STATE: Governor – 2026 Primary Election

VOTER GUIDE – QUICK LINKS TO:

• Steyer ENDORSED
• Becerra
• Porter
• Hilton
• Bianco

• HOME
• STATE OFFICES: Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, Insurance Commissioner, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Board of Equalization Member – District 2
• FEDERAL CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS: 24th, 26th, 27th , 32nd
• STATE ASSEMBLY DISTRICTS: 38nd, 42nd, 46th
• COUNTY: Ventura Co. Supervisors: District 2 and District 4, Assessor, Auditor-Controller, & Tax Collector, County Clerk & Recorder, County Superintendent of Schools
• JUDICIAL: Superior Court, Office No. 15

RECOMENDATION: YES! (Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth!) Here are the reasons why we’re endorsing Mr. Steyer:

• THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY: That PG&E still exists after 90 felonies related to safety lapses, including 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the 2018 Camp Fire, the massive pipeline explosion in the Hayward area that destroyed homes and hospitalized residents ,and their refusal to pay taxes on Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant (See the “Board of Equalization” page about this), absolutely enrages us. Newsom whiffed his opportunity to take them apart.
  • PG&E has already scoped him as their mortal enemy, and has aimed a $10 million campaign to sink him in the polls.
  • Becerra, the closest competitor in recent polls, has taken Chevron donations for his campaign and has ZERO environmental endorsements.
• THE LIMITS OF IDENTITY POLITICS: We also based our decision on feedback from Latino members of CA indivisibles. Identity politics automatically giving Chevron-friendly politicos like Becerra the edge is how their community will continue to get screwed. “How can someone of my own [pick one: ethnic, racial, religious, etc.] group cheat me?.” Because it’s easy – the “danger” warning system in your brain is lulled to sleep. (See: Bernie Madoff, Donald Trump) They spoke persuasively that the candidate most committed to smacking equity and fossil fuel interests is the one best suited for the job of protecting minority populations who live in sacrifice neighborhoods and those who work in outside jobs.
• SINS OF THE PAST: Can we forgive? This is a serious question. Some religions demand it and our society encourages second chances for the formerly incarcerated. For those in the “never forgive, never forget” camp over Steyer’s business history, exhibit one would be Oskar Schindler. Now considered a hero, he was a Nazi party member who ended up using the slave-labor aspect of his business to save the lives of over 1200 people. Like the ghost of Scrooge’s old partner, Marley, we carry psychic chains of past hurt, anger, hubris, and ego. The question is whether or not we can remove the ones that no longer serve us or others.
• LISTENING TO OUR FRIENDS:
  • CA-DSA (Democratic Socialists) have deemed him the most progressive candidate, as has Bernie’s group – Our Revolution. But what topped it off for us was the most reluctant endorsement we’ve ever read, from the progressive group KNOCK-LA (we posted it below his endorsement grid.)
  • Also, what Amy says in the instagram video below. And Bill McKibben below that. And Rebecca Solnit.
• BILLIONAIRES’ BALL: Can’t swing a cat without hitting one in this race, including those funding Becerra and other candidates as well. This is our current reality. Until we can restructure wealth taxes, we think having one pull the cart for us is infinitely better that one whipping us from the driver’s seat, using a friendly politico as a beard.
• ROBERT REICH HAS JUST WEIGHED IN: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/tom-steyer-for-governor-of-california?utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e232_tv2_tp1_a1demonlfteheg
  

WHAT HAS HE DONE?

• (2007) Co-founded the Beneficial State Bank, a community development bank dedicated to economic justice and environmental sustainability. As of 2024, Beneficial State Bank is a $1.9 billion asset state-chartered, federally insured bank with branches in California, Oregon, and Washington. There are currently four locations in CA: Los Angeles, Oakland, Porterville and Fresno.
• (2010) Defeating Proposition 23 – Tom co-chaired the successful campaign to stop oil companies from rolling back California’sclimate laws, helping protect and grow the state’s clean energy economy and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
• (2010) Tom Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor, signed The Giving Pledge in August 2010. They were among the first group of wealthy individuals to commit to donating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes through the campaign created by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. 
• (2013) Tom co-founded and invested $20 million into the “For Our Future” PAC as well as NextGen America to build long-term organizing infrastructure.  NextGen America has became the largest youth voter engagement organization in U.S. history.
• (2012) – Proposition 39 – Tom co-led and funded this measure, which closed corporate tax loopholes and has generated billions for California schools, specifically funding energy efficiency upgrades and creating thousands of union jobs.
• (2016) – Proposition 56 – Tom served as co-chair and major funder of this tobacco tax initiative, which now delivers over $1 billion annually for healthcare, particularly supporting Medi-Cal and public health programs.
• (2017) Became a major Democratic donor against Donald Trump, launching the “Need to Impeach” movement. He also ran as a Democratic candidate for U.S. President in the 2020 election.
• (2026) He supports the proposed California wealth tax. He is the only major gubernatorial candidate to support the one-time (5%) levy on billionaire wealth, even stating he would vote for it if it reaches the November ballot. 

