As a registered voter in California, I’ve been watching the slowly developing 2026 gubernatorial race in which no Democrat seems to be breaking out of the bipartisan pack. I wrote an early assessment for New York:
The last three governors of California were all legendary, larger-than-life political figures. Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003–’11) was a huge Hollywood and pop-culture celebrity before he entered politics in a recall election that ejected his predecessor Gray Davis. He remains the last Republican to be elected as governor or U.S. senator in the Golden State. Jerry Brown (2011-2019) served in his second two-term gubernatorial stretch, having first been elected to the office way back in 1974 (he also ran for president three times). And the current and outgoing California governor, Gavin Newsom (2019-present), was San Francisco mayor and two-term lieutenant governor before stepping up to the top job in Sacramento. He, too, has dominated California politics in a big way.
The contest to choose the 41st governor of California currently has ten candidates — eight Democrats and two Republicans — and not that many voters could identify them in a line-up. Two Democratic politicians who did have some name ID and who might have dominated the field have given the race a pass. That would be former U.S. senator, vice president, and presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who may instead run for president again in 2028 (very likely against Newsom); and her successor in the Senate, Alex Padilla, who gained a lot of attention when he was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by Secret Service agents for trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a press conference.
With those big fish out of the tank, the remaining field is composed of candidates who are far from unknown, but are still small fry, relatively speaking. A well-known former Democratic member of the U.S. House, Katie Porter (who ran for the Senate in 2024) and current House member Eric Swalwell (who very briefly ran for president in 2020), are running. One current Democratic statewide office-holder, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, is making a bid. So is former state comptroller Betty Yee, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former Biden administration HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and former state assembly majority leader Ian Calderon. The most recent Democrat to enter the race was hedge fund billionaire and liberal activist Tom Steyer (who ran a presidential campaign briefly more successful than Swalwell’s in 2020).
Alongside these eight Democrats are two Republicans: Fox News gabber and former British Tory political operative Steve Hilton, and current Riverside County (east of L.A.) sheriff Chad Bianco.
Polls consistently show these ten candidates struggling to break out of the pack. Early on, Porter, building on name ID from her unsuccessful 2024 Senate race, had some buzz, but she damaged herself by pitching a temper tantrum during a media interview that wasn’t going her way. Since then it’s become a sluggish race between snails. The latest public poll, from Emerson, released in early December, shows Bianco at 13 percent, Hilton and Swalwell at 12 percent, Porter at 11 percent, Villaraigosa at 5 percent, and Steyer and Becerra at 4 percent. The remaining candidates combine for 7 percent, and there’s an impressive 31 percent who are undecided or don’t know who these people are. Everyone but Porter has name ID under 50 percent, and hers isn’t all that positive. You may think that’s because it’s so very early in the contest, but in fact, the primary is on June 2, just over six months away.
That primary, by the way, is part of California’s non-partisan top two system in which the first- and second-place finishers, regardless of party, proceed to the general election. And the early polling has created a bit of a freak-out among Democrats bewailing their candidates’ lack of star power, as Politico noted:
“California Democrats have a math problem: They’ve added so many candidates in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom that two Republicans could end up winning the state’s quirky ‘jungle primary,’ shutting the Democrats out.
“A Democratic wipeout is still unlikely. But the prospect of a humiliating pile-up, with no clear powerbroker to act as traffic cop, has put the state’s political class increasingly on edge with each new entrant into the field.”
Even though the race should intensify considerably as we get deeper into 2026, the candidate filing deadline isn’t until March. So the power vacuum in the gubernatorial field could yet attract a late entry from some celebrity (Hollywood is chock full of them) or insanely rich self-funder (one such bag of money, Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso, could run for governor if he doesn’t run again for L.A. mayor). Or more Lilliputs could join the race hoping that lightning strikes (e.g., state Attorney General Rob Bonta).
If the field remains as it is, keep an eye on Steyer, whose vast wealth could buy him the name ID he needs. Ideological divisions and factional alignments could also be key. Thurmond is touting his support for a single-payer health care system and has the endorsement by California’s powerful teachers unions. Villaraigosa (who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018) has a well-worn reputation as a Democratic “moderate.” Porter has scars from her battles with the crypto industry, which savaged her with negative ads in 2024, while Calderon has become a crypto bro ally. Becerra can run on his legal battles with the first Trump administration (when he served as California attorney general) and Swalwell has been trading insults with Trump for years. Meanwhile the two Republicans in the race can be expected to compete for a Trump endorsement (Hilton is a long-time Trump backer on Fox News, while Bianco is a former Oath Keeper).
