California’s Democratic Statehouse Hopefuls Are Stuck in a Trump Rut

Reporters love a race with a tidy narrative. You can take your pick of tales and tropes: There’s the old guard and the new face (Cuomo-Mamdani), the bomb thrower and the problem solver (Crockett-Talarico), or the Trump loyalist and the principled conservative (Paxton-Cornyn). Without the structure of a narrative, we’re a bit lost—which is probably why nobody was paying much attention to the gubernatorial race out here in California. That is, up until this weekend, when suddenly everyone’s heads swung in the direction of the Golden State, on the back of an all-too-familiar political narrative: the crash and burn of a front-runner’s campaign amid a torrid sex scandal finally brought to light after swirling rumors became stomach-turning allegations.

Representative Eric Swalwell’s career-ending news cycle began with a Friday night news dump and concluded with his Sunday night departure from the race. Suddenly, the support he had previously garnered was back in play, leaving his Democratic rivals to pursue the spoils. But before Swalwell’s disturbing history of alleged sexual assault came to light, those rivals had combined to make the gubernatorial race a torpid affair. Prior to Swalwell’s flameout, this group of campaigners were perhaps best regarded as a field of stumblers who were running the risk of handing the governor’s mansion to a Republican. The front-runner’s departure changes very little: This is a largely unexceptional field—a hodgepodge of recycled political names, neck and neck and neck in a competition to get their hands on the nation’s most powerful anti-Trump pulpit. 

The more you read the news, the more it begins to feel that’s all they were running for—America’s Next Top Trump Antagonist. The vacuum was filled by the doom narrative: What if Democrats shit the bed so badly in California’s chaotic jungle primary that they surrender California to a MAGA Republican? There are still simply too many Democrats running; they’re crowding each other out. With Swalwell in the race, it was a three-way tie in a jungle primary. Without him, who knows? For months, the California Democratic Party has been publicly begging low-polling candidates to stop deluding themselves, setting an arbitrary drop-out deadline of April 15 and releasing a poll showing the race’s two Republicans eclipsing the bumbling field of Democrats. 

Swalwell’s sudden disappearance may have changed the field, but it has not changed the race. Over the next few weeks, you can expect every campaign to make a feverish grab for Swalwell’s supporters. You should not, however, expect many former Swalwell supporters to jump feverishly aboard a new campaign. Allison Gill, the California-based political influencer known online as Mueller, She Wrote, says she was leaning toward Swalwell before the allegations but added that “I think a lot of Californians were simply looking to vote for Eric Swalwell because he was polling way ahead of everyone else, and they wanted to guarantee that we had a Democrat in the top two.”

Gill told The New Republic that her preferred candidate was former State Controller Betty Yee but that Yee was “polling very, very low.” So Gill was not a dedicated Swalwell voter as much as she was a Californian voting for Swalwell, explaining, “I vote strategically, but also, I like voting with my whole heart in the primaries and I can’t do it in the California governor race.” She remains terrified of an all-Republican general election, saying it’s “the number one thing I’m worried about.” California State Senator Scott Wiener told The New Republic that the possibility poses “an existential risk.”

Much—maybe too much—has been made of that dilemma (including in this magazine). Democratic strategists and politicians here in the Golden State dread an all-Republican ticket as an unlikely calamity, more likely than a rainy summer in L.A., less likely than yet another Dodgers World Series. They say this race has only just begun. It’s about to get prohibitively expensive, and while one of the Republicans (the British political strategist turned Fox News talking head Steve Hilton) does have money, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco can’t remain competitive as the race’s price tag climbs into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars. 

“That guy’s going to get left behind in the dust,” one longtime California political strategist told The New Republic. “He’s not going to be able to communicate in any way that’s like, meaningful.” And now that Trump has endorsed Hilton, Bianco’s campaign has begun its death rattle, thus putting the unlikely calamity of an all-Republican slate even further out of reach. 

Lurking behind this specter of a Democratic field choking itself out of the governor’s mansion is a larger, more elemental problem: These Democrats don’t seem to be running on anything—beyond opposition to Trump, that is. Such a pose may work in some races (it’ll probably work in the 2026 midterms), but it’s not a winning platform in this kind of race. Just ask Kamala Harris. 

Here’s what I mean: In the very first minute of her announcement video, Katie Porter said, “I first ran for office to hold Trump accountable now, and I feel that same call to serve now to stop him from hurting Californians.” Swalwell one-upped her in his unveiling, declaring that “no one will keep you safer from Trump than I will.” Hop on Xavier Becerra’s website, and the first thing you’ll see is a two-paragraph elevator pitch promoting the former California attorney general as “the only candidate for Governor with the experience to tackle the man-made crises of the Trump Administration on Day One.” 

It seems the only politician in this field not selling himself primarily as an anti-Trump warrior is Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire running a campaign focused on affordability and ending corporate influence. It’s probably worth a mention that Steyer is working with Fight Agency, the slick P.R. firm behind other affordability-first candidates like Graham Platner in Maine and Zohran Mamdani in New York City.

