The issues

Why it matters

Housing and homelessness are the dominant issue cluster of the race. Affordability tops the PPIC February 2026 voter-priority survey at 32%, well ahead of any other issue, and every viable candidate has been pressed to put a housing plan on the table. The most-watched single policy event of the cycle — a May 8 forum moderated by Ezra Klein — was about nothing else.

The numbers frame the stakes. California is roughly 3 million units short of demand and needs to permit about 180,000 homes a year, but has averaged under 80,000 for a decade. About 187,000 Californians were homeless in the most recent federal count, nearly 124,000 of them unsheltered — even after $24 billion in state spending across 30-plus programs from 2018 to 2023. Layered on top is a homeowner-insurance market shaken by wildfire losses: the state FAIR Plan now covers more than 684,000 policies, up 152% since 2022. For voters, “housing” now bundles rent, mortgage, insurance, and visible encampments together.

Recent state action

The Newsom era leaves the next governor significant tailwinds and unfinished business:

• CEQA reform (AB 130 / SB 131, June 2025) — the biggest environmental-review overhaul in a generation, exempting most urban infill housing.
• SB 79 (October 2025) — overrides local zoning to allow mid-rise housing near major transit, after intense local-government and labor opposition.
• Earlier streamlining — SB 9, SB 10, SB 35, and the AB 1893 “Builder’s Remedy 2.0.”
• Homelessness funding — roughly $4.85B in HHAP grants and $3.8B in Project Homekey, with a May 2026 investigation finding stalled units and a fraud indictment; a 2024 executive order tied future funds to local encampment policies after the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision.
• Behavioral health — Prop 1 (2024) now directs 30% of each county’s behavioral-health funds to housing.
• Rent control — AB 1482’s statewide cap runs to 2030; Prop 33, which would have expanded local rent control, failed 2-to-1 in 2024.

The debates

Behind a broad “we all want more housing” consensus sit real disagreements:

1. CEQA / lawsuit reform. Near-universal Democratic agreement that 2025’s reform was good; they split on how much further to go. Hilton would gut CEQA wholesale; Villaraigosa wants narrower fixes; Becerra and Steyer back continued reform with labor guardrails.
2. Union labor on residential construction. The cleanest split: Porter says now is not the time for prevailing wage on residential housing; Becerra supports it on larger projects with flexibility below; Steyer, Villaraigosa and Thurmond back union labor more broadly.
3. State preemption of local zoning. Mahan is the most aggressive about overriding cities; Steyer frames it as conditional on funding; Hilton opposes SB 79 outright.
4. Supply-side versus subsidy. Pro-housing groups rate Mahan strongest on production mechanics and Steyer strongest on financing, with differing emphases across the field.
5. Housing First versus treatment-first. Most Democrats keep Housing First as the frame while adding prevention and mental-health pairing; Hilton calls Housing First “a complete disaster,” and Bianco rejects the housing framing entirely in favor of mandated treatment.
6. Encampments. Hilton and Bianco favor aggressive clearance and enforcement under Grants Pass; Mahan pairs shelter offers with no-encampment zones; Steyer, Porter and Becerra oppose criminalizing sleeping outdoors.

Notable proposals

Independent assessments rate Villaraigosa’s five-pillar, dollarized bond plan the most detailed on paper, and Mahan’s deregulatory blueprint the most operationally concrete on permitting and fees, backed by the only city-scale track record. Becerra’s emergency-declaration package is the only plan with a named day-one action and a dedicated homelessness-prevention financing stream, and Steyer’s commercial-property tax pivot is the only plan with a serious answer to how to pay for it.

The field’s shared blind spots: the insurance-market crisis (only Villaraigosa speaks to it in personal terms), Homekey procurement oversight, and Prop 13’s property-tax structure, which every Democrat treats as too risky to touch.

Outside perspective

Analysts converge on three points. First, the field has converged at the level of slogan but diverges sharply on instruments — willingness to take on labor, to preempt local zoning, and to push CEQA reform further all vary materially. Second, the Republican candidates are running against the entire premise of the prevailing approach rather than offering a different strategy, which makes a Hilton or Bianco win the most consequential policy reset on the ballot. Third, Newsom’s record is the asterisk on everything: the state spent $24 billion as homelessness rose for most of his tenure, even as the 2025 reforms — whose production effects will take years to show — give whoever wins a running start.

