California has spent years telling the rest of the country what good governance looks like. Now it is showing everyone what happens when voters refuse to accept change, no matter the results. The lesson is simple: In a state that is this committed to a particular ideological philosophy, failure is not grounds for reconsideration. It becomes a reason to double down.
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The state’s June primaries made two things abundantly clear. On the statewide level, Xavier Becerra, the former Biden administration health secretary, advanced to the November general election for governor. In Los Angeles, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, whose tenure has been defined by record-low quality of life, a homelessness crisis with no end in sight, and a wildfire response so disastrous that she fired her own fire chief, will face off against City Council member Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialists of America member who thinks Bass is the problem because she isn’t far enough to the left.
Think about that for a moment. The Democratic response to a mayor who has presided over genuine civic failure is to offer voters either her or someone further left. In Los Angeles politics, there is no lane for questioning whether the entire approach might be worth reexamining.
The Republican trying to break through was Spencer Pratt, the reality television personality from The Hills, who lost his Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 wildfires and chose to take the lessons learned to a mayoral campaign. Pratt was not a typical candidate, and no one pretended he was. But he ran on accountability, transparency, and treating the wildfire devastation as a referendum on the city’s leadership and incompetence. He finished second in early returns but was knocked out of the runoff as late votes trickled in. The general election will be Bass versus Raman, with Angelenos choosing in November between staying the course and accelerating in the same direction.
And it is mind-boggling to imagine why they’d want to stay the course. The UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs released a quality-of-life index for Los Angeles County that hit an all-time low of 52 out of 100, driven by frustration with the cost of living, failing schools, and crumbling infrastructure. Bass fired Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, who said publicly that the department had been intentionally starved of the funding it needed to improve emergency operations. Homelessness encampments cleared in one part of the city sprang up somewhere else in a cycle that has become almost ritualistic. Even so, Bass advances to a November runoff while her challenger argues the city’s fundamental problem was insufficient left-wing progressivism.
This is California on a smaller scale.
The overall state, as reflected in the numbers, tells a fairly complete story, and none of it is good. California’s unemployment rate is 5.3%, among the highest in any major state and well above the national average of 4.3%. People are leaving in significant numbers.
Census data show the state lost more than 229,000 residents to net domestic migration between July 2024 and July 2025 alone, with Texas, Nevada, and Arizona absorbing much of the outflow. Los Angeles County led the entire nation in population loss, shedding more than 53,000 residents in a single year. Redistricting analysts at Carnegie Mellon project the state could lose four congressional seats after the 2030 census, on top of the seat it already lost after 2020. That would be only the second time in California’s history that it has lost representation, a remarkable outcome for a state that spent most of the 20th century boasting it was the symbol of American growth and aspiration.
Then there is the high-speed rail project, which has achieved something genuinely rare: a government boondoggle so catastrophic that even California officials are willing to call it a disaster in public.
Voters approved a $9.95 billion bond in 2008 with promises of a $33 billion system running between San Francisco and Los Angeles by 2020. The project’s 2026 business plan now estimates the cost at a minimum of $126 billion, with projections reaching $231 billion, depending on which assumptions the authority prefers on any given day. No track has been laid, and the Federal Railroad Administration pulled $4 billion in federal grants after finding that the authority had failed to meet its obligations in nine areas. The peer review group chair called the project a “dead end.” State Sen. Tony Strickland, the vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, offered the definitive summary: “This is a project that will never be built, and everybody in this building knows this project will never be built.”
Eighteen years, $18 billion dollars spent. Not a foot of track to show for it.
All of which raises an obvious question: Who was running California while this was happening? That would be Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who is term-limited after two terms and has spent his final year making book tour stops in New Hampshire, being a social media troll and podcaster, and positioning himself as a 2028 presidential candidate. On his watch came the unemployment rate, the population flight, the rail catastrophe, homelessness, and the cost of living that has driven residents to Texas and Nevada by the hundreds of thousands. He would apparently like to bring that record to the rest of the country. Voters should be so lucky.
The person California Democrats have chosen to carry the torch is Becerra. His resume is long, which is the most that can be said for it. He spent 24 years in Congress, four years as California attorney general, and then served as Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, where his tenure was marked by the loss of contact with roughly 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children placed through federal programs, a mismanaged monkeypox response, and a former chief of staff who pleaded guilty in a corruption scheme involving a dormant Becerra campaign account.
Becerra himself faces no charges, but the defenses he offered during the primary debates were not exactly reassuring. When rival Antonio Villaraigosa pressed him on the migrant children issue, noting it originated from a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation, Becerra dismissed it as “Trump lies.” Nothing says desperation more than trying to tie a New York Times Pulitzer award to President Donald Trump.
Becerra surged in the polls largely because Eric Swalwell, who had been gaining momentum, exited the race in April following sexual misconduct allegations. With the Democratic field suddenly thinned, Becerra consolidated enough support to take the top spot in the primary. His campaign announcement featured the line that “the California Dream is slipping away,” which is quite an opening argument for a career politician who spent years in positions of authority while that dream was slipping away.
On the Republican side, Steve Hilton, the British-born former Fox News host and one-time senior adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, advanced to November with Trump’s endorsement and a straightforward argument: Sixteen years of uninterrupted Democratic control of state government have produced the results detailed above, and California voters deserve a choice.
Hilton is a more plausible statewide candidate than Pratt was in Los Angeles, running in a jungle primary where consolidating Republican support behind a single candidate at least gives the party a fighting chance of reaching the general, which Hilton did. Whether he can actually win in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly 2-to-1 is another matter. At a minimum, the November race will force Becerra to defend the record of the party that has been running California into the ground.
The voters fleeing the state apparently did not stick around to weigh in. The businesses that have relocated their headquarters to Texas and Florida have already voted with their feet. The 229,000 people who left for other states in a single year are now someone else’s constituents.
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This is what makes California a national story rather than simply a regional cautionary tale, particularly for a state with a larger economy than most European countries. What is happening there is not hidden. The quality-of-life index is published. The unemployment figures are federal data. The high-speed rail cost overruns have been covered exhaustively for years. And merely living there is a strain on the pocketbook. California voters are not choosing their current path in ignorance of the results their government has produced. They are making this choice with full awareness of those results and concluding that the correct response is to keep it going, and for what? That is the takeaway: The state keeps seeing failure and choosing more of the same.
Bass or Raman for mayor. Becerra, carrying Newsom’s legacy, for governor. In Ghostbusters, Gozer instructed the gang to choose the form of their destructor. California voters have apparently taken that as a governing philosophy. The exit signs are right there, clearly marked, and the voters keep locking them from the inside. At some point, voters will have to say, “Stop. It’s time to try something different.” Voters in Los Angeles chose to stick with failure. Whether the state chooses the same path remains to be seen.
Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a writer living in Florida.