(abc7) Steyer is a billionaire who wants billionaires to pay their fair share. He said California would not lose its competitive edge even if billionaires leave to shield their private wealth. He also addressed a proposed one-time 5% wealth tax that has not yet made the ballot.

“In theory, I support it, and I’m going to wait and see what happens before I decide specifically if there is a wealth tax on the ballot,” he said.

Steyer also wants a special election to rewrite Proposition 13’s tax limits for commercial properties.

“Large businesses that own huge office buildings and huge malls have been getting a tax loophole for over 40 years that makes no sense,” Steyer said.

(CA-DSA) “There are myriad left-wing protest votes one could take (none of which are going to come close to winning), the most prominent of which are Ramsey Robinson and Butch Ware. We highly encourage voters to not cast a protest vote, as the stakes are incredibly high and the chance of the top two candidates both being Republicans is still very real. We especially urge you to not write-in Butch Ware, who failed to qualify for the ballot and has lashed out against Californian Left, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), and DSA. Aside from his previous anti-abortion and transphobic statements, the latter of which he has doubled down on during his run for governor, he also saw it fit to call Shirley Weber, a Black woman, Gavin Newsom’s “house slave” in an ill-executed diss track.”

However, the most progressive of the current viable candidates for governor is Tom Steyer. Time will tell whether he’s truly a class traitor.

(knock-la.com) The California governor’s race could be generously described as a goat rodeo. The state Democratic Party is directionless, and Governor Newsom is primarily concerned with anti-Trump memes and impressing his chud son by interviewing internet bigots on his podcast. Maybe it’s for the best, though — if he’s busy online he can’t destroy unhoused people’s possessions for a photo op. In the meantime, an endless parade of candidates have somehow put us in danger of a Republican vs. Republican runoff: MAGA dipshit Steve Hilton and Literal Fascist / Ambulatory Moustache Chad Bianco crawling over the finish line with 15% each.

• If you’re familiar with past guides, you know we’ve been more than happy to say “don’t vote for either of these creeps.” Not every race has a candidate who deserves your vote. But sometimes we as voters have to play a numbers game.
• After many long conversations, we’ve come to the conclusion that you should vote for Tom Steyer. A literal billionaire. I think I’m going to vomit.
• One of the inescapable issues of running for statewide office in California is that you’re running for statewide office in California, with nearly 40 million people across a vast geographic range. As the race has progressed, the realistic field of candidates has narrowed.
• Swalwell was a favorite of the moneyed establishment until long-rumored accusations of sexual assault finally surfaced and his supporters immediately dumped him — perhaps relieved that the other shoe they’d been on the lookout for finally dropped. The big bucks have pivoted to Becerra, who after months of silence finally found the resources to bombard us with text messages.
• Becerra isn’t it. In the simplest sense, a person who can’t say “Abolish ICE” is completely unfit to represent California. We in LA have borne the brunt of the federal Gestapo assault on our neighbors and if you can’t stand with us, you can go to hell. That’s not his only failing, however — he’s accepted a maximum donation from Chevron and consistently sides with the oil industry including supporting new drilling and oil production in California. He turned his back on single-payer healthcare to earn the backing of a health industry lobby. Becerra is only clay in the hands of wealthy corporations.
• Katie Porter was definitely screwed over in 2024, when Adam Schiff (D-Raytheon) boosted Republican Steve Garvey in order to box her out of the runoff. But that doesn’t make her a good candidate for governor. No one we talked to had a positive experience with her office during her time in Congress. Porter has also come out against the proposed Billionaire Tax, a small tax on people whose wealth is so great as to warp the world around them; unilaterally disarming in the class war puts her at odds with the working people of California.
• So it’s Steyer then, as disgusted as we might feel about another oligarch governor. His commitment to environmentalism is genuine, he supports single-payer healthcare, he backs the billionaire tax, he’s unafraid to say that ICE should be abolished and that they should be prosecuted under state law for their crimes. It’s a strange position to find ourselves in, but remember: an elected official is a battlefield, not a general. We don’t count on elected leaders to simply take care of us out of the goodness of their souls — we have to engage with them, push them, and challenge them, even the ones we support, to accomplish our goals.
• While we cast those ballots, however, we should also ask why the governor’s race looks the way it does. Why are candidates backed by Democratic Party power players unwilling to call for the elimination of Trump’s fascist stormtroopers? Why are candidates still willing to call for more oil drilling, against the will of the voters, in a state that has seen the devastating effects of climate change firsthand? Why are our state politics, in a state with democratic supermajorities all up and down the line, still so captured by the wealth and influence of right-wing interests?
• At this point, it’s clear: if we want to keep MAGA out of the Governor’s mansion, Steyer is the best choice. And of course, he has the all-important Juvenile endorsement.

