The California governor’s race you hate is the one you helped create | Opinion
California’s wide-open primary race for governor appears destined to end how it began, a muddled mess providing no clear direction to a downbeat public on where the state is going.
Most of the ideas the major candidates have been promoting will likely never happen. California is not about to waive the state gas tax, or provide health insurance for everybody with money we don’t have, or lower rates for electricity or insurance.
The Democrats who were the most serious, or who spoke the toughest love, either got out of the race or are polling badly. Voters seem to prefer one variety of political candy or another, yet feel malnourished by their own diet choices.
A new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California is the latest barometer of our collective pulse. More than three out of four of us expect bad economic times for the state in the future. No politician is particularly popular, with outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom garnering only a 50% approval rating.
Newsom is more popular than President Donald Trump, whose 24% approval rating in California dooms Republican Steve Hilton if he qualifies for the November runoff. Hilton’s allegiance to the president, given Trump’s unblemished record of getting his way in down-ballot party races, makes the real race for California governor a Democratic Party affair.
The PPIC survey shows that we are worried about affordability, political extremism and the state budget. And as in any election, we look to the candidates for the state’s highest office to solve our collective problems.
Yet the critical mass of Democrats, if the polls are right, shows a convergence on two of the candidates, 35-year political careerist Xavier Becerra and billionaire Tom Steyer, who has never held public office. The contrast in backgrounds couldn’t be greater. Yet too often, the candidates have told us what we have wanted to hear, and not what we need to hear.
Becerra, for one, thinks he can freeze insurance rates by declaring an emergency and negotiating from there. It sounds great. But that’s not how the world or the law work.
Emergencies have to be real and not politically contrived to pass court muster. Someone who was once the California attorney general should know that. The property tax challenge is so wicked because our risks are going through the roof due to weather extremes that are getting worse. That’s the true emergency.
Steyer, meanwhile, has run a quarter-billion-dollar campaign driven by focus group messaging, seizing on the public’s disgust with utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric. He promises universal health care, lower electricity bills, lower gas prices and free community college. And while he supports a proposed one-time tax on billionaires, as for his own contributions, “Me paying more taxes is not the answer.”
Universal health care in California sounds terrific until it comes to paying for it. Nobody promoting this has a clue. Gavin Newsom promised this as a candidate back in 2018, and then avoided the topic once he got the job.
The progressive candidates’ pitch for single payer health care is like a page out of the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” a policy dream without real-world math. It was a great movie.
When candidates like Antonio Villaraigosa spoke a little bit of truth, calling this go-it-alone state approach to paying for everybody’s health care “pie in the sky,” voters didn’t reward his honesty with support. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan was equally candid on the expanded treatment programs it will take to conquer homelessness. Few seemed to want to listen.
Villaraigosa and Mahan, along with other straight-talking Democrats like Toni Atkins and Betty Yee, became the race’s also-rans. They never gained traction with a public gravitating toward happy talk and political magic tricks.
As for former Rep. Katie Porter, it’s beyond ironic that progressive-minded Democrats seem to have turned to someone (Steyer) who made his billions thanks in part to private prisons and oil companies, and not the candidate (Porter) who wouldn’t take a penny from corporations large and small. As a political evolution of progressive values in California, this feels downright regressive.
If a Democrat and a Republican get the most votes on Tuesday, the November election is a foregone conclusion. If Steyer and Becerra happen to surface on top, heaven help us.
This election cycle wasn’t California’s finest snapshot. We must do better, for our own sake.