Tom Steyer, a Democratic billionaire running in the crowded California governor’s race, pitched himself as a stalwart progressive in a Sacramento town hall on Thursday night.
Steyer vowed to institute single-payer health care, boost education spending, slash utility costs and remove Proposition 13 protections from commercial and industrial properties to a crowd of roughly 200 people at The Cannery in East Sacramento.
Time and again, the former financier cast himself as the champion of “working people.”
“We can show the Trump administration, we can show the world: this is what the 21st century is supposed to look like,” he said. “And that definitely means leaving nobody on the side of the road.”
Democrat Tom Steyer, a billionaire running for governor, speaks during a campaign stop in Sacramento on Thursday. HANNAH RUHOFF hruhoff@sacbee.com
In a Public Policy Institute of California poll released last week, 10% of likely voters selected Steyer as their top choice for governor, effectively tying with two Democrats — former Rep. Katie Porter and Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin — and two Republicans, Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. The top two candidates, regardless of party, will advance from California’s June 2 primary election.
This is Steyer’s second attempt at higher office. He ran in the 2020 Democratic primary as a climate change activist, spending more than $191 million on a bid that failed to net him any delegates.
He told the crowd in Sacramento that his latest bid was motivated by his desire to give back to a state that helped launch his success.
“I want to have a meaningful life,” Steyer said. “I want to stand with the people of this state and have actual prosperity. Twelve trillionaires and 40 million people who can’t make rent is not success.”
Steyer spent most of the Sacramento appearance answering audience questions on everything from taxes to utility monopolies.
Pro-Palestinian protesters are removed from a campaign event for Democrat Tom Steyer, a billionaire running for governor, in Sacramento on Thursday. The protesters repeatedly yelled for Steyer to acknowledge the Gaza war as a genocide. HANNAH RUHOFF hruhoff@sacbee.com
Several questioners pressed Steyer on his positions on Israel’s actions in Palestine and asked him to work to divest state entities from Israeli companies. The event was briefly interrupted by two protestors who urged Steyer to refer to Israel’s actions in Palestine as a genocide.
The Democrat said that what he’d seen in Gaza was “incredibly distressing, sad, and wrong” and said there’d been “criminal behavior,” but stopped short of calling it a genocide.
“I’m going right now to find out what’s going on in Gaza now and trying to determine exactly what’s true because if you’re going to go to an extreme place in terms of condemnation, you have to make sure you’re right,” he said.
Sacramento native Gina Coates asks a question during a campaign stop for Democratic governor candidate Tom Steyer in Sacramento on Thursday. HANNAH RUHOFF hruhoff@sacbee.com
Another audience member, Gina Coates, said she liked what she’d seen of his ads but noted he was a wealthy white man making big promises. “How do I trust what you’re telling me is true?” she asked.
Steyer said his decision to step away from his business had been unwise from a financial perspective but argued that “this is where my heart is,” and pledged to give away most of his wealth.
In an interview after the event, Coates, a retired civil servant who described herself as a person of color who’d become increasingly disillusioned with politics, said Steyer’s answers had left her “somewhat satisfied” but said she still wanted to do more research.
But the skeptics seemed far outnumbered by Steyer enthusiasts like Rob Kneen, an El Dorado Hills resident who liked the fact that Steyer’s campaign was largely self-funded. To Kneen, the fact that Steyer had spent so much of his own money on the race — more than $37 million in January and February alone — was part of the appeal.
“He’s less controlled by special interests, corporations, political action committees,” Kneen said.
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Ben Paviour is the California political power reporter for The Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Bureau. He previously covered Virginia state politics for public radio and was a local investigations fellow at The New York Times. He got his start in journalism at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. Before becoming a reporter, he worked in local government and tech in the Bay Area.