Money & independent expenditures

The money in the race

Campaign money in California flows through two channels with very different rules. Candidate-controlled committees raise hard money subject to per-donor limits, while independent expenditure committees can raise and spend unlimited sums as long as they do not coordinate with a campaign. Self-funding is a subset of hard money — a candidate’s own contributions to their own committee. In the 2026 governor’s race, the independent-expenditure channel is where the largest sums sit, and the two largest forces in the entire race point at a single candidate.

Combining self-funding and independent expenditures, more than $300 million is moving through the contest. The figures below are drawn from CAL-ACCESS filings as reported by CalMatters, Transparency USA, and the tracker CA Gov Tracker, keyed largely to the H2 2025 and January-to-April 18, 2026 filing periods. The standout fact is concentration: Steyer’s self-fund and the independent expenditure opposing him together account for well over half of all the money in the race, dwarfing every candidate’s hard-money committee combined.

Self-funding

Tom Steyer, a former hedge-fund founder, is the financial story of the cycle. He has contributed roughly $122.5 million of his own money to a campaign that exceeds $132 million in total, with personal contributions of about $105 million reported through the mid-April filing and the pace continuing into late May, according to CapRadio and CalMatters. That puts him on a trajectory comparable to Meg Whitman’s record-setting 2010 self-funded campaign.

No other candidate is self-funding at a meaningful level. Hilton has contributed roughly $200,000 of his own money, and the rest of the field is at zero. Steyer’s self-fund is therefore many times larger than any rival’s entire cumulative fundraising — roughly ten times the next candidate’s hard-money total. Because his campaign is financed almost entirely by himself, Steyer has effectively no donor base to answer to, a fact that shapes both his pitch and the opposition organized against him.

Independent expenditures

Three concentrations of independent-expenditure money define the air war, and each can be traced to identifiable interests.

The largest is a roughly $92.6 million effort opposing Steyer, the biggest independent-expenditure bloc of the cycle per CA Gov Tracker. Its funders are industries with direct policy stakes in his platform: the California Association of Realtors and the building and construction trades, responding to his commercial Proposition 13 and housing-finance proposals; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Pacific Gas & Electric — the latter reportedly contributing around $10 million on its own — responding to his proposal to break up investor-owned utilities; and the California Chamber of Commerce. Each funder has a specific grievance with a specific plank, which makes this the clearest example in the race of tracing a committee back to its backers and their interests, as detailed by Fortune.

The second concentration is roughly $78.7 million supporting Mahan through a committee aligned with Silicon Valley donors, including Sergey Brin, Michael Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Joe Lonsdale, Garry Tan, Patrick Collison, and Steve Huffman. The committee aired the only gubernatorial Super Bowl ad of the cycle. As the SF Standard noted, this same donor class is backing a candidate who has also proposed to hold large technology companies accountable. Mahan faces no opposition independent expenditure, the only candidate with that asymmetry, and the spending is large relative to his high-single-digit polling.

The third is roughly $19.1 million supporting Becerra from a labor and health coalition, “Working Families for Healthy Communities,” the second-largest pro-candidate effort. A separate pro-Becerra committee accepted $500,000 from Chevron and $500,000 from California Resources Corporation, oil-industry contributions that rivals have used to question his climate record, per CalMatters. Notably, much of the labor infrastructure that had been committed to Swalwell — roughly $20 million before his April suspension — redirected toward Becerra. Other candidates drew far less outside air cover: the supportive expenditures for Porter, Yee, and Thurmond combined totaled only about $223,000, and a $150,000 contribution from Uber to a pro-Porter committee prompted the Teamsters to withdraw a separate $100,000 contribution.

What money has and hasn’t bought

The clearest lesson of the cycle is that spending and standing have diverged. Steyer’s roughly $122 million has bought him sustained television presence since November 2025, but as of late May he sits third in the polls and is the target of the largest opposition effort in the race; his campaign is also under FPPC scrutiny over payments to social-media influencers, some made without required disclosures, as reported by CalMatters. Mahan’s roughly $78.7 million in support has not lifted him out of single digits, reading more as a long-term bet on a younger candidate than a near-term play for a top-two slot.

The polling front-runner, Becerra, has the smallest treasury of any leading candidate — roughly $507,000 in cash on hand against about $2.89 million raised — and is sustained largely by the labor and health independent expenditure he does not control rather than by his own committee. Roughly $215 million of the cycle’s money, Steyer’s self-fund plus the effort against him, amounts to a single referendum on whether one candidate makes the top two, which means the closing television war is overwhelmingly about Steyer. The hard-money contest among the other candidates is comparatively small. Several figures remain unconfirmed at the latest filing — cash on hand for Steyer, Mahan, and Villaraigosa among them — and market-level ad-spending breakdowns are not yet public.