Democrats are at a huge crossroads in California governor’s race

The next governor of deep-blue California will almost certainly be a Democrat. But what kind of Democrat?

The establishment favorite for overseeing the world’s fourth-largest economy, Xavier Becerra, has trod a traditional path. As governor, based on past performance, he would keep his party and the state on the rutted road of corporate-friendly liberalism.

Becerra’s top Democratic rival, Tom Steyer, is a threat to the status quo in a state where 7 million people live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are among the highest in the country. While Silicon Valley and AI boom, deprivation is widespread.

Steyer promises to upend corporate power and give California a sustained progressive jolt. If he wins, the country’s largest state party will probably go through a major ideological challenge. During the last 15 years, while Democrats have controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, they have avoided disrupting the status quo. State budgets have routinely failed to protect low-income Californians.

The California Democratic party is a corporate entity, as I saw up close for 10 years while on its state central committee. The party’s center of gravity is occupied by California’s two Democratic senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, mainstream liberals who rock few corporate boats and vote in harmony with the military-industrial complex that has massive footholds in the state.

Overall, Becerra – who went from Congress to serving as California’s attorney general and then Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services – is central casting for the kind of political sensibilities that have dominated the state party, which internally boosts identity politics above (rhetoric aside) such considerations as economic justice, labor rights, public health, environmental protection or peace.

Scant policy differences exist between Becerra and outgoing governor Gavin Newsom. “While Steyer is vowing to raise taxes on corporations and his fellow billionaires, Becerra is skeptical of tax increases that could push businesses to leave California,” Politico reports. Preventing capital flight from the state is the same argument that Newsom has used in his vehement opposition to a ballot measure endorsed by Steyer for a one-time billionaire tax, while one study after another has shown such capital flight to be largely a myth.

Days before the 2 June primary, in which the top two vote-getters advance to the November general election, Steyer called his main Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, “a Maga extremist” and Becerra “a career politician backed by a deep roster of corporations and billionaires”. At the same time, Steyer – continuing to draw on his $2.4bn of wealth accumulated as a hedge fund operator – was on track to spend a record-shattering $200m on ads.

While many progressives have become enthusiastic about the prospect of a Governor Steyer, some say they can’t bring themselves to vote for a billionaire, especially one with a financial history that includes distasteful ventures. His much-criticized investment in private prisons has caused Steyer to respond with a tone of repentance.

“I started an investment business 40 years ago, and we invested in thousands of things, and one of them 22 years ago was investing in a private prison company,” Steyer says in a video released by his campaign, “and I realized within a year it was a huge mistake, and I got out of it. I didn’t just make a mistake and say I was sorry, I’ve also spent the ensuing time working very hard for rehabilitative justice in the state of California. And that’s why we pushed very hard for things like getting rid of sentence enhancements, we pushed very hard to make sure that the police officers in this state who misbehaved were decertified, and we pushed very hard to end the state’s relationship with any private prison companies, which they did in 2019.”

Steyer seems intent on coming across as an anomaly – a billionaire with a conscience and a commitment to genuine, even drastic, progressive change. The issues section of his campaign website includes such planks as “Make Corporations and Billionaires (Like Me) Pay More Taxes,” “Provide Free Education From Pre-K to College,” “Stop Masked ICE Agents From Terrorizing Californians” and “Ensure Health Care for All Californians.”

“Steyer is a gamechanger because, when he takes office, he owes no favors to the corporate Democratic establishment,” said Amar Shergill, a former chair of the California Democratic party’s Progressive Caucus. In sharp contrast, he told me, “Becerra is a go-along Democrat – whatever others are doing, he goes along. He hasn’t shown leadership and almost always hedges his bets even on progressive policies that he supports.”

Shergill, a Sacramento-based attorney, added: “If Becerra is elected, it’s business as usual for the party and the state. Becerra will be working with corporations to undermine progress that helps working families.” That’s pretty much the profit-driven goal of the corporations intervening in the election on behalf of Becerra.

