capitol Hill. She holds a bachelor's in business administration and a master's in public administration, has served as a Human Relations Commissioner, and is a former chair of the Alameda County Commission on the Status of Women. As a councilmember she was appointed to the League of California Cities' Community Services Policy Committee, where she says she advocates for reducing homelessness and increasing affordable housing while retaining local decision-making.

Strengths

A full council term plus ten prior years on the school board give her the longest local-governance record of anyone running in Fremont's three 2026 council races.

Trade-offs

As the incumbent, she owns District 2's last four years of council decisions most directly, against a challenger this dataset found little independent information about to weigh her record against.

Keep in mind

Her bio above comes from the city's own official page, an authoritative but self-published source for her career facts -- not an independent evaluation of her council record.

Keith Parker

Keith Parker's ballot designation is Marketing Director. He filed a campaign committee for a 2022 council run, but that committee shows no filings since November 2022, and no new 2026 committee was located for him on Fremont's NetFile portal.

Strengths

A first-time or repeat challenger giving Fremont voters another choice for the seat, outside of the incumbent's record.

Trade-offs

No active 2026 campaign committee was located, so there is no current fundraising signal, and no independent news coverage or biography beyond his ballot designation was found in this pass.

Keep in mind

The absence of a 2026 committee could mean a self-funded campaign below the state's filing threshold, a very late filing, or simply a lower-visibility campaign -- this dataset did not find independent confirmation either way.

Source review: Strong (86/100) · 5 cited sources

Official records anchor this contest, with multiple sources checked.

  • alamedacountyca.gov (opens in a new tab)Alameda County Registrar of Voters -- official Candidate List system (electionId 260, "General Election - 11/03/2026 (Official)"), queried directly via its own JSON API (GET /rov_app/racelist/260/600) for the City category: names all three Fremont races (raceIds 115-117) -- For Member Of City Council #2/#3/#4, Fremont -- alongside the other 43 Alameda County city races countywide, and confirms Fremont has no mayoral race this cycle.
  • alamedacountyca.gov (opens in a new tab)Alameda County Registrar of Voters -- official Candidate List system, queried directly via its own POST-based HTML API (POST /rov_app/candidatelist/) for all three Fremont races, each flagged "Vote For: 1" and "On Ballot": For Member Of City Council #2 -- Desrie Campbell ("Councilmember/Healthcare Director") and Keith Parker ("Marketing Director"); #3 -- Kathy Kimberlin ("County Field Director") and Vipin Sharma ("Senior Engineering Manager"); #4 -- Aziz Akbari ("Director, Alameda County Water District"), Ying Min Li ("Small Business Owner"), Anurag Mishra ("Technical Leader"), and Manisha Pathak ("Educator/Nonprofit Executive"). The system's own "Incumbent" detail field reads "N" for every candidate including Campbell and Kimberlin, who Fremont's own city government page confirms are sitting councilmembers -- this dataset does not treat that field as reliable.
  • web.archive.org (opens in a new tab)City of Fremont -- "Mayor & City Council" page, read via the Internet Archive's July 23, 2026 snapshot after fremont.gov itself returned HTTP 403 to every direct fetch attempted in this pass: names every sitting councilmember by district -- Teresa Keng (District 1), Desrie Campbell (District 2), Kathy Kimberlin (District 3), Yang Shao (District 4), Vice Mayor Yajing Zhang (District 5), and Raymond Liu (District 6) -- plus Mayor Raj Salwan, sworn in December 2024. Independently confirms Campbell and Kimberlin as genuine incumbents in their Nov. 2026 races and that Yang Shao, not a candidate for reelection, is the outgoing District 4 officeholder.
  • netfile.com (opens in a new tab)City of Fremont's own NetFile-hosted public campaign-finance portal (agency code FRE), queried directly via its own QuickNameSearch and filings/byFiler|byCandidate JSON API for every 2026 city council candidate, with each located candidate's actual H1 2026 FPPC Form 460 (or, where none existed, the most recent filing on record) downloaded directly via the portal's own CampaignDocuments/download endpoint and read for its real reported totals. Desrie Campbell (D2) $800 raised / $40 spent; Keith Parker (D2) no 2026 committee, only a 2022 one; Kathy Kimberlin (D3) $200 raised / $1,966.08 spent, including a $5,000 loan from her husband; Vipin Sharma (D3) only a Form 501 on file, no Form 460; Aziz Akbari (D4) $288 raised / $10.09 spent plus $1,107 in accrued unpaid bills; Ying-Min Li (D4) $50,060.88 in monetary contributions plus $80,000 in loans from Li herself / $13,932.33 spent, including an $850 contribution from sitting District 4 Councilmember Yang Shao; Manisha Pathak (D4) $4,091 raised / $1,395.06 spent; Anurag Mishra (D4) no campaign committee located.
  • en.wikipedia.org (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia's Fremont, California article -- 2020 census population (230,504), the fourth most populous city in the Bay Area and the largest in Alameda County; also lists the current City Council roster by name, used only as a secondary cross-check against the city's own page.

Last updated September 1, 2026.