A crowded field could cause havoc.
Photo: David Crane/MediaNews Group/Getty Images
Early in the 2026 California gubernatorial race, talk of a Republican becoming governor of the very blue state was mostly a negative commentary on a less than dazzling Democratic field and on the quirks of the nonpartisan top-two primary system. Now, just two months before the primary and a month before mail ballots begin being cast, the possibility of two Republicans facing off in the general election is becoming a lot less remote and more of an existential threat to California Democrats.
There are ten at least vaguely viable candidates for governor; eight are Democrats and two are Republicans. All those Democrats are competing for about three-fifths to two-thirds of the primary vote, while the two Republicans are competing for the rest. Since the Democratic vote is so divided and the Republican candidates are so evenly matched, polls keep showing GOP candidates Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco at the top or very near the top of the heap. The last credible public poll, from Berkeley IGS, had Hilton at 17 percent and Bianco at 16 percent, followed by Democrats Eric Swalwell and Katie Porter at 13 percent and Tom Steyer with 10 percent. If that’s how it all ended, two very Trump-y Republicans would compete for the governorship in November as Democrats howled in dismay. And howling is all Democrats could do, because California doesn’t allow write-in candidacies for the general election. It is almost certainly the only way a Republican could win this contest.
As Democratic anxiety about a possible lockout has grown, four strategies for avoiding it have come to light.
As long as one Democrat finished ahead of one Republican, there won’t be a GOP lockout in November. A couple of polls (Emerson in early March and PPIC in February) already have Bianco — the less abundantly funded of the two Republicans — running third. As voting nears, persistently underfunded and underpublicized Democrats will likely lose vote share and there’s also a significant undecided vote (25 percent in the Emerson poll, 16 percent in Berkeley IGS) that some late-trending Democrat is likely to benefit from disproportionately. There’s still enough time for the state’s leading Democrats (including the outgoing incumbent, Gavin Newsom, former vice-president Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the state’s two Democratic senators) to put up a flare and call on lower-performing candidates to cease campaigning if a lockout is looking very likely. The problem with the laissez-faire strategy is that it hasn’t worked so far.
A more hands-on option: Begin cutting off the oxygen supply of publicity for Democratic candidates who have no realistic chance to make the top two. That is what led the University of Southern California to limit participation in a planned March 24 debate to six candidates (including four Democrats) deemed to have proven themselves viable either by poll showings or fundraising numbers. Unfortunately, the four excluded Democrats (Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa, Tony Thurmond, and Betty Yee) happened to be the only candidates of color in the field, and a furor over an all-white debate field led to the event’s last-minute cancellation. Any further field-culling maneuver from on high could face similar obstacles.
Coordinated endorsements by highly influential Democrats could push a few candidates into a higher tier that the two Republicans couldn’t reach. The most forceful and elaborate scheme was presented by The New Republic’s Perry Bacon this week:
The most natural process would be for the party’s center left to collectively endorse one candidate, and the party’s progressive wing to back another. Swalwell is the most moderate of these three and is already getting support from prominent center-left figures in the party, such as Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego and California’s own Senator Adam Schiff. Pelosi and others in that establishment bloc should also endorse him. Alternatively, they could choose Becerra, perhaps the most qualified of the 10 candidates. He’s polling terribly now, but a collective endorsement from the party’s poobahs would probably lift him to the top of the field.
Meanwhile, groups such as the Working Families Party, progressive officials in the state, and leftist national figures like Senator Bernie Sanders should choose Porter or Steyer. (Representative Ro Khanna has already endorsed Steyer.)
It’s unclear, of course, who, exactly, would coordinate this sort of collective endorsement campaign and whether it might backfire by creating a grievance for non-endorsed candidates. You could see, for example, Tom Steyer running another batch of ads reinforcing his “outsider” message if someone else gets the pooh-bah’s-choice designation.
This strategy hasn’t gone public yet but is likely under discussion privately. A GOP lockout depends not just on a widely dispersed Democratic vote but also on a virtually even Republican vote. Anything that consolidates the GOP vote behind either of their candidates probably kills a lockout and thus any real chance a Republican can become governor. It would not be surprising at all if some serious Democratic money got behind ads boosting Hilton or Bianco either by praising him or (more likely) by attacking him in a way that will make GOP voters like him a lot more. As it happens, this was a strategy very successfully deployed by Adam Schiff in the 2024 U.S. Senate race in California. He spent a big chunk of money attacking Republican Steve Garvey in order to consolidate the GOP vote behind the former baseball star and lift him past fellow-Democrat Katie Porter into one of the top-two spots. This gambit gave Schiff an easy general-election matchup, and something similar could help kill a lockout in 2026.
Whatever strategy California Democrats choose, time’s a-wasting. Right now, 2026 is shaping up into a magnificent midterm election for Democrats nationally and in the Golden State. It might really spoil the party on November 3 if there is a MAGA shill taking office in Sacramento and promising to give Donald Trump all the help he needs in battling the hippies and communists of the Left Coast.
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