I’m not arguing that California voters—Democrats by a 2-to-1 margin—aren’t eager for a governor who will fight Trump. I’m not even arguing that this anti-Trump messaging isn’t effective—it probably is. But with everybody saying the same thing, a regular chorus line of candidates promising they’ll fight Trump even harder than the last guy, what’s a Californian to do? I write this as a Californian who has no idea who the hell I’m going to vote for at the top of the ticket.  

Golden State politics is in the midst of what can best be described as a political thought experiment. Governor Gavin Newsom is running for president (not officially, but come on) and claiming that California is “a beacon … an operational model, a policy blueprint for others to follow.” That’s what he told us back in January, during his State of the State speech. He spent a considerable portion of that speech touting his own victories over the Trump administration; victories that juiced his popularity here. So it’s natural that his hopeful successors would try to shout out their own anti-Trump bona fides. 

But while California is a wonderful place to live, we’re still riddled with a slew of non-Trump problems. Most of us, my family included, are priced out of the hope of buying a house (something like one-fifth of the homes in this state are investor-owned); our energy bills keep increasing because one company has a stranglehold on the market and its infrastructure keeps sparking wildfires, leading to lawsuits, which are then passed down to consumers. Our state universities are probably the best public institutions in America, sure, but they’re also expensive (despite the fact that they were tuition-free for a century). The entertainment industry has all but decamped—every screenwriter I know is working another job right now, while every sound and lighting guy is shooting in Canada or Georgia or Texas. 

And while Hollywood is growing tumbleweeds, we are letting its successor industry run wild—this is, after all, the backyard of AI. We should be leading the way in regulating the industry that’s presently spooking a majority of Americans. Instead we’ve adopted a please-don’t-leave-me attitude, only instituting watered-down regulations after Newsom nixed any chance at meaningful AI safeguards. There are plenty of ways a Democrat can build a campaign for governor that stands out from the herd and addresses the actual needs of Californians. Instead they’re all running the same anti-Trump campaign—an uninventive strategy with a shoddy success rate.

This is a national problem among Democrats; it’s larger than California. The party’s brand is historically unpopular, a rake they somehow continue to step on despite the fact that they’ve spent half the past decade as the opposition party to a historically unpopular president. 

The problem with using Trump as a foil is that Democrats (and California’s crowded field of would-be governors, in particular) are wasting their precious oxygen on the president rather than offering solutions to problems that, unlike our visibly aging 79-year-old president, won’t sort themselves out. Trump single-handedly cooked our political system by making “all press is good press” a strategy for both campaigning and governing. You are losing to him simply by playing ball in his court, and too many California Democrats are presently playing ball in his court.

Steyer is probably the favorite, all the same, simply because he has unlimited resources and no problem setting money aflame (I was seeing Steyer ads on the treadmill TVs months ago, long before anybody was thinking about this race). Porter wins if this race does in fact come down to who is going to fight Trump the hardest. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is quietly expected to get an enormous financial bump from his wealthy benefactors, but it was oligarchs picking their own politicians that got us in this mess in the first place. 

The thing about Steyer is that he’s his own kind of thought experiment. The good plutocrat; the affordability-first billionaire. When Steyer jumped into the 2020 presidential race, Bernie Sanders quipped, “I like Tom personally, but … I’m a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power,” a sentiment that hits even closer to home in the Trump era as billionaires are slicing up the county piece by piece. Allison Gill told TNR that her top issue in the governor’s race is “the billionaire problem.” Her hesitation on Steyer is a bitter pill I hear often from Democratic voters: Do we really trust a billionaire to solve the billionaire problem?

My own hesitation comes from the fact that I don’t understand why Steyer is running for governor. I believe that he wants to change the system, but I don’t understand why he believes he has to be a part of the system to change it—why now? It feels a lot like he’s running for governor simply because the Oval Office isn’t up for grabs this cycle. In a recent podcast interview with TNR’s Perry Bacon, Steyer claimed he’s been involved with “virtually every policy decision in the state of California.” If that’s the case, if he can influence every policy decision in the state from outside the system, why does he need to be governor? And how does he square the overarching influence over policy matters that he claims to wield with the fact that the next Democratic governor will have to clean up so many messes? 

If there’s anything in this field to be thankful for, it’s that I don’t have to vote for any of them today. There’s measurable confidence among California’s political class that this field will sort itself out within the next month. Senator Wiener (who has not endorsed) told TNR that Sacramento is feeling “frustration about the race in general,” which might indicate that the machinery of the system is on the verge of doing something useful. Meanwhile, it feels like California voters are just now remembering that we have to vote this summer. The candidates have only recently begun to go negative. War chests will soon begin to drain. Best case: This field gets down to two or three candidates, and they stop fighting over who gets to fight Trump and start telling us exactly how they’ll fight the power companies, tech giants, private equity firms, and real estate moguls that got us here.