Why it matters

Affordability is the top issue of the race. PPIC’s February 2026 survey found Californians citing cost of living as their leading concern at 32% — ahead of housing, immigration, crime and schools — and the figure has held near that level through May. California is now the second-most-expensive state to live in, trailing only Hawaii, with housing costs well above the national average and a median home price near $800,000 statewide. Gas is the priciest in the nation, residential electricity (about 33.75¢/kWh) is the highest in the continental US, and the 13.3% top income-tax rate is the country’s steepest.

Layered on top is a structural budget problem. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects deficits of roughly $35 billion a year beginning in 2027-28, even after a temporarily balanced 2026-27 budget achieved largely through reserve drawdowns. A federal funding cliff compounds the strain: H.R. 1, the Trump reconciliation law, puts more than $28 billion in federal funding at risk and could remove coverage from up to 3.4 million Californians. Every candidate must triangulate a trilemma voters pose simultaneously — lower costs, preserved services and fiscal discipline.

Recent state action

The Newsom era leaves the next governor a contested fiscal picture and several live decisions:

• May Revision (May 14, 2026) — a $349.9 billion budget the administration frames as carrying no deficit for 2026-27 or 2027-28. The LAO disputes that, finding an $18 billion problem in 2026-27 closed through roughly $20 billion in reserve withdrawals, suspended deposits and $4 billion in new borrowing.
• Reserves — combined reserves are projected around $23 billion at the end of FY 2026-27, down from a $34 billion peak in 2022-23.
• MCO tax (Prop 35, 2024) — voters made the managed-care provider tax permanent for Medi-Cal rate increases. H.R. 1 caps future MCO taxes, California’s current structure does not comply, and a CMS rejection of the proposed new version would open a roughly $1.1 billion General Fund hole.
• Prop 13 / split roll — Prop 15, a 2020 commercial split-roll measure, lost 52%-48%; no serious split-roll bill has cleared the Legislature since.
• 2026 ballot items — a union-sponsored one-time billionaire wealth tax reported sufficient signatures in April (verification deadline June 25), and a business-backed “Building an Affordable California” package targets CEQA and permitting.

The debates

Behind a shared “make California affordable” message sit sharp divides:

1. Prop 13 / split roll. The single biggest revenue lever and the cleanest fault line. Steyer is essentially alone among viable candidates in campaigning to revive split roll, proposing a 2027 special election. Yee backed it “in concept” before suspending; Becerra, Porter, Mahan, Villaraigosa, Hilton and Bianco are opposed or silent, and even Thurmond has not embraced it publicly.
2. Billionaire wealth tax. Thurmond is the only viable candidate who supports the one-time 5% wealth-tax initiative; the rest oppose it, including Steyer, who is himself a billionaire.
3. Income-tax cuts versus corporate-tax hikes. Porter and Hilton both propose eliminating state income tax on households earning under $100,000 — Porter paying for it with corporate-tax increases, Hilton with large spending cuts plus a flat 7.5% rate above $100,000. The headline is similar; the mechanisms are opposite.
4. Gas-tax suspension. Mahan, Bianco and Hilton favor some form of suspension. The 70.9¢/gallon tax funds road maintenance through SB1, so cuts force transportation-funding holes; Steyer prefers targeting refinery margins instead.
5. Regulatory rollback versus revenue. The “spending problem, not a revenue problem” framing is adopted in softer form by Mahan and Villaraigosa, while Steyer and Thurmond argue the state cannot cut its way out of a deficit and federal cliffs at once.
6. Electricity rates. Becerra calls for an emergency rate freeze; Steyer would cap utilities’ guaranteed rate of return; Hilton would reclassify hydropower as renewable; Bianco would “unleash” energy resources.

Notable proposals

Independent observers rate Steyer’s split-roll revival the cycle’s largest tax-policy proposal — he claims about $22 billion a year, above the LAO’s 2020 Prop 15 estimate. Villaraigosa’s housing-and-refinery package, with a Refinery Retention Act and an automatic gas-affordability trigger above $5.50/gallon, is the most detailed industry-level plan from a Democrat. Hilton’s Califordable plan is the most numerically specific Republican proposal, citing a $60–65 billion static revenue impact, though it does not itemize matching cuts.

