Meet John B. T. Campbell III

Member of Congress 2005-2015

John Campbell (68) was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He has a BA in Economics from UCLA and a Master’s of Business Taxation from the University of Southern California (USC) from which he graduated with Beta Gamma Sigma honors.

 He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) having begun his career after college with Ernst and Young in Los Angeles. Campbell began a 25-year career in the retail automotive industry in 1978. He progressed from Corporate Controller to owner/operator and dealer principal over that time. He represented 15 franchises during his career, including European, domestic and Asian car companies. His dealerships received numerous awards including Ford Top 100 dealer, Mazda Top 50 dealer and Saturn’s Visionary Award. In 1987, Campbell raised capital through a joint venture with a publically held British firm resulting in the first public ownership of any car dealership chain in the United States, thereby paving the way for the multiple publicly traded dealership groups now in existence.

Campbell began his career in politics in 2000 when he was elected to the California State Assembly. He was elected to the California State Senate in 2004 and to the U.S. Congress in 2005. He retired from Congress in 2015 after 14 years in full-time elected office. During that time, he won 16 straight elections, defeating over 40 opponents over that time by double-digit margins.

Being a CPA and a businessman, Campbell’s political career has been defined by principled leadership in financial and fiscal issues. In the California Legislature, he was the lead Republican on budget matters and one of the early leaders in the recall of then-governor Gray Davis. In Congress, he was Chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, as well as serving on the Budget Committee and Joint Economic Committee. He along with now Senator Jeff Flake, led the fight that ended earmarks in Congress. However, he considers that his most important work in Congress to be his major role in rescuing the economy from greater calamity in the financial crisis of 2008. “The hardest I’ve ever worked and the most scared I’ve ever been,” he says.

Congressman Campbell has been married for over 44 years to his wife, Catherine, who was literally the “girl across the street.” They have two married sons and five grandchildren.

John and Catherine live in Scottsdale, Arizona. John is an avid car collector, active investor and has farming and ranching interests in Kansas. He has been an adjunct professor of Political Science at both Pepperdine University and the University of California at Irvine as well as having been the primary guest host for the nationally syndicated Hugh Hewitt radio show.