Governor of California

Becerra represented Los Angeles in Congress for more than two decades before being appointed California’s attorney general in 2017. He led the state’s numerous lawsuits against the first Trump administration and Republican states. He was U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services under Biden, steering the administration through the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and receiving criticism for the agency’s care of migrant children in its custody. Becerra says he’s open to revising the state’s climate goals to keep fuel affordable for middle-class Californians and wants to declare a state of emergency to freeze utility and insurance rates.

Bianco has a three-decade career in the Riverside County sheriff’s office and was elected sheriff in 2018 with the support of the union that represents deputies. He has past ties to far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers militia and has faced criticism, lawsuits and a state investigation over deaths and conditions in his jails. Bianco is pushing to suspend numerous state regulations, particularly environmental ones, and says as governor he would overturn the state’s sanctuary law. He also wants to boost oil and gas production and eliminate the income tax and the gas tax.

Hilton, who is British American, was senior adviser for former conservative Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012 before moving to California, where he co-founded a political crowdfunding platform in Silicon Valley. He has written books on decentralizing power in large, bureaucratic institutions from government to the food and health care systems. From 2017 to 2023 he hosted a weekly show on Fox News. Hilton wants to lower the price of gas by suspending environmental regulations, cut income taxes for middle-class earners and wealthier Californians and open natural spaces for housing, particularly suburban single-family homes.

Mahan worked on voter engagement platforms in Silicon Valley before joining the San Jose city council in 2021 and becoming mayor in 2023. He has focused his term on reducing street homelessness by opening numerous tiny homes as a more palatable alternative to traditional temporary shelters, sometimes at the expense of using city funds to develop permanent affordable housing. A moderate, he opposes new taxes and wants to temporarily suspend the gas tax and tie government leaders’ pay to performance to force improvements.

Porter flipped a longtime Republican congressional seat in Orange County in 2018 and held it through 2024. She is a law professor focused on consumer protection, was mentored by Elizabeth Warren and is known for grilling corporate and health care executives while pointing at a whiteboard. Porter wants to cut income taxes for middle-income earners and raise corporate taxes on large businesses. She supports developing denser housing in urban areas and near transit stations.

Steyer is a billionaire who made his fortune at a hedge fund where he invested in such industries as private prisons and fossil fuels. After selling off those holdings, he founded a firm investing in environmental technology and became a climate change activist, sometimes bankrolling ballot measures on other liberal causes. He wants to challenge the monopoly status of the state’s investor-owned utilities, raise property taxes on business-owned properties and collect a fee on AI usage to support displaced workers.

Thurmond, a former social worker, is head of the California Department of Education which oversees the state’s public K-12 schools. He previously served four years in the state Assembly. Further to the left than most of his fellow Democratic candidates, Thurmond is the only gubernatorial contender who supports a proposed one-time tax on billionaires’ assets to backfill federal cuts to Medi-Cal. He wants to give a tax credit to lower-income working families, open up spare land owned by school districts to develop housing and commit more public funding to building affordable housing.

Villaraigosa was speaker of the state Assembly in the late 1990s and mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013, during which he significantly expanded the size of the police force and pushed a local sales tax ballot measure to pay for public transportation expansions. Villaraigosa is one of the more moderate Democrats in the race. He is more skeptical of the state’s climate goals, believes in using oil and gas as a “transition” fuel and wants a moratorium on climate regulations.