Few Angelenos thought Xavier Becerra could one day outshine Antonio Villaraigosa

For Southern California voters of a certain age, there’s something disorienting about the current race for governor.

It’s not that two Republican candidates may shut out the entire field of Democrats in this overwhelmingly Democratic state. Democrats are always coming up with new ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so none of that is particularly new or surprising.

No, the cognitive dissonance for Los Angeles voters who remember a historic mayoral race a quarter of a century ago is this: Xavier Becerra is leading the pack. Antonio Villaraigosa is struggling in the single digits.

Seriously? How could that happen? What cataclysm took place to bring about this reversal of fortune?

Villaraigosa was always the electric one, the history-maker, the man of destiny. On completing his tenure as state Assembly speaker, he steamrolled home to Los Angeles to run for mayor in 2001. Broadcasters, after several months of butchering his name, finally began to pronounce it correctly, then quickly learned how to pronounce Cristóbal Aguilar, as in, “Villaraigosa could be the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since Cristóbal Aguilar in 1872.”

But it wasn’t just that he was Latino. Labor loved him. Progressives loved him. The cameras loved him. His flashy smile was like the beacon on top of City Hall that once pointed planes toward the airport but had been shut off for decades. Maybe it was time to turn it back on.

Who could stop the Villaraigosa phenomenon? His biggest obstacle was City Attorney James K. Hahn, scion of L.A. political royalty. Other candidates made a play too.

Then Becerra entered the race, and much of Los Angeles let out a collective, “Who?”

Becerra was a Stanford-educated lawyer and native Sacramentan who served a single term in the state Assembly before succeeding the legendary Edward Roybal in Congress. He was one of the so-called Boy Scouts, earnest, clean-cut young Latino men who went to law school, focused on policy and (in image) stayed out of trouble (yet who always seemed to be just an arm’s-length from some campaign trick worthy of Richard Nixon). 

Villaraigosa was only a few years older, but it was an important few years. He was already a teenager during the Chicano Moratorium in 1970, a member of MEChA while at UCLA, and a labor organizer in the early part of his career. Like Becerra he went to law school, but instead of Stanford it was People’s College of Law, an unaccredited school dedicated to “progressive social change.” 

Becerra kept his nose in the books. Villaraigosa focused on activism.

They ostensibly belonged to two rival Latino political factions, divided by loyalties to different mentors and defined by different places on the political spectrum, different attitudes toward coalition-building, different older-brother figures whose couches they slept on while establishing residency to qualify for office. 

But both men in fact worked with many of the same leaders and on many of the same causes. When Becerra was preparing his congressional run, his home was briefly Villaraigosa’s couch.

In the mayoral race, though, Becerra looked like Villaraigosa’s spoiler. Yet why should one Latino candidate feel obligated to stay out of another’s way when no one expected state controller and mayoral candidate Kathleen Connell, for example, to defer to Hahn?

What actually seemed to separate Villaraigosa and Becerra in the minds of most voters during the 2001 Los Angeles mayoral race’s first round was the electricity gap. To put it gently, Becerra was never a particularly exciting guy. 

That showed up in the vote count. He won less than 6%, too little to even make him a spoiler. 

In those days, city and congressional elections were held in different years, so Becerra could lose big for mayor and still return to his safe seat in Congress. Villaraigosa finished first, then Hahn beat him in the runoff, and then Villaraigosa crushed Hahn in the 2005 rematch. Villaraigosa was featured on national magazine covers and talk shows. He was a regular visitor to Washington, D.C. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein famously said he had “a special shimmer.” 

Becerra meanwhile plugged along in Congress. No one ever accused him of shimmering.

But unlike Villaraigosa, whose activist legal education didn’t prepare him for the bar exam, Becerra’s State Bar membership made him eligible for political advancement unavailable to non-lawyers. Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Becerra to be state attorney general when Kamala Harris vacated the office to take her seat in the U.S. Senate.

As AG (which, political pundits like to say, stands for “almost governor”), Becerra became known for his lawsuits against the first Trump administration.

Villaraigosa continued to call himself a “proud progressive” while tacking toward the political center (toward Becerra) and prepared his run to succeed Brown as governor in 2018. He got trounced — maybe even out-shimmered — by Gavin Newsom. He wandered in the political wilderness as Becerra became President Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services during the COVID pandemic.

And here we are. Neither Becerra nor Villaraigosa made any headway in the current governor’s race until moderately shimmery Eric Swalwell was accused of rape and other sexual misconduct and quickly dropped out of contention, then out of Congress.

Nothing seems obvious or natural about Becerra suddenly inheriting Swalwell’s support. But someone had to. After the revulsion against Swalwell and after years of big personalities in office — Newsom as governor, Donald Trump as president once, and now as president again — Democrats may be hungry for someone steady, quiet and, let’s face it, a bit dull. Villaraigosa, scraping the lower regions of the polls, is not dull. Becerra may just fit the bill. 

A recent poll put him in the lead alongside Republican Steve Hilton. Announcers are practicing the name Romualdo Pacheco, the last Latino California governor in 1875. The reversal of fortune is complete.

Becerra’s unofficial campaign slogan may now be “cálmate,” a word he cheerfully lobbed toward Villaraigosa in a recent debate. Calm down, excitable friend. Maybe that’s what California Democrats want right now. A little calm.

That’s also what they wanted in the 2020 presidential race. And they got it.

For a little while.