Transcript: Inside the Wild, Unpredictable California Governor’s Race

California-based journalist David Dayen says neither the state’s progressives nor its Democratic establishment can coalesce around a single candidate.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 6 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, the host of the The New Republic show Right Now. We have a great guest who’s really up early in the morning. This is David Dayen. He’s the executive editor of The American Prospect, which is one of these magazines—like The New Republic—that is left of center and trying to cover the news in a pro-democracy perspective. And David has done some great work. If you follow him on Twitter or Bluesky, he’s one of the best chroniclers of economic policy particularly, but he runs a great magazine. I’m really honored that David’s come on. So David, thanks for joining me.

David Dayen: Thanks for having me, Perry.

Bacon: So I want to start with the big—you’re the rare person who writes about national politics who is based in California. I wish we had more people who were interested in California because, as we know, it’s the biggest and most important state. And so what I want to talk about first is the governor’s race there—it’s heating up, the voting is going to start pretty soon. And my first question is: a few weeks ago, the big worry was the two Republicans would finish ahead and Democrats would be kind of locked out of that. But I think that’s no longer the problem in some ways, because Donald Trump solved that problem.

Dayen: Yeah. It’s a combination of two things. So one—Donald Trump helped solve the problem by endorsing one of the two Republican candidates. The fear was that there are essentially two prominent Republicans in this race, and at the time, there were up to eight prominent Democrats.

And the way that we do elections in California is with what they call the top-two primary. So on your primary ballot are all the candidates—Democratic, Republican, Decline to State—no matter who you are, you see all those candidates. There are actually 62 candidates on the ballot. And you vote for whoever you want, Democratic, Republican, doesn’t matter, and the top two advance regardless of party.

And obviously this is a state where you could see 65 percent of the voting public vote Democratic and 35 percent vote Republican—but if those two Republicans in the governor’s race got essentially an equal amount of votes, they would have 17, 18 percent of the electorate, and it would be hard for one of those eight Democrats to get more than that—therefore creating a situation where even though 65 percent of the electorate voted Democratic, they’d only have the choice of two Republicans for governor in the general election. And under the statute—this was created by initiative in 2010, and under that initiative, you can’t write in anybody. So in the general election, it’s just the two who are on the ballot.

So that was a very palpable fear, I think—particularly when the polls started coming out and showed the two Republicans essentially neck and neck, and other Democrats who hadn’t really gained traction behind them. Now, two things happened. The first is, as you say, Donald Trump endorsed Steve Hilton, who is a Fox News commentator, a former adviser to the British government under David Cameron. And he endorsed Hilton over this guy Chad Bianco, who’s the Riverside County Sheriff and an Oath Keeper—an admitted Oath Keeper—and a MAGA guy.

You would expect, if Trump endorses one over the other, for those two candidates to split. And indeed, in the polling, we’re seeing Hilton poll much higher than Bianco now. So that gives an opportunity for one Democrat to get into that top two.

The other thing that happened, obviously, is that Eric Swalwell—who was running essentially in that top tier of Democrats—had to drop out, for obvious reasons. And so when Swalwell dropped out, that narrowed the field. Another candidate, Betty Yee, dropped out of the race and endorsed Tom Steyer. We’ll talk about those candidates in a second. So the Democratic field has consolidated a bit while the Republican field has stratified a bit. And so that fear is lessened—although it’s not completely gone. You could still see this happen.

Bacon: So I’ve been looking at the polls some, and there’s a lot of buzz about the race—but it appears, from where I’m sitting and not close to the race, that a lot of the Swalwell vote went to Xavier Becerra, the former Biden administration official who used to be in the leadership in the House.

Is that what happened? And secondly, why do you think that was? It wasn’t like Swalwell endorsed Becerra.

Dayen: Yeah. It’s a very interesting dynamic. You saw this happen almost immediately and incredibly inorganically, I would have to say—where all of a sudden there was just all this buzz happening on the Becerra side, after he was in the race for a year with essentially nobody talking about him. So what is going on here?

It was very apparent from reporting that Swalwell had the support of the kind of Newsom faction in California politics, which is aligned with these consultants who run California politics. One’s called Bear Star Strategies. There are a few others. And they have essentially held the main seats in California for some time.

Bacon: Meaning their clients have. So Kamala Harris, Gavin—

Dayen: That’s right. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Alex Padilla, Jerry Brown—all same consultants, same major people behind them. And all of a sudden, Swalwell was their guy. They—I don’t feel like even Swalwell supporters would admit that he didn’t really have a lot of connection to the state in terms of the state political structure.

Famously, there’s a CNN story that shows that he was up in Sacramento and he was looking at the reconstruction of the Capitol building, and he said, “What are they doing—putting up condos?” He didn’t even know that they were redoing the state Capitol building up there. He was a puppet. He had no sort of firm beliefs about state politics.

Bacon:  Let me just zero in on one thing. The Newsom faction—but was Newsom himself behind the scenes as well? Or I thought Newsom was pretty neutral.

Dayen: Yeah, not in any definitive way, but people who worked with him in the governor’s seat—both politically and also even his aides—were working with Swalwell. But when that ended, they all moved to Becerra, and they moved very quickly to Becerra—including Bear Star Strategies and some of these other consultants. Newsom’s digital director—the guy who is putting together the Newsom persona online—moved to Becerra after Swalwell dropped out. So this created—I think a lot of this buzz was internally generated.

But he fits into a role—you could see why, at a superficial level, he would take off a little bit. This is a very heavily Latino state, he is the main Latino candidate. Antonio Villaraigosa is also running. By the way, Becerra and Villaraigosa have run in races against each other for 25 years—they were in the 2001 LA mayor’s race against each other. But Becerra has actually held public office a lot more recently than Villaraigosa, who’s just been out of office for 10 years.

So—obviously a strong Latino candidate, and then someone with connections to the Biden administration. He was the attorney general of California, he was the HHS secretary. So he’s running on that résumé. And so he has risen as Swalwell fell.

Bacon: So the buzz about Becerra has been that he is not particularly effective at the jobs he’s held, and I wanted to ask you about that, because you and I both covered the Biden administration very closely. And so the discussion was that some of the debate was that he wasn’t a great HHS secretary—and my reading was sometimes maybe the White House was blaming him for things that they ran. But do you assess him as being a weak public official?

Dayen: Yes. He was not a competent HHS secretary—maybe not necessarily for some of the reasons that he’s being attacked for, but because HHS, which is a sprawling agency, was the absolute weakest on the kinds of policies that the Biden administration was trying to do in terms of taking on corporate America, in terms of providing better changes to that particular system.

So there was the one famous thing—and I haven’t written about this, but maybe I will—that people in my neck of the world talk about, which is that there was a town hall, like a big event in the Biden administration, around pharmacy benefit managers. These are the middlemen that make drug prices higher. And it’s a major problem and obstacle to lowering drug prices within the pharmaceutical transaction chain. And Becerra was there along with Lina Khan and Lael Brainard and many others, and they gave Becerra about five minutes to speak—and it becomes very clear from the discussion that he doesn’t know what a PBM is.

That he’s—and this is the Health........

© New Republic