Ranjit “Ricky” Gill ’09 graduated from Princeton two years ago and still has a year to go in law school at the University of California, Berkeley. But that hasn’t stopped him from planning his next step. In May, the 24-year-old announced plans to run for a seat in the House of Representatives as a Republican candidate in California’s 9th district, which includes his hometown of Lodi. He’ll turn 25 – the minimum age for a representative – before the election in 2012.
In the last few months, the precocious Gill has been turning heads, partly due to his extraordinary fundraising. He collected more than $426,000 from individual donors in the first quarter of his campaign, and his overall fundraising ranked third nationally among non-incumbent Republicans, according to The Ticket, Yahoo’s politics blog. The Fix, a Washington Post blog, called Gill one of nine big “winners” in the second-quarter fundraising race. And in a July 28 National Journal profile, David Wasserman wrote that the Indian-American Gill “may be the perfect GOP candidate for a district where non-whites are now 50 percent of all residents and Vietnamese and Filipino-Americans are numerous.”
Gill, a Woodrow Wilson School major, has a remarkable résumé (beginning with his service on the California state Board of Education at age 17), and he counts distinguished alumni Jim Leach ’64 and Bill Frist ’74 among his mentors. In March, Gill told The Daily Princetonian that his undergraduate experience helped to shape his career ambitions.
“I think Princeton has certainly contributed to a desire to serve,” he said. “I credit Princeton a lot for putting me in a position to even contemplate [running for Congress].”
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