California Democrats walked away from their annual convention this weekend without making an endorsement for their anointed successor to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
With eight candidates eligible for the state party’s endorsement — San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan jumped into the race too late to be considered — the odds that 60% of delegates would coalesce around one candidate were low. But with some candidates who have been consistently polling toward the back of the pack garnering support from party insiders, it’s unclear whether Democrats will be be able to shrink the field before the filing deadline next month.
“I think it is a little clearer on who needs to get out, but there’s not a big impetus to do that,” Sonoma State Political Science Professor David McCuan said, noting that it’s going to take Democratic heavyweights like Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi or former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to put pressure on some of the candidates.
Democrats looked to capitalize off the momentum of the passage of Proposition 50 — the gerrymandering ballot initiative approved by voters in November — at the three-day convention, which was held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The gathering of 3,500 delegates and other party members also acted as a sort of swan song for Pelosi, who was one of the featured speakers and was honored at a special tribute service for her nearly 40 years in Congress as she heads towards retirement.
But consolidation of candidates in the governor’s race was also on the forefront of many Democrats’ minds at the convention. With nine prominent Democrats in the race, there’s been a growing concern reverberating throughout the party that the Democratic candidates will split their party’s vote in June, effectively sending two Republicans into the runoff. California has a “jungle primary” system where the top two candidates regardless of party advance to the November election.
Former state Controller Betty Yee was among the candidates that McCuan said were “targets for consolidation,” but she ultimately found strong support among the party with the second-highest percentage of delegates (17.3%) casting their vote for her.
Yee performed poorly in an independent poll from Emerson College released last week, placing second to last among Democratic candidates with 1.8% of support among all voters, with a similar showing among Democratic voters surveyed.
McCuan credits the disconnect to Yee’s ability to “leverage the party faithful” as she’s run in San Francisco’s political circle for years now. But that isn’t likely to translate to voter support.
“The activist-insiders do not elect the governor,” he said. “There’s still a mountain to climb if you are a single digit candidate (in the polls).”
Yee has dismissed calls for her to drop out and told the Bay Area News Group that she tries “not to pay attention to (it) because I’m just staying focused on how I run a race and continue to garner support.”
The former controller, who cast herself on Saturday as the “adult in the room that doesn’t need on the job training” said she hopes she receives a bump from this weekend’s vote and that her “phone has been burning up” since the results were announced.
Former health secretary and Attorney General Xavier Becerra, whose polling has stayed stagnant in Emerson College’s last two polls at 3.5%, also outperformed his polling numbers at the convention, receiving the third-highest share of the vote at 14%. Becerra also received the endorsement from the California Young Democrats this weekend.
McCuan said that while Becerra “hasn’t really caught fire” in the race yet, his performance at the convention this weekend could help him in the near term as consolidation talks heat up.
U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has built his name on skirmishing with President Donald Trump, had the most amount of support among delegates with 24% of the vote. His speech to attendees on Saturday afternoon was met with one of the loudest receptions of any of the candidates as he pledged to get Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents out of the streets and lower Californians’ costs.
Billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, who came in fourth in the delegate vote, took aim at both Mahan and Swalwell in his convention speech, telling the crowd: “The question is, are we going to have a government that listens to working people? Or to tech bros?”
While Steyer hosted a luncheon packed to the brim with supporters on Saturday before his speech, a group of convention-goers in orange prison jumpsuits with the words “Tom Steyer made millions off private prisons” on the back roamed the halls looking for the gubernatorial candidate. Steyer’s past investments previously came under fire when he ran for president in 2020.
Three candidates received fewer votes than the 8.5% of delegates who cast their ballots for no endorsement or no preference — state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former Assemblymember Ian Calderon. According to the Emerson College poll, 21% of voters are still undecided.
Bill James, the chair of the Santa Clara County Democratic Party, said that there was “some level of near-term anxiety about the number of candidates” at the convention this weekend. However, he believes that the field is strong enough that “a couple of those candidates will emerge” as the frontrunners.
James blames much of the discourse around consolidation and fears of Republicans taking control of the governor’s office on California’s top-two system.
“I don’t think it’s productive and I don’t think it helps our democracy in the conversations that we could be having to have folks wonder whether they should pull out before they’ve had their chance to make their case to voters,” he said.
State Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens (D-Cupertino), who has endorsed Swalwell, said that while it’s not out of the realm of possibility for a Republican versus Republican matchup to occur, he’s confident that a Democrat is going to be the state’s next governor.
“I think what I expect to see is there to be a lot of conversations and a lot of meetings with the candidates in the race and I expect us to start to unite together around one common candidate in the next few weeks,” he said. ”
It’s not uncommon for statewide candidates to not receive the party’s endorsement. In 2018, only 39% of delegates cast their vote for Newsom.
This time around, the party failed to make an endorsement in a majority of statewide races including for lieutenant governor, treasurer, insurance commissioner and superintendent of public instruction.
Some key endorsements, however, were made in several notable congressional races. The party opted to endorse state Sen. Scott Wiener in his bid to succeed Pelosi of San Francisco, the former House Speaker, and state Sen. Aisha Wahab in her quest in the open race for Swalwell’s East Bay congressional seat.
While the party’s endorsement of a candidate for governor — or lack thereof — certainly won’t be a weighty factor in the race for voters, McCuan, the political science professor, said it is a sign of what’s to come as they approach next month’s filing deadline.
“This set of candidates is not setting fire to the electorate,” he said. “From this result, Swalwell gets a little bit of a bump, and that helps him, but I don’t know that there is that much clarity about who should get out.”
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