RECOMMENDATION: Not our top choice. We feel that he’s always been the “back room guy,” not the leader (no knocks there – we’re backroom peeps too). But there has been some other issues that Becerra’s diehard fans need to take seriously.

• CHEVRON: He has taken the maximum campaign donation allowable from Chevron for this campaign. It is not a surprise that there are ZERO endorsements from ENVIRONMENTAL groups in our grid below. California Environmental Voters even issued a notice why they didn’t.
• CAMPAIGN FUNDING SCANDAL: A scandal with two of his underlings diverting campaign funds that will sink us if he’s the only Democratic choice on the ticket against a GOP candidate in November. For you die-hard Becerra fans who think this will just die down if we just ignore it and he keeps saying “Case closed.” – NOT A CHANCE IN HELL!
  • Steve Hilton (R): “You shouldn’t be in this race. You should be preparing your criminal defense.”
  • Katie Porter: “What the quote was, was that you had not been mentioned in the charging documents. But as you know, that does not preclude, because you are also a trained attorney, you know that does not preclude an indictment from being issued against you. We do not know what Dana Williamson said about your involvement, and the government will have the ability to reveal that later.”
  • The GOP is probably already making buttons with him in an orange jumpsuit and Trump’s DOJ is assuredly calculating the best time to spring their own trap on him. Innocence doesn’t matter. They indicted a former FBI Director Jame Comey for spelling out 86 47 with seashells. Does anyone image that they’re not going to flood the zone if Becerra becomes our only Democratic candidate on the ticket?

(guardian,com) “Hilton would reportedly pad the halls of Downing Street in socks, ordering civil servants to enact his latest hare-brained scheme, a quirk parodied in the BBC political satire The Thick of It. He also, according to those who worked with him, pushed to scrap maternity leave.

Now he wants to be a politician proper, rather than an aide working behind the scenes. Some are sceptical of how this will work.

The former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, who served in Cameron’s coalition government, was unenthusiastic at the prospect. “I think of him as ideologue rather than doer, gadfly not a serious politician,” he said. “His big idea, the ‘big society’, was a disappointment.” Cable believes Hilton can only get elected “by freak accident”.

“He would be terrible!” said one government adviser who worked in No 10 at the same time as Hilton. “He is someone who was very quickly insanely frustrated with how government works in reality. He comes in with these incredibly wild ideas, wants them all to happen instantly, isn’t interested in compromise, and when it doesn’t happen he throws his toys out the pram.”

His behavior directly inspired the character Stewart Pearson on a BBC political satire “The Thick of It.”

That’s because, under his posh British accent, he’s just another MAGA con artist.

Exhibit 1 – The man described as “terrible” for California is intent on infesting our state with Cal DOGE, his version of a failed and corrupt program that came nowhere near it’s $2 trillion dollar spending target, but still managed to harm millions of people. (Death toll tracker from USAID here)

It looks exactly like the RICH WOULD GET A SUBSTANTIAL TAX CUT!

