Rusty Hicks speaks at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco on Feb. 21, 2026.
Jeff Chiu/AP
The race to become California’s next governor was already a mess for Democrats, but it had been what you might call a clean mess — one about polling numbers, viability and experience.
On Friday, it became a dirty mess, thanks to bombshell allegations against Rep. Eric Swalwell first reported by the Chronicle.
How did we get here? And is there enough time for the party to clean this up?
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In June 2025, it looked like California — the nation’s most diverse and progressive state — was poised to elect someone other than a white male as governor for the first time in 150 years. Then Democrats, as is their wont, curled into a circular firing squad. The Swalwell allegations set off yet another round.
But this latest self-inflicted debacle may lead the party to a better place.
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No matter what type of defiant statement he makes about staying in the race, Swalwell’s days are numbered. As always, look to Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi for direction on where this story ends. Pelosi never endorsed Swalwell, even though some of her most trusted lieutenants — like Sen. Adam Schiff — did. On Friday, Pelosi said in a statement that “the young woman who has made serious allegations against Congressman Swalwell must be respected and heard. This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability.”
On Friday afternoon, she said she called Swalwell and told him “it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”
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Not too tough to translate the Pelosiese here: Get out.
If California Democrats are going to tear down signs and rename holidays and schools after learning more about an icon like Cesar Chavez, they sure as hell better not spare Swalwell, a white dude from suburban Dublin.
Morally and ethically, Pelosi is making the right call. But she is also the smartest politician of her generation, and nudging Swalwell out of the race could — eventually — clean up the mess Democrats have made — one that has put them at risk of losing the governor’s race in a state where their party has twice as many registered voters as Republicans.
Yet Democrats haven’t been able to stop tripping over themselves. It started when the prospect of leading the world’s fourth largest economy became political uranium to a series of attractive candidates, including two of the most prominent candidates of color — former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla — who both opted not to run. Two other prominent women in the field — Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former state Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins — surprisingly dropped out.
None of the other non-white candidates in the race — former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, state schools chief Tony Thurmond and former state Controller Betty Yee — captured voters’ attention, and their meager polling and fundraising numbers came close to getting them excluded from a high-profile debate last month at USC while a white candidate, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, was invited. The ensuing blowback was a terrible look for a minority-majority party — and state — and the debate was canceled.
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Meanwhile, the party’s chairman, Rusty Hicks, has proved impotent at cleaning up the mess.
First, he failed to cull the impossibly large field before the deadline for candidates to get their names on the ballot. Then, he compounded that whiff by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars commissioning polls on the state of the race, an effort to publicly shame low-polling candidates to get out of the race. Only one candidate left. But the others dug in, compounding the problem of the Democrats’ large field diluting their share of the vote, which enabled two Republicans to surge in the polls. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, there was a one-in-five chance that two Republicans would advance to the general election in November, freezing Democrats out of a state they dominate.
Hicks doubled down on his fecklessness Friday by calling the allegations against Swalwell “deeply disturbing” but stopping short of demanding that he drop out. Instead, he reiterated his previous calls for all of the Democrats in the crowded race to “honestly assess the viability of their candidacy” — meaning he scolded Swalwell, who’s accused of serious misconduct, as harshly as candidates like Yee, whose only alleged crime is low poll numbers. So much for Democrats being the party that protects women. There’s a reason former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown calls Hicks “Rusty WHO?”
Fortunately, California Democrats had a hero step in recently: President Donald Trump.
Trump did more than Hicks to help Democrats when he endorsed former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton. That increased the likelihood that the state’s MAGA lemmings would amass behind Hilton. “Dems can exhale because the risk has gone way down,” of being locked out of the race in November, Sacramento data guru Paul Mitchell, who runs daily simulations of the race, told me this week.
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But, he added, “Now one of the Dems has to get to 15% to be safe.”
You guessed it: The Democrat polling closest to 15% was Swalwell (12% according to the HIcks-commissioned poll).
Now Democrats have a chance to step out of circular formation and reset — and enable Californians to fulfill the promise of electing a non-white guy to lead the state. The second choice of Swalwell voters is Porter (39%), with Steyer a distant second (15%), according to a UC Berkeley Citrin Center/Politico poll.
The California Democratic Party’s polling reflected this same dynamic in its latest poll when Swalwell’s support increased 3 points while Porter’s dropped 2 points.
Democrats can pull victory from the jaws of defeat by coalescing around Porter.
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The longtime rap against the former congresswoman is that she didn’t play well in the sandbox with her fellow House members. Several members of the California delegation have told me this privately, including one who said she often “Momsplains” to them.
All but one of those members was a man.
At this point, the Democrats could use some Momsplaining. And rallying behind Porter could solve both of their problems. It would help repair some of the damage done by Swalwell, who until this week had been the leading candidate for a party that purports to protect women. And it would represent the kind of unity that the party has so far failed to demonstrate, which is a big part of what led to this mess.