THE CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR’S RACE: KAYAKING BETWEEN THE SHALLOW WATERS OF LOW CHARISMA AND THE SHOALS OF MAGA TRUMPISM

California, the land of Disneyland and Hollywood, has long been the origin of creative worlds of fantasy, including excelling at the art of performative politics (is there any other kind?). After all, B-actors such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger performed the role of “Governor of the Golden State” splendidly, with impeccable panache, exuding charisma and star power unrivaled by any of their more boring peers elsewhere. 

In a cinematic era that yielded such gems as Bedtime for Bonzo and Conan the Barbarian, these two celebrity govs got elected and re-elected with ease. One, Reagan, would even go on to become President of the United States, twice, frequently thinking he was in a movie set (the other aspired to run but couldn’t, due to his unsurmountable foreign-birth constitutional disqualification). 

Not just did these two California Republicans successfully sprinkled star dust on their adoring followers to win the governor’s mansion twice: super-cool, celebrity-dating, later Zen master Jerry Brown beat them all, winning four times the governorship! And one could even say that the current telegenic and debonaire Gavin Newsom, elected twice and about to launch his presidential run, is the latest avatar of this venerable, California showtime tradition. The show goes on.

But, alas, as far as this year’s gubernatorial race is concerned, we’ve hit a dry spell. Among the many gubernatorial candidates, there’s not even one that even remotely has that elusive “it” quality. What are millions of celebrity-chasing voters to do?

Well, what they always do in these circumstances, get back to vote, reluctantly and fewer, for the “lesser evil.” California has been governed by unglamorous figures for most of its history. Other than Pat Brown - the visionary architect of modern California, though not a charismatic fellow - no one remembers their names, much less the contenders.

Ah, well, except Tricky Dick Nixon, of course, Brown’s 1962 contender: Mr. Anti-Charisma himself! He merits a parenthesis:

Nixon ascended from being a backbencher in Congress to national prominence, not by charisma or vision, but by dint of media-grabbing, fearmongering chicanery during the McCarthy anti-Communist hysteria. That’s how he climbed to the U.S. vice-presidency first, under Eisenhower; then, race baiting his way against the new Civil Rights laws and promising law and order at home and peace in Vietnam, the presidency; and, finally, due to his uncovered Watergate dirty tricks, met the fate of presidential resignation and disgrace. 

But even that whole story could be interpreted as a cheap Hollywood melodrama, with an unhappy ending and a terrible political legacy. Among his political innovations, aside from hitching the GOP to his “Southern Strategy,” Nixon invented the modern way of selling the presidency and re-making from scratch the image of an otherwise repulsive politician with cheeky TV gimmicks, a marketing approach now universally used in political campaigns, from dog catcher to president. Trump, the TV reality showman, is the ultimate practitioner plying his own social media and forever performing self-aggrandizement, as we all know. And hard-core Maga Republicans – a third of the electorate - still can’t get enough of it.

It is not surprising that with such antecedents and recent wild swings between such ruthless demagogues as Trump and mild but charismatic paper tigers like Obama, vast swaths of the nation – California included – have yearned for a return to drabness, normalcy, and stability. This would explain the popular preference for Joe Biden in the 2000 primaries, with a little help of establishment Dems and the DNC vis-à-vis the political rebel Bernie Sanders, and his subsequent victory over bombastic Trump in the general election.

But that drabness and centrism, in the persistent absence of results, merely laid its own self-defeating path – as became the case with the ever-compromising Biden and Harris, who even crossed over to the Trumpian lane on such burning issues to the base as immigration and the Gaza genocide, which only paved the way for Trump’s improbable return to power.

Which brings me to this moment, the 2026 primary race for California governor (a subsequent essay on the November mid-term national elections will follow, analyzing the impact of the war in Iran, the SCOTUS gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the inflamed gerrymandering wars).

The first thing to notice is the utter lack of charismatic candidates with a compelling vision – no Zohran Mamdani on the left, no Arnold Schwarzenegger on the right.

