YoIt has been three decades since Democrats last had an open contest for governor of California, one of the most visible and powerful positions in the United States. However, rather than enjoying the competition of a crowded field, party leaders are worried that the race to succeed Gavin Newsom could blow up in their faces.
On Tuesday, state Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks wrote in an extraordinary open letter to candidates: “If you do not have a viable path to the general election, please do not apply to place your name on the primary ballot.”
With no clear front-runner and less than three months until the June 2 primary, Democrats worry that their nine candidates vying for the state’s top job could become a circular firing squad and, under an idiosyncratic state primary system that rewards the top two vote-getters regardless of party, allowing two Republicans to advance to the November general election.
Such a scenario would be difficult to accept at the best of times, since California is a Democratic stronghold and the richest and most populous state in the country. But with Donald Trump in the White House and Democrats focused on trying to regain control of Congress from Trump’s Republican allies, losing California would be nothing short of a catastrophe.
“There is a lot at stake in our nation and many are counting on the leadership of California Democrats to stand up and speak out at this historic moment,” Hicks wrote in his open letter. “We all have a duty to act responsibly.”
Hicks and analysts in both parties consider the likelihood of two Republican contenders in November small, as Democrats enjoy a large lead in party registration, but anxiety about the outlook has been simmering since two recent polls showed one Republican, British-born political consultant Steve Hilton, leading the race and a second Republican, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, running a close third.
At least three Democrats are also doing well: former congresswoman Katie Porter, who previously ran a failed Senate campaign, progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, who has poured more than $60 million of his own money into the campaign, and incumbent congressman Eric Swalwell, a newcomer who saw an opportunity after Kamala Harris, the Democrat who lost the 2024 presidential election to Trump, announced she would not run.
None of these three, however, show signs of breaking away, while the party’s support remains divided among the other candidates. The latest Emerson College poll puts the top five candidates within eight percentage points of each other, while a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California puts them within just four percentage points.
Without California, Democrats lose one of the most important brakes on Trump’s agenda. Worse yet, Hicks said, if two Republicans were running for governor in November, Democratic turnout could become so depressed that congressional seats now firmly in the blue column could begin to turn red.
“We have to make sure we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot,” the party’s national chairman, Ken Martin, said in an interview. He and other party officials have been urging less viable candidates to drop out since at least the party’s state convention in San Francisco 10 days ago.
But candidates surveyed at the lower end don’t necessarily agree they’re unviable — yet — and it has proven difficult to convince them otherwise ahead of Friday’s deadline to file applications to appear on the primary ballot.
It doesn’t help that those lower-order candidates include some prominent and familiar figures with long records in elected office, including former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former state Comptroller Betty Yee.
Delegates to last month’s state convention did little to help clear the field, not even coming close to endorsing a single candidate and, in one vote, elevating Yee and Becerra to second and third place behind Swalwell, even though neither has excited voters.
Meanwhile, a relatively new candidate, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, is gaining momentum and stands virtually alone in the Democratic field as a centrist and outspoken critic of Newsom’s public fights with the White House. Mahan is generally distrusted by labor unions, a key force in Democratic politics in the state, but he enjoys significant financial backing from Silicon Valley.
His campaign’s response to Hicks: “Voters elect the next governor, not political gatekeepers.”
Garry South, a political consultant who worked on the last truly competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1998, pointed to three major endorsements that are likely to change the contours of the race: those of the California Federation of Labor and the Service Employees International Union, which play a major role in mobilizing unionized workers and getting out the vote, and that of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose continued influence and fundraising was key to sending Adam Schiff, not to Porter, to the Senate in 2024.
“I don’t know if they’re going to go after the same candidate,” South said, “but it’s pretty clear there are powerful forces that haven’t come into play yet.”
Swalwell would appear to be in the best position to secure these endorsements, according to party insiders, but even in a divided field, South was confident that primary voters themselves would shift away from low-polling candidates to avoid wasting their votes. “That dynamic alone makes the prospect of two Republican candidates in the general election unlikely,” he added.
The California Federation of Labor, for its part, hopes not only to give its endorsement soon but also to use its own weight to put pressure on the candidates with the worst results in the polls. “We have to start having some difficult discussions with some of our very good friends about the feasibility,” federation president Lorena González said in an interview.
For months, Democrats at all levels have expressed doubts about the quality of the candidate pool, as well as its size. Porter alienated many colleagues with his decision to resign his House seat and run for higher office in 2024, and has since struggled to maintain his appeal as a trenchant truth-teller with a populist bent. A pair of viral videos showing her losing her cool with an employee and a CBS reporter have also raised questions about her temperament and judgment.
Swalwell has not quite lived up to expectations of becoming the front-runner in the necessary race as soon as he entered the race in November and has since been criticized for losing an unusually large number of votes in Congress. Mahan, sensing both an openness and an appetite among voters for a candidate who would resist the party’s drift toward the populist left, took the plunge just last month after openly expressing disappointment with the quality of the other candidates.
South said one problem was the unusually large number of former officials compared to current elected officials. This presented a major voter perception problem, he said, in part because California law does not allow candidates to include old job titles in short descriptions on the ballot. “It’s part of what makes this race so complicated,” he said.
Many party members are still cautiously betting on Swalwell, who played a role in both of Trump’s impeachments during his first presidential term and can distance himself from California’s biggest headaches — the high cost of living, a ballooning state budget facing a significant deficit, housing shortages and homelessness — because he has been in Congress, not state government, for the past 13 years.
At a candidate debate before a largely Jewish audience in Los Angeles last week, Swalwell described California as “a blue state bound by bureaucracy” and promised to relentlessly focus on generating more revenue without straining low- and middle-income taxpayers.
Steyer has waded into the conversation with a relentless diet of television and online ads and unusual positioning as a billionaire who supports tax increases on the billionaire class. “At the end of the day, I will always be on the side of supporting working families,” he wrote recently, “and if that includes making billionaires like me pay more taxes, so be it.”
In a state that may be frustrated with business as usual after 16 years of one-party rule, but is decidedly uninterested in Trump’s brand of anti-establishment politics, Steyer is an intriguing choice. “California has a tendency for people outside the political establishment to go back as far as Ronald Reagan, if not further,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a political consultant who has worked with governors from both major parties.
But Steyer may also be hamstrung by his wealth at a time when billionaires tend to inspire more revulsion than admiration, especially among progressive voters and union leaders. California already has a history of rejecting self-funded candidates who outspend the competition, including Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, who ran for governor in 2010, and Al Checchi, a Democratic businessman who ran and lost in 1998.
South said Steyer’s advertising blitz reminded him of Checchi, who was equally relentless in competing against South’s ultimately successful client at the time, Gray Davis. “Two or three months after the primaries, we were doing a focus group and one of Checchi’s ads came up,” he recalled. “The reaction was, oh no, not that guy again, I’m sick of having him in my face. Steyer is going to have the same problem: he’s exhausting voters.”
Steyer’s campaign counters that, unlike Checchi, he has a long history of advocating for progressive issues, including labor rights, environmental protections and health care access, not as an elected official but through California’s ballot initiative process. That, in turn, makes them optimistic that he can make inroads among key electoral groups, including young people and Latinos. “Tom’s entire campaign,” said spokesman Kevin Liao, “is aimed at addressing the problem that Californians can’t afford to live in California. That’s a blow to voters.”
