The Machine Blinked
Vote Tom Steyer for Governor.
California’s mail-in ballots arrive the first week of May. I have already received my voter’s guide. If you are just now tuning in, the race to replace Gavin Newsom as Governor is a big, stinky pile of takki, and the outcome matters more than most people realize. There are actually sixty-plus people running for governor and I am always entertained by the candidate statements in the guide, especially the one or two off-kilters from the margins.
We are a month away from the June 2 primary and the field has reshuffled dramatically after the summary exit of now ex-Congressman Eric Swalwell, who was consolidating frontrunner status among the Democrats.
The polling aggregator 270 to Win now puts Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra practically tied, followed by Democrat Tom Steyer and Republican Chad Bianco. I am going to dispense the rest as also-rans: Katie Porter, a fiery advocate who should have kept her temper out of public view; Matt Mahan, who will have to contend with finishing his term as mayor of San Jose, a job he hopped to from the City Council, and find other ways to leave that post for President Mahan 2028; Antonio Villaraigosa and Tony Thurmond, whose spotlight is mired in one percent.
The Democratic machine’s quiet consolidation around Becerra is now looking certain.
For me, plainly: I am voting for Tom Steyer for Governor.
There are two kinds of candidates in this race (maybe in any race). The ones with their own money who don’t owe anyone anything, and the ones who rely on zillionaires and special interests who owe everyone everything.
Mr. Steyer is not perfect and I will get to that. But in a race that could plausibly hand California’s governorship to a Republican for the first time in a generation, he is the viable candidate the machine did not choose and is not choosing yet. In a state where political succession is increasingly managed rather than contested, that is not a liability. It is the point.
I supported Betty Yee, the former State Controller, when she announced her candidacy. She was, to me, the most qualified person in this race to manage California’s finances at the worst possible moment for California’s finances. Her tagline was “Let’s make California ADD up for all of us.” An unglamorous, nerdy accounting metaphor. I loved her for it. My grandfather was a bookkeeper. My father was a bookkeeper. I am in many ways a bookkeeper. We are a family of people who believe that getting the numbers right is a form of care.
Last February, I attended the California Democratic Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco as an observer. I heard most of the candidates speak. I watched the room. There was no palpable excitement around anyone, which is exactly why the delegates failed to coalesce and left without an endorsement.
There was, however, a sea of idealistic, energetic Swalwell interns echoing his name and working the floor with hope that hadn’t yet been crushed. The machine was coalescing around him and I felt a slow, reluctant mathematical pull. A fragmented field of Democrats plus two advancing Republicans equal a tragical conclusion. Vote strategically, I told myself. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of electable.
Then it turned out Swalwell was exactly who I always suspected he was. A man of hubris. Multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. He denied assault, but apologized for his behavior, which is the polite way of saying he’s a wanton cheater. He resigned from Congress to avoid being expelled, pushed from the train by his political godmother Nancy Pelosi. In a hundred hours he went from golden-boy frontrunner to radioactive footnote.
The following week, Betty Yee withdrew from the race. Stalled fundraising and support closed the path to the nomination. The most qualified financial mind in the race, with thirty years of public service and seven billion dollars in identified waste to her name, could not get traction in a system that rewards optics over substance.
Steve Hilton, a Fox News host born in London—née Hircsák, son of Hungarian asylum seekers—who moved to Atherton, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the United States, has been consistently ahead in the midst of the Democratic donkey circus. He wants to run California on an ICE agenda. Trump endorsed him, which he embraced fully at the first gubernatorial debate. He wants a “constructive” relationship with Trump’s federal government. Sit with that. Remember, Project 2025 is no longer a blueprint. It’s Tuesday.
Then there’s Chad Bianco, the Riverside County Sheriff and former Oath Keeper, who seized half a million ballots from his own county’s elections office while running for Governor, dismissed concerns about racial profiling and defended pulling over truck drivers and administering English tests. Because somehow understanding traffic signs and hauling freight requires English aptitude. He is ours in the way that a rattlesnake in the Central Valley is ours: native and dangerous, though at least honest about what he is.
Since Swalwell’s exit, Xavier Becerra has jumped in the polls, and the machine is quietly coalescing around him. Twenty-four years in Congress. Four years as California’s Attorney General. Four years running Health and Human Services under Joe Biden during a pandemic. The résumé is long. Law enforcement unions spent over $300,000 on his AG campaign, and he spent much of his tenure resisting police misconduct transparency before the George Floyd protests made that position untenable. He shifted, eventually. The California Medical Association representing physicians and medical students just endorsed him, and so now he is backpedaling on single-payer healthcare. The filing cabinet, it turns out, has a weathervane on top.
Second time’s a charm for the machine? Keep that in mind.
Now, Tom Steyer.
He is a billionaire trying to win a statewide election. He has spent roughly $130 million of his own money on this race. He will spend more. The irony is that as we see all these American oligarchs circling the drain that is the Trump swamp, a billionaire from the Bay Area is now the unlikely voice of progressives and the working class, despite — or maybe because of — his past.
His hedge fund, Farallon Capital, invested in fossil fuels and private prisons, including companies that contracted with ICE. Those were not incidental holdings. They were profitable ones. He has since exited those investments and spent the better part of a decade funding climate, democracy, and immigration advocacy.
You can call that hypocrisy. Or you can call it conversion. People are allowed to change. The question is whether the change is real and not some political evolution that happens when the right thing to say catches up with the right thing to do. His post-Farallon record suggests it is.
Here is how you know his independence is real and not rhetorical: PG&E just reached deep into their pockets and pumped close to $10 million into an anti-Steyer PAC after he promised to appoint utility critics to the California Public Utilities Commission and pull back on expensive infrastructure projects.
As he put it at the debate: “The people raising the costs for California don’t want me to be governor. I’m the change agent here, and they don’t want change.”
When your enemies tell you who to vote for, listen.
And let’s face it: he is not a natural retail politician. Like Betty Yee, he is not running on performance. He is running on competence. California does not need a performer right now.
Many of California’s most powerful labor and progressive voices agree, including the teachers, school employees, and nurses’ unions; environmental groups; Congressmen Ro Khanna. Bernie Sanders’ anti-billionaire group Our Revolution endorsed him. Yes, they endorsed the billionaire.
In a dense, interlocking system of agencies, unions, and informal power in Sacramento that has defeated better-resourced outsiders, Steyer has staying power to absorb pressure and not spend half his time dialing for dollars. It is a structural advantage.
Because California does not lack ideas. It lacks insulation from its own political machinery.
This is not the clean argument I would have preferred to make. Betty Yee was that argument, and the system gave her no path.
The day after she suspended her campaign, Yee endorsed Tom Steyer.
Again, smart lady. I agree. This is the argument the race we have requires.
Vote Tom Steyer for Governor of California.
Postscript.
Vote Fiona Ma for Lieutenant Governor. She is part of the machine, but if Steyer wins, he will need someone in the room who knows how it works. She has held four elected offices and manages roughly three trillion dollars in annual payments. She does not need on the job training. But the machine blinked: Newsom passed her over for his own cabinet staffer for Lieutenant Governor. He said in his endorsement that the Lieutenant Governor’s office is not a place for on-the-job training. Okay then. Fiona Ma is right there.
Post-postscript.
Vote Democratic down the ballot: the legislature, the down-ticket races, all of it.
One specific thing: Alameda County District Attorney.
DO NOT VOTE for Pamela Price. She had the job. She prioritized criminals over victims. She was recalled. I voted for her recall. She is running again. Nabungtot. Vote Ursula Jones Dickson.