Let’s first briefly stop by the irrelevant Republican side. The two contenders – a suave, Trump-endorsed, former Brexit champ and Fox News talking head, and a more brutish, oath-keeper Sheriff out of central casting – have zero chance of winning. Even if they somehow ended as the top two contenders in the primaries due to a crowded Democrat field, a receding scenario, they would inexorably lose later to a consolidated Democrat write-in candidate. 

For California is not the same as in Pete Wilson’s days. For their unrepentant sins of immigrant hate and fearmongering, Republicans will simply not return to power in California. Even the few Republican congressional redoubts remaining in the state, such as in the Central Valley, are now facing gerrymandering erasure thanks to the earlier chicanery of their Texan brethren, shamelessly egged on by their Dear Leader. Not a moment too soon, I hope Californians vote them all out, the rascals!

On the Democratic side, there are plenty of candidates, none of them with much by way of charisma, vision, and, setting aside titles, actual records of substantive accomplishments. Worse, they are all, in various degrees, deeply in denial running surrealist campaigns of tinkering with purely internal state issues in the face of the relentless and deadly federal attacks coming from the unfolding Maga Trumpist Fascist Project, its hyper-aggressive imperialism and warmaking, it's chaos-inducing, world-endangering behavior. All pretending things are still "manageable," without requiring massive mobilizations and resistance. ¿Qué les pasa?

And yet, vote we must all do for one of them in the upcoming June 2 primaries. Let’s proceed then.

Dispensing with the low-polled candidates out of charitable consideration, the remaining top three Dem contenders today are, in order of poll preferences, Xavier Becerra (with 21% of all polled), slightly ahead of Tom Steyer (15%), and Katie Porter (7%). This is the real race – one of them will almost certainly become the next governor of California. And any of these three is infinitely preferable to any of the Republican contenders. The question for this primary, then, is for whom we should vote among these three candidates. Different folks I respect have chosen each of the three, for various reasons. I share with you my own:

For me, the choice revolves primarily around the question of who is going to urgently rally the people and stand up to Trump and his Maga fascist project, with more courage, boldness, determination, ability, and resolve than heretofore; who is the most willing to rally the people to rise and resist Maga Trumpism on every front, to re-direct all agencies of the state to challenge all attacks on all California residents – immigrants, ethnic and religious communities, organized workers, women, LGBTQ, students, the elderly & children, the environment, the unsheltered and unemployed, etc.; to challenge and resist all encroachments on American democracy, on the free press, on voting rights, and on our cultural & educational institutions.

Here, though I’ve said the candidates are in various stages of denial on this question of mobilizing resistance, I give the higher score to Porter, who has fought hard as a progressive congresswoman, a lesser grade to Steyer (who only says he’ll do it, though emphatically), and the lower grade to Becerra, who, although he acquitted himself well filing an impressive 122 lawsuits against the Trump administration during his tenure as California Attorney General (2017–2021), he did little-to-nothing to resolutely stand up for immigrants vis-à-vis both odious Republican (Bush Jr.) and timorous / treasonous Democrat administrations (Clinton, Obama/Biden) in his long tenure as a U.S. congressman (1993-2016).

Furthermore, this duck & hiding embarrassingly continued as the top Latino in the Biden administration, when Biden taped him as secretary of health and human services from 2021 to 2025. And, after he stepped down in 2025, he has remained practically M.I.A. during the ongoing massive assault on immigrants and most other communities during the present Trump 2.0 regime. What kind of Latino & social leader is he, after all?

Others can pass better judgement than me on how Becerra dealt with attacks on their communities, but as to Latinos – ethnic and immigrant - and their cruel and relentless persecution, Becerra – as have all the other centrist, liberal Dems – failed the test ignominiously, in my opinion. I am thoroughly disgusted by their pusillanimity and betrayals.