• AUSTERITY (PRE-PANDEMIC) BUDGET/SPENDING CUTS TO MATCH THE TAX CUTS FOR RICH PEOPLE. And since we have Prop. 13, he won’t be able to raise property taxes like Texas does. Steve is experienced in creating antidemocratic austerity politicies, which structurally transfer resources from the working majority to the 1 percent of the population that subsists mainly off capital ownership (i.e., stock dividends, rents, and interest). In other words, austerity is not about spending less but about spending in the “correct” way — in favor of the economic and financial elite and to the detriment of the majority of the population.” 
  • LOOK AT THE DAMAGE HE DID IN THE U.K. “Given that Hilton wants to realize a version of [his “Big Society”] in America, a question naturally presents itself: What happened when it was implemented in the U.K.? He elides this question, and no wonder, because the Big Society in practice was a vicious mess, demonstrating only the cruelty of its designers and the vacuity of its promise to somehow disentangle an idea of community from economics. The facilities he identifies as the constituent parts of a community—public libraries; neighborhood parks; youth clubs— all need money to function; the Britain he presided over provides an object-lesson in what happens when they‘re deprived of it. Since 2010, over 600 public libraries have been shuttered, along with more than 500 youth centers. Uncountable green spaces have been concreted over and sold off to property developers. Austerity was the only real policy the coalition had: everything else was decorative, and the Big Society was the gaudiest bauble of all, a vast shiny distraction from the brute fact of 110 billion pounds in spending cuts.“
• HE WAS KNOWN FOR OTHER STUPID IDEAS AS WELL: “Hilton suggested that one of the United Kingdom’s biggest problems was too much cloudy weather—“Why can’t we fly planes over the eastern Atlantic,” he suggested, “to drop chemicals on the clouds and force them to break up, and get rid of their rain before they get to our shores?”
• STUPID STATISTIC GAMES: “In a state as big as California, where just 5% of the land is developed, there’s plenty of room to build the housing we need. They call it “sprawl.” I call it the California Dream, and I will do everything I can to restore it.”
  • Steve’s only been a citizen since 2021. He apparently knows NOTHING about how Californians care about open space, our SOAR initiatives, the already large losses of agriculture and grazing land and our issues with water.
  • Yes. 90% of our population lives on 5% of the land. That sounds crazy, right! But if Steve had done 5 minutes of research, he’d have learned that: more than 27% of CA is agricultural land. Approximately 46% of the state’s land is federal land, which includes mostly national forests, national parks and wildlife areas and military areas. People can’t build homes there. Our state also have this mountain range taking up a huge amount of space, and deserts where there is no access to water. “The only places that are “empty”, and is not tall mountains or impossible deserts of federal forest or park land or productive agricultural land is extremely far away from any infrastructure.” (https://www.quora.com/If-there-is-so-much-empty-space-and-desert-in-California-why-dont-they-just-build-a-bunch-more-houses)
  • We invite Steve to “spread out” from from his current home in Bay-area Atherton, maybe to a place like Modoc County for example. It’s only a five hour commute to Sacramento! It’s been losing people for 30 years and could certainly use your cheerleading!

• LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: USAID Death tracker (https://usaidcounter.github.io)
  • Let’s see. Some kids killed essential programs and walked off with our data. Elon helped kill USAID through DOGE. We can’t wait to see what tragedies this guy will bring to our state.

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BE A PROBLEM FOR HIM: (abc7) “Hilton is a former Fox News host and a vocal supporter of Trump. He was born in the UK where he served as director of strategy for former Prime Minister David Cameron, and then moved to California in 2012. He became a U.S. citizen in 2021.

Hilton blames climate change policies for the housing and affordability crisis in California, saying the policies have made it more costly to build. He added that he doesn’t believe climate change played a role in last year’s destructive and deadly wildfires.”

FAKING IT: (latimes) “He “[Hilton] stopped by the Original Del Taco off 1st Avenue on Saturday after a town hall with lieutenant governor candidate and Barstow native Gloria Romero. His campaign posted a short video on social media of him standing outside the spot — the oldest operating Del Taco — while holding something that looked like a melted Frisbee.

…Hilton gleefully wielded the crunchy mass with one hand as he pointed to the Original Del Taco sign with the other. “My Barstow street taco, I’m going to enjoy,” he concluded in an accent from his native England, while giving a thumbs-up. “See you soon.”

He didn’t take a bite.”

The social media blowback exploded like a digital Montezuma’s revenge...

…But Hilton disappoints again and again. He launched his campaign in Huntington Beach, enamored of politicians there who seek to silo their city from the rest of California and humiliate liberals at every opportunity. His embrace of Trump‘s endorsement and refusal to admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election expose him as a toady…

… Instead of offering a bold vision for the future, he offers a return to a past that will never happen again and that wasn’t as great as people make it out to be.

VOTER GUIDE – QUICK LINKS TO:

• Steyer ENDORSED
• Becerra
• Porter
• Hilton
• Bianco

• HOME
• STATE OFFICES: Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, Insurance Commissioner, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Board of Equalization Member – District 2
• FEDERAL CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS: 24th, 26th, 27th , 32nd
• STATE ASSEMBLY DISTRICTS: 38nd, 42nd, 46th
• COUNTY: Ventura Co. Supervisors: District 2 and District 4, Assessor, Auditor-Controller, & Tax Collector, County Clerk & Recorder, County Superintendent of Schools
• JUDICIAL: Superior Court, Office No. 15