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Even when President Donald Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote in 2024, Kamala Harris still won California by nearly 3.2 million people, or nearly 1% of the nation’s whole population. The Golden State remained the fifth-bluest in the country, and thanks to its economy — if California were its own country, its GDP would rank as the fourth-largest in the world — its current governor is seen as the Democratic Party’s 2028 front-runner.
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And yet, according to the polling, if the 2026 race to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) were held today, the victor would be Steve Hilton, the charismatic Republican alumnus of Fox News, Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, and the Tory government of David Cameron in the United Kingdom.
DEMOCRATS ARE LOSING THE WORKING CLASS ONE MOVING TRUCK AT A TIME
The first answer to “what the hell happened here” is the overnight collapse of Democratic front-runner Eric Swalwell, the congressman who ended his gubernatorial bid and resigned his House seat after being accused by multiple women of rape. But that answer barely scratches the surface of the quandary that decades of Democratic dominance in California have effectively cratered the party’s internal infrastructure.
On Wednesday, Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha forensically analyzed the not-so-coincidental timing of Swalwell’s collapse, noting that Swalwell may have been the front-runner among Democrats, but not among the entire “jungle primary” which allows the top victors of the June 2 contest, regardless of political party, to proceed to November’s general election. Rather, Hilton was leading in the high teens, followed by Republican Chad Bianco in the mid-teens, and then Swalwell tied with former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter for an effective third place. As Concha summed it up, “Democrats were simply splitting the pie too much, so somebody had to go. And that somebody was Swalwell because of the open secrets about him within the party that could be weaponized at a time of their choosing.”
Unfortunately, the interesting question here is not why Democrats kept Swalwell around so long despite the open secret of his womanizing and rumors of his alleged criminal sexual misconduct — the interesting question is why Swalwell became a liability for the party. The answer is not his well-known conduct, but rather, because the gubernatorial field in the most important indigo state in the union was uniformly Democratic, and therefore fractured.
Consider the full roster of candidates in the first major post-Swallwell poll conducted by Emerson. Hilton leads at 17%, followed by Bianco, who is tied with Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Democratic donor who graduated from standard progressive activism to bankrolling Trump’s first failed impeachment and then his own failed 2020 presidential bid. Porter is tied at 10% with Xavier Becerra, former President Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services, who was famously reviled by top administration veterans. Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, polls at 4.5%, followed at 4.3% by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has not held public office in over a decade.
For all that Republicans can mock Newsom as a painfully slick career politician, Newsom acolytes don’t actually balk at the caricature because, for better or worse, it is true. Newsom was indeed born on third base, bankrolled by the Getty family with a telegenic visage to match his ambitions, but he padded his resume with the correct stepping stones of predecessors. He served and was reelected as mayor of San Francisco and then lieutenant governor, clocking in a total of 30 years in local and state California government of some kind.
The current Democratic pool is distinctly national. Swalwell’s only government experience within his actual state was a combined six years over 14 years ago as a local prosecutor and Dublin City Council member. Porter, an anti-corporation Elizabeth Warren acolyte, was a professor with no formal government experience before going to Washington, and Steyer obviously has zero history of public office. In fact, of the top five Democratic candidates for governor, the only two with a history in state government are Becerra, who replaced Harris as the state attorney general, and Villaraigosa, who served in the California State Assembly a quarter-century ago.
It’s not that California must elect a candidate with experience in statewide office or in state government. It’s that Democrats have not done so in 144 years.
While California has elected two total Republican outsiders to the governor’s mansion in recent memory — Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan — every Democrat elected governor since George Stoneman has served in state office, in a legislative role or as a statewide executive. For reference, Stoneman was a Union general in the Civil War.
The total lack of California government experience in the Democratic primary points to the party’s biggest problem: Nobody responsible for the state’s actual governance thinks that the fruits of their labor are compelling enough to carry them to a gubernatorial victory.
And why should they? As I detailed last week, the state has lost 10% of its working class in the past decade for good reason: If you’re an adult younger than 35 in California, you are more likely to be living with your parents, 39%, than you are to own your own home, 15.5%, and if you do get to own a home, it is more likely to be an inheritance, 18%, than a purchase of a new build, 7.7%. What state government official thinks they would have a strong campaign while defending California’s multibillion-dollar deficit to fund Medicaid for illegal immigrants or the state’s policy of refusing to hand over the 33,179 illegal immigrants with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers out for their arrest for crimes completely unrelated to their immigration status?
JUNGLE PRIMARIES AND THE CURIOUS TIMING OF SWALWELL’S DOWNFALL
With a practical record of governance like this, your primary gets national party celebrities, and even then, their records are painfully thin. Of California’s 52 members of the House delegation sent to Washington during the 118th Congress, Swalwell missed the third-highest number of votes, and Porter the single-highest number of votes. Porter introduced zero bills that became law while Swalwell introduced one. Both were too busy starring on MS Now to do the grunt work of actually legislating.
For a time, Swalwell was the best of a mediocre bunch for the Democrats. He had high name recognition thanks to his cable news addiction, and unlike Porter, whose reputation for berating staff and allegations of domestic abuse were made public long ago, Swalwell had been cosseted by a friendly and uncurious press corps. Alas, the polling got too disparate and the opposition too strong for comfort. Democrats must now hope to coalesce around another national celebrity, lest they have to defend the state’s actual garbage governance.
