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California has enough important elections next month to alter the fortunes of the country. Yet in a midterm year defined by strong tailwinds for Democrats, who already hold California’s most powerful positions, some of the biggest contests in America’s most populous state have flown under the national radar.
Xavier Becerra, a Democratic former congressman, state attorney general and cabinet member for President Joe Biden, is expected to cruise to victory against Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, in the race for California governor. Becerra’s wide lead in the race overshadows some of the significance of his expected victory. He’d be the first Latino governor of California since 1875, when then-Lt. Gov. Romualdo Pacheco stepped in to fill a partial term after the elected governor resigned.
That’s a major milestone for a state with 8.5 million eligible Hispanic voters — more than 30 percent of the state’s electorate and about a quarter of the total number of Hispanic voters nationwide. Hispanic and Latino voters have had a growing influence in California for years, but they’ve too often been tapped for their assumed Democratic electoral support late in a campaign, says Nilza Serrano, chair of the California Democratic Party Latino caucus. With a Becerra win in November, Latino Democrats would hold not only the governor’s office but also the most powerful jobs in the state Assembly and the state Senate.
“The fact that we’re able to get a candidate that is supported by all segments and constituencies across California and be seen as a steady leader is huge for us,” Serrano says. “I think that will open the door for more Latinos in office in the future.”
They won’t all be Democrats. In 2024, Latino voters in California swung to the right, as they did in many parts of the country. President Donald Trump performed better in majority-Latino counties that year than he did in 2020, especially in those counties with the largest Latino majorities. But there’s evidence that Republican gains among Hispanics and Latinos in that election are already eroding. Polls suggest that, like other voters, they prioritize affordability and the economy — the issues that drove Democratic incumbents out of office in 2024 and that are bedeviling Republican incumbents this year — over other concerns. Recent polls also have found a stark gender divide among California Latinos, with women being much more likely than men to say that protecting immigrant communities and standing up to Trump is a priority, especially in the youngest cohort of the electorate.
“The long-term impact might just be that the Latino community is a swing vote in a way that it wasn’t before,” says Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
A win for Becerra would also represent a shift in the geographic center of gravity for California Democrats. Almost all of the Democratic governors of California going back to the 1950s — Pat Brown (1959-1967), Jerry Brown (1975-1983, 2011-2019), and Gavin Newsom (2019-present) — had their rise in San Francisco, long the powerhouse of California Democratic politics. Gray Davis (1999-2003) represented parts of Los Angeles in the state Legislature, but spent more years serving as Gov. Jerry Brown’s chief of staff in Sacramento than he did as either assemblyman or governor. The state’s two U.S. senators are now Southern California Democrats, and former U.S House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a longtime national icon who came up in San Francisco politics, is retiring. Becerra took a more moderate tack in the gubernatorial primary than some of his fellow contenders, possibly a preview of a different kind of California Democrat on the national stage.
“The California public is not as liberal as it sometimes is portrayed as being,” McGhee says. “It’s more that it’s Democratic than liberal. Southern California and Northern California are both equally Democratic, but the Democrats in the Los Angeles area are generally somewhat more conservative.”
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times/TNS)
Dem vs. Dem in Los Angeles
The race for Los Angeles mayor, meanwhile, is challenging the city’s reputation for Democratic centrism. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, a longtime Democratic congresswoman, won the office by beating a Republican billionaire in 2022. Her initial popularity tanked when she was out of the country during the Los Angeles wildfires early last year, and this year, she faced primary challenges from both the right and the left. The leftwing challenger, City Council member Nithya Raman, advanced to a head-to-head contest with Bass in November. Some recent polls show Raman with a lead, but a substantial portion of voters are still undecided.
The contest between Bass and Raman has garnered more national attention than the gubernatorial race, partly because it reflects the broader divide between socialist-aligned candidates and establishment Democrats that has played out in primary elections around the country this year. But the race has been more a referendum on Karen Bass’ governing record than an ideological contest.
Raman is aligned with renters and pro-housing YIMBY policies, while Bass is closer to traditionally influential homeowners groups. A win for Raman, and growing influence for renters, could “reorganize the governing order in Los Angeles,” says Mike Bonin, director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A. But labor unions and business groups are likely to retain their influence under either outcome. And a close finish, as has been seen in recent left-versus-center primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin, could blunt the significance of a Raman win.
“No matter who wins, unless something changes in the next three weeks, I don’t see anyone getting elected with a mandate to do anything,” Bonin says.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times/TNS)
Disaster Insurance and a Billionaire Tax
The left-center dynamic is also at play in the race for state insurance commissioner, an office that has taken on new relevance in an era of frequent natural disasters. The candidates in the general election are both Democrats: state Sen. Ben Allen, whose district includes areas that burned during last year’s wildfires, and Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and head of the state Working Families Party. Kim has proposed a “natural disaster insurance for all” policy, while Allen, who has the support of most of the Democratic establishment, is proposing tighter regulations on the insurance industry.
Californians will also decide whether to impose a wealth tax on billionaires — a proposal that has been met with skepticism from some within the Democratic party, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Some of the state’s billionaires, who would pay a one-time 5 percent tax on assets under the proposal, have already left the state because of it. A win for the wealth tax combined with a win for a socialist-aligned candidate in the L.A. mayor’s race could go a long way to changing the tenor of Democratic politics in California, which has the fourth-largest economy in the world.