The field’s shared gaps are equally telling. Becerra’s positions (“tax the mega wealthy,” “tax passive income”) lack rates or revenue estimates. Porter’s under-$100K exemption removes much of the income-tax base while her corporate increase would raise only single-digit billions. Bianco’s plan to eliminate the income and gas taxes would require well over $100 billion in cuts or replacement revenue, which “oil royalties” and “fraud” cannot cover. And no viable candidate has a clear answer on what to do if H.R. 1 forces the MCO tax to shrink.

Outside perspective

Analysts diverge by lean but converge on the core risk. The LAO is skeptical of the “$0 deficit” framing, recommending roughly $24 billion in added solutions and warning that reserves at half their peak leave the state ill-prepared if revenues drop. The California Budget & Policy Center praises preserved education investments but cautions against meeting the federal cliff with cuts alone, favoring new revenue. The right-leaning Tax Foundation ranks California 48th of 50 on tax competitiveness, citing the top rate, uncapped SDI and denial of net-operating-loss carryforwards. Underlying it all is a structural critique that spending grew 72% under Newsom while revenue grew 60%, leaving whoever wins to manage a volatile revenue base atop a persistent deficit.

Why it matters

Public safety is the issue on which California’s politics have moved most sharply rightward in the past two years, and the 2026 race is the first statewide contest to absorb that shift. In November 2024, 68% of voters approved Proposition 36, rolling back portions of the decade-old Proposition 47 by restoring felony penalties for some repeat theft and “hard drug” offenses and creating a “treatment-mandated felony.” The measure carried every county and passed despite opposition from Gov. Newsom and Democratic Party leadership — a rebuke to the criminal-justice-reform consensus that had dominated California politics since 2014. Every candidate now runs in the shadow of that result.

The backdrop is a visible crisis on two fronts: highly publicized smash-and-grab thefts and “organized retail crime,” which retailers cited to justify store closures even where statistics were ambiguous; and the fentanyl-driven overdose epidemic, which made open-air drug markets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and elsewhere a national symbol. Crime ranks among the top voter concerns alongside affordability and homelessness in PPIC polling. What is at stake for the next governor is implementation, not just rhetoric: how aggressively to resource Prop 36’s penalties and treatment mandates, whether to reverse Newsom-era prison closures, and whether the death-penalty moratorium survives.

Recent state action

• Prop 47 (2014) set the reform baseline, reclassifying many drug-possession and under-$950 theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. Supporters credited it with reducing incarceration; critics blamed it for retail theft.
• Prop 36 (2024) rolled that back partially, over the explicit opposition of Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders — the defining state action shaping this race.
• Retail-theft package (2024). Ahead of the Prop 36 vote, Newsom and the Legislature passed a bipartisan set of bills targeting organized retail theft, partly to show they could act without a ballot rollback.
• Prison closures. The administration closed several state prisons as the inmate population fell post-realignment; reopening them is now a Republican rallying cry.
• Death-penalty moratorium. Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019 and ordered San Quentin’s death chamber dismantled; it remains in place but is reversible by a future governor.
• Implementation gap. The central post-2024 fight is over whether the state will fund Prop 36’s treatment-mandated-felony pathway, which critics across the spectrum say passed without the treatment-bed and court capacity it assumes.

The debates

The real fault lines are not a clean left-right split:

1. Funding versus repealing Prop 36. With 68% voter approval, no viable candidate campaigns to repeal it. The contested question is implementation: Mahan and the Republicans want it fully funded and enforced, while most other Democrats are quieter. The wedge is whether Sacramento failed voters by under-funding it.
2. Enforcement-and-treatment versus enforcement-only. Mahan’s “Responsibility to Shelter” and mandatory-treatment model and Steyer’s “remove from streets paired with services” frame both pair coercion with services. Bianco leans toward enforcement and incarceration; Hilton sits between, emphasizing enforcing existing laws and clearing open drug markets.
3. Decarceration record versus tough-on-crime backlash. Steyer is the only viable candidate explicitly critiquing mass incarceration as “racially unfair and dehumanizing.” The Republicans run the opposite frame. Most Democrats — Becerra, Porter, Thurmond — have no foregrounded crime platform, a notable silence in a cycle where the issue moved right.
4. Stated position versus record. Several candidates’ records diverge from their 