Representative Eric Swalwell’s career-ending news cycle began with a Friday night news dump and concluded with his Sunday night departure from the race. Suddenly, the support he had previously garnered was back in play, leaving his Democratic rivals to pursue the spoils. But before Swalwell’s disturbing history of alleged sexual assault came to light, those rivals had combined to make the gubernatorial race a torpid affair. Prior to Swalwell’s flameout, this group of campaigners were perhaps best regarded as a field of stumblers who were running the risk of handing the governor’s mansion to a Republican. The front-runner’s departure changes very little: This is a largely unexceptional field—a hodgepodge of recycled political names, neck and neck and neck in a competition to get their hands on the nation’s most powerful anti-Trump pulpit.
Swalwell’s sudden disappearance may have changed the field, but it has not changed the race. Over the next few weeks, you can expect every campaign to make a feverish grab for Swalwell’s supporters. You should not, however, expect many former Swalwell supporters to jump feverishly aboard a new campaign. Allison Gill, the California-based political influencer known online as Mueller, She Wrote, says she was leaning toward Swalwell before the allegations but added that “I think a lot of Californians were simply looking to vote for Eric Swalwell because he was polling way ahead of everyone else, and they wanted to guarantee that we had a Democrat in the top two.”
Much—maybe too much—has been made of that dilemma (including in this magazine). Democratic strategists and politicians here in the Golden State dread an all-Republican ticket as an unlikely calamity, more likely than a rainy summer in L.A., less likely than yet another Dodgers World Series. They say this race has only just begun. It’s about to get prohibitively expensive, and while one of the Republicans (the British political strategist turned Fox News talking head Steve Hilton) does have money, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco can’t remain competitive as the race’s price tag climbs into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars.
Lurking behind this specter of a Democratic field choking itself out of the governor’s mansion is a larger, more elemental problem: These Democrats don’t seem to be running on anything—beyond opposition to Trump, that is. Such a pose may work in some races (it’ll probably work in the 2026 midterms), but it’s not a winning platform in this kind of race. Just ask Kamala Harris.
It seems the only politician in this field not selling himself primarily as an anti-Trump warrior is Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire running a campaign focused on affordability and ending corporate influence. It’s probably worth a mention that Steyer is working with Fight Agency, the slick P.R. firm behind other affordability-first candidates like Graham Platner in Maine and Zohran Mamdani in New York City.
Golden State politics is in the midst of what can best be described as a political thought experiment. Governor Gavin Newsom is running for president (not officially, but come on) and claiming that California is “a beacon … an operational model, a policy blueprint for others to follow.” That’s what he told us back in January, during his State of the State speech. He spent a considerable portion of that speech touting his own victories over the Trump administration; victories that juiced his popularity here. So it’s natural that his hopeful successors would try to shout out their own anti-Trump bona fides.
And while Hollywood is growing tumbleweeds, we are letting its successor industry run wild—this is, after all, the backyard of AI. We should be leading the way in regulating the industry that’s presently spooking a majority of Americans. Instead we’ve adopted a please-don’t-leave-me attitude, only instituting watered-down regulations after Newsom nixed any chance at meaningful AI safeguards. There are plenty of ways a Democrat can build a campaign for governor that stands out from the herd and addresses the actual needs of Californians. Instead they’re all running the same anti-Trump campaign—an uninventive strategy with a shoddy success rate.
The problem with using Trump as a foil is that Democrats (and California’s crowded field of would-be governors, in particular) are wasting their precious oxygen on the president rather than offering solutions to problems that, unlike our visibly aging 79-year-old president, won’t sort themselves out. Trump single-handedly cooked our political system by making “all press is good press” a strategy for both campaigning and governing. You are losing to him simply by playing ball in his court, and too many California Democrats are presently playing ball in his court.
The thing about Steyer is that he’s his own kind of thought experiment. The good plutocrat; the affordability-first billionaire. When Steyer jumped into the 2020 presidential race, Bernie Sanders quipped, “I like Tom personally, but … I’m a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power,” a sentiment that hits even closer to home in the Trump era as billionaires are slicing up the county piece by piece. Allison Gill told TNR that her top issue in the governor’s race is “the billionaire problem.” Her hesitation on Steyer is a bitter pill I hear often from Democratic voters: Do we really trust a billionaire to solve the billionaire problem?
If there’s anything in this field to be thankful for, it’s that I don’t have to vote for any of them today. There’s measurable confidence among California’s political class that this field will sort itself out within the next month. Senator Wiener (who has not endorsed) told TNR that Sacramento is feeling “frustration about the race in general,” which might indicate that the machinery of the system is on the verge of doing something useful. Meanwhile, it feels like California voters are just now remembering that we have to vote this summer. The candidates have only recently begun to go negative. War chests will soon begin to drain. Best case: This field gets down to two or three candidates, and they stop fighting over who gets to fight Trump and start telling us exactly how they’ll fight the power companies, tech giants, private equity firms, and real estate moguls that got us here.
Hence then, the article about california s democratic statehouse hopefuls are stuck in a trump rut was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( California’s Democratic Statehouse Hopefuls Are Stuck in a Trump Rut )
Also on site :
- Physicists just witnessed pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed of light — without breaking the laws of relativity
- China has so far weathered the historic oil crisis. But as Xi prepares to meet Trump, costs are starting to grow
- 1967 Classic Rock Anthem Ranked Among the ‘Greatest Songs of All Time’—‘One of the Most Beautiful Songs Ever Written’