Ethnic and geographical rivalries could matter too. Becerra, Calderon, and Villaraigosa are Latino; Yee is Asian-American; Thurmond is Black. Calderon, Porter, and Villaraigosa are from the greater Los Angeles area; Steyer, Swallwell, Thurmond, and Yee are from the San Francisco Bay area; and Becerra is from Sacramento. Schwarzenegger was the last California governor from Southern California, but he also represented the last gasp of truly moderate Republicanism.
While the field could shrink or expand even more before the filing deadline, the next governor of California probably won’t enter office with anything like the street cred and national prominence of the other 21st century chief executives, who often acted as though the state is an independent principality with its own foreign and domestic policies. Newsom will also leave some chronic fiscal problems, a perpetually fractious legislature, all sorts of natural resources and environmental challenges, and a housing “affordability” crisis that has spurred a national debate over a so-called “abundance” agenda prioritizing regulatory streamlining to speed up housing and other construction. It’s a lot, but whoever wins will become a lot more famous, fast.
I think the filibuster problem is much more difficult to solve than you imply, since it involves the classic collective action problem of a conflict between between national or “Democratic Party” goals, and individual Senators’ goals.
The filibuster works wonderfully well right now for Senators Nelson and Lieberman, and perhaps Landrieu, Byrd, and others. They have strong motivation to keep it, and indeed to resist attempts to get around it through reconciliation. The ‘inevitable’ move towards increasing legislating through reconciliations to avoid filibusters will lesson the importance and power of individual Senators; as such, many will vote against it in order to maintain their power (are there 50 votes for a public option or an early Medicare option? I doubt it, and I think Reid counted noses and realized reconciliation wouldn’t work either).
The filibuster (and holds, and UCAs, and all the other anti-majoritarian rules of the anti-majoritarian body called the US Senate) may eventually be ended. But it will NOT be ended just because Republicans are trying to block everything.
It will be ended if and only if a solid majority of Senators think their individual interests will be promoted by allowing the Senate to take more collective action. That is not the case right now, and it is not (just) the Republicans’ fault.
I’m not sure I understand the need for compromise. As we’ve seen on health care, Republicans are unwilling to meet us half way. More importantly, the filibuster was never intended to kill legislation. If Republicans want to repeatedly use it for that purpose, that abuse justifies a change in the rules.
Do we need the filibuster? Thomas Geoghegan, writing in the August 12, 2009 issue of The Nation, puts it as follows:
“The fact is, as long as we have the filibuster, we ensure the discrediting of the Democratic Party and we’re more likely, not less, to have a terrible bench.
Sure, sometimes liberal Democrats put the filibuster to good use when Republicans are in power. Sure, sometimes a liberal senator can use the filibuster to stop a piece of corporate piracy. It’s impossible to prove that the filibuster never does any good. But the record is awfully thin. Look at all the financial deregulation that Senator Phil Gramm and leading Democrats like Larry Summers pushed through only a decade ago. The filibuster did not stop their effective repeal of the New Deal, but it would block the revival of it today.
On the other hand, Republicans and conservative Democrats use their filibusters on labor, health, the stimulus, everything. They can and will block all the change that Obama wanted us to believe in. And even when they lose, they win. For example, when we say that after a major rewriting of the stimulus package–a rewriting that seriously weakened the original bill–it “survived the filibuster,” what we really mean is that it didn’t.”
It’s interesting that in his January 10th Op-Ed piece for the NY Times, Geoghegan omits from his “several promising lines of attack” the nuclear option, which is described by wiki as follows:
“In U.S. politics, the “nuclear option” is an attempt by a majority of the United States Senate to end a filibuster by majority vote, as opposed to 60 senators voting to end a filibuster. Although it is not provided for in the formal rules of the Senate, the procedure is the subject of a 1957 parliamentary opinion and has been used on several occasions since. The term was coined by Senator Trent Lott (Republican of Mississippi) in 2005.”
Considering Geoghegan’s reasonings for killing the filibuster, Judis and Teixeira’s strong conclusion that the Republicans are very likely not coming back to power for at several decades, the Republicans having egregiously abused their filibuster privilege, and the fact that if we don’t take serious action on climate change soon civilization as we know it will cease to exist after about 2060, we should use the Nuclear Option and let Obama and Congress get about the business of fixing the messes we’re in.