Ballots are already landing in mailboxes across California and the race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom is entering its final stretch.
In the first open race in almost 30 years, the gap between candidates widened further after former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out. With no clear frontrunner, voters are left navigating a crowded, unsettled field still taking shape just weeks before the primary.
Marisa Lagos, host of KQED’s Political Breakdown, and KQED politics correspondent Guy Marzorati spoke with The California Report Magazine to break down the race and key players.
Both have hosted KQED’s Gubernatorial town hall series, set to continue through the month with Sheriff Chad Bianco on May 18, and Tom Steyer on May 26.
Lagos: Democrats are a little confused because there’s no blockbuster candidate like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, but being a rock star is not a prerequisite to being governor. You do have a number of very experienced, smart Democrats in this race, along with some serious Republicans.
Marzorati: We’re still in a position where, no matter what poll you’re looking at, none of these candidates are breaking 20% — so it’s all very muddled. But we have seen the emergence of a top five in most polling: two Republicans — Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator, and Chad Bianco — and on the Democratic side, Xavier Becerra, Tom Steyer, and Katie Porter.
There are more candidates on the Democratic side we could talk about, but this top five has started to take shape in recent weeks.
The most notable shift has been Eric Swalwell dropping out — he had been seen as a frontrunner — and since then, Becerra has gained ground in just the past few weeks.
Lagos: Xavier Becerra really relying on his experience. He was a former attorney general. He was in Congress for several decades before that, representing Los Angeles and then he was in the Biden administration as Health and Human Service Secretary, and we’re both hearing him talk about that, and a lot of people attack him on that.
Marzorati: Tom Steyer spent more than $160 million of his own money on this campaign so far that has smashed every self-funding record in California history.
What makes it so fascinating to me is you have this billionaire in a time where a lot of Democrats are kind of looking sideways at billionaires. You have this billionaire in Tom Steyer who is running as the most progressive candidate in this race.
He’s getting supported by Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders group. He’s supporting single payer healthcare. He’s pushing to raise corporate taxes to bring in money for schools. So it’s like this dichotomy of this personality, this investor, this billionaire, and this progressive platform that he talked to us about.
Lagos: Katie Porter struggled at times to find lane in this race. She was pretty progressive. One of her mentors is Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts who did endorse her recently.
In the fall, she got hit by some videos, including one from five years ago snapping at a staff member. She’s had to apologize for that. But you do have to wonder if it sort of created a ceiling for her and you can’t disentangle her gender. So fair or not, that has really dogged her in this race.
Marzorati: We also have Matt Mahan, the mayor of San José, who’s running. He got into this race somewhat late. He’s trying to run as a centrist Democrat, trying to maybe have some crossover appeal to independence and even Republicans.
Antonio Villaraigosa who was mayor of Los Angeles over a decade ago, is more of a centrist candidate as well.
And then Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, has held statewide office, but has kind of struggled to break through at all in this race.
Lagos: In most states, Republicans face off in a primary and Democrats face off [in a primary]. The winner of each face each other in the fall. But in California, it could be anybody in the race. And so we have seen that really set up the system where all these Democrats are splitting the vote.
Lagos: Both of them call the one-party rule for the last decade a failure. They say that Democrats own all of the problems in this state — the affordability crisis, the housing crisis, the homelessness crisis — and that they would be a new chapter.
Bianco is a Riverside County sheriff. He’s definitely further to the right than Hilton. Bianco made some waves earlier this year when he seized tens of thousands of ballots from last November’s election, kind of echoing some of these claims we’ve heard from the president around election security. And he has really tried to pitch himself as an outsider.
Steve Hilton is trying to run as a more traditional Republican, yet he is associated with Trump and the kind of MAGA movement. He has made an effort to both appeal to more hardcore conservatives and moderate Democrats.
Both Hilton and Bianco, if you look at their platforms, are very much running on a sort of traditional conservative anti-tax, pro-growth and pro-business.
Marzorati: I honestly hear from voters wrestling with this idea of, “Okay, do I want someone who I know is going to kind of shake things up and bring change or do I want someone I know who is going to fight Trump well?”
Lagos: How the candidates, especially on the Democratic side, continue to interact with one another will be worth watching. Are they throwing bombs or are they just really trying to push a positive message about themselves to break through and get voters to come out and vote by June 2?
Marzorati: If you look at California as kind of a laboratory for democratic politics, like what would the future leader of the state kind of put forward for the rest of the country? Because a lot of these issues, you know, housing affordability, the energy transition, we’re kind of the canary in the coal mine in a lot of ways for what the country is going to be going through. So I think there are a lot of differences you see between Democrats.
To learn more about how we use your information, please read our privacy policy.