So, if he ends up winning the governorship, my expectation is the lowest that he will really stand up to Trump and fight like hell for us. More probable, judging by his so-call “Boy Scout” record and persona – and that of his feeble liberal mentors and peers entrenched in the Dem establishment – is that he, and they, will remain timorous appeasers to Maga Trumpism, duplicitous compromisers of our rights, if not outright capitulators, just as Biden/Harris did at the end of their term vis-à-vis immigration. 

I hope I am proven wrong and that he surprises us with a well of newly-found resolute courage and audacity in the ongoing, life-and-death fight against Maga Trumpist fascism. And, regardless, if he’s running against a Republican in November, he’ll certainly have my vote, though reluctantly, without that much hope he’ll be the champion we all need in these dark, menacing times.

Against this harsh judgement weighs heavily in my mind the second foremost consideration, which Xavier Becerra, an outstanding first-generation college graduate Latino with humble Mexican working class immigrant parents, wins hands down vis-à-vis his two main rivals: (a) a white billionaire man who evidently – and arrogantly – wishes to buy his way to the governorship, and is suddenly waving progressive politics to that end, after enriching himself, among other "ventures," building the American Gulag of immigrant concentration camps, which begs the question: why didn't you, or haven’t you poured your vast fortune for Bernie Sanders’ and the other real progressives since 2016, like the other billionaires have been pouring their money for corporate Dems and Maga Republicans?; and (b), a white, genuinely progressive woman who unfortunately, despite the severe blows women have been receiving for so long, hasn’t been able to rally her sisters, and the people more generally, despite her best efforts; and, BTW, from my angle of preference, her entire position on immigration is to throw the sop one-liner of “abolish ICE”!? 

This second major consideration, contrary to what Becerra indefatigably touts, is not “experience” – a double-edged sword when you have precious little results to show despite all those titles you accumulated. No, it’s his Latino ethnicity and humble working-class Mexican immigrant roots. That is very important to me and millions of Latinos in California.

Republicans and fair-weather white liberals may cavalierly dismiss this consideration, as they always have, but nobody who is even slightly acquainted with the torrid history of racial/ethnic Apartheid in California and the entire U.S. Southwest since the U.S. war with Mexico, heavily soaked with so much anti-Mexican violence & dispossession, labor exploitation, social marginalization and discrimination, cannot but consider it’s long overdue to elect a Latino governor of California; and that Becerra is, indeed, a very worthy, accomplished Mexican-origin candidate, now called upon by history to occupy the California governor’s mansion for the first time since Pío Pico occupied it in 1846.

These are the two main considerations that weigh heavily in my mind as I stare at the blank ballot that I have yet to fill. I have not yet made up my mind who I will vote for governor. But fill it I will before June 2^nd. And certainly, with much less drama and much more certitude, I will fill it again in November for whomever wins the primary on the Democratic side.

But I leave you with this: we should not have to choose like this, under so much duress, among those who have not yet proven to be our champions and not yet deserve our vote; who have not yet fought for us with unbound courage and resolve and help us win major battles; who have not yet understood, and gotten dead serious, about the imminent danger we face and very stakes in the ongoing fight against American fascism. 

We, the people, need to stop waiting for saviors delivered from the top down, and resolve to get busy building a mighty historic people's movement once again, as we have done in our state's history, mobilize from the grassroots up such that from our organized collective struggles for social justice and democracy, unbeholden to the plutocracy and its corrupt political duopoly, authentic popular leaders will emerge to help lead us further. Such leaders are already in our many California social movements. California is ready to lead the way to confront and defeat Maga trumpism. We just need to take ourselves seriously and stop playing the rigged top-down duopoly game.

That we have continued to do so as late as this Trump 2.0 era of unmitigated assaults has been our  historic fault, as we have allowed to be held hostage to a failed duopoly utterly incapable of providing us with the results and generate the leadership we need. Only we can provide these things in the heat of the Good Fight ahead, regardless of who gets elected governor in November.

That’ll be our main task moving forward, as pressing and urgent as ever, after we cast our votes in these elections. Choose whom you will, reluctantly, then get back in the real fight!