In the last few days of May, corporate funds continued to pour into Pacs backing Becerra and attacking Steyer. The medical industry was generous, as when DaVita Kidney Dialysis gave $500,000. Other half-million-dollar funders to anti-Steyer groups have included McDonald’s, Chevron and the giant oil-drilling firm California Resources Corp.

Late last week, the CalMatters news outlet reported: “Outside groups, which unlike candidates can receive unlimited donations, reported spending $79m so far … Billionaire Tom Steyer is the biggest target: a political spending committee called California Is Not For Sale, funded by the state Realtors association, the California Chamber of Commerce, Pacific Gas & Electric and the state’s electrical workers’ union poured $32m into ads opposing him. Steyer has vowed to lower electricity bills by challenging PG&E’s monopoly in much of Northern California.”

The Bay Area congressman Ro Khanna has been an early and prominent supporter of Steyer. “I’ve spent my career fighting for Medicare for All, it’s the only path to make healthcare more affordable,” Khanna says in a widely seen Steyer campaign ad, “and Tom Steyer is the only candidate for governor with the guts to take on the private insurance companies and pass single-payer healthcare.” (The need for truly universal healthcare is a big reason why RootsAction, a group I co-founded, has supported Steyer.)

Becerra has backed away from support for single-payer healthcare that he had expressed while a congressman from southern California. This spring, he met privately with leaders of the powerful California Medical Association and received its endorsement. “He said very clearly that, at this point, he wasn’t supportive of single payer,” the group’s president said approvingly.

Behind the scenes, much of Newsom’s political apparatus is working hard to help elect Becerra. At the same time that the Becerra-Steyer clash is a major ideological battle with enormous consequences for the future of California, it can also be seen as a proxy war of sorts in the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

For Newsom, as he gears up to run for the White House, the prospect of a Governor Bacerra is far preferable to a Governor Steyer. Citing “several longtime Newsom allies”, Politico reported last month that “the last thing Newsom needs on the 2028 campaign trail, they argue, is a successor looking to upend Sacramento or compete for headlines on a national stage.” Not coincidentally, “Becerra’s campaign ranks include several top strategists who’ve long worked with Newsom. Meanwhile, Bearstar Strategies, Newsom’s chief consulting firm, is leading a new pro-Becerra Super Pac and involved in a related anti-Steyer Pac that has spent heavily on TV ads flaming the billionaire over his hedge fund past.”

The rivalry between Becerra and Steyer can also be understood as a skirmish in a nascent conflict between Newsom and Khanna, whose evident presidential ambitions have more than a little riding on this election. If Steyer becomes governor, presumably allied with Khanna, that could boost the congressman’s uphill quest to overtake Newsom for the Democratic nomination.

Meanwhile, at the same time that Becerra’s position on Israel has remained within the Democratic party mainstream, Steyer has pushed well beyond it while denouncing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). By early April, he was saying that pro-Israel groups had launched “$25m in attack ads against me”, adding: “They can come after me all they want. I’m not going to back down.”

That kind of attitude could shake up the power structure of the California Democratic party and much of the state government, as well as send constructive shock waves through the national party.

Karen Bernal, who chaired the state party’s Progressive caucus for six years, has worked as a legislative staffer for a Democratic state senator. In 2020, Bernal was a northern California regional field director for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. When I talked with her a few days ago, she sounded convinced that getting Tom Steyer elected as governor was the party’s chance to show itself worthy of progressive support.

“For the most part, the majority of progressives, particularly former Bernie supporters, have gravitated to Steyer’s campaign,” she said. “So have younger voters. It’s not surprising why. They’re tired of an organization, the Democratic party, that behaves and operates independently of what its people want. Steyer has validated their grievances while pledging to fight for an agenda not heard since the Bernie campaigns. Steyer’s platform has been long fought for by the progressive working-class base of the party. His policy positions resonate strongly with younger voters of the party, which is key, since they finally overcame the Boomer generation to become the dominant cohort of the electorate in 2020. At a time when support for the Democratic party is at an all-time low, continuing to alienate the current and future base of the party hardly seems like a course of action to take if they want to have a chance of not only rolling back Trump, but along with it, a runaway corporatocracy that is taking us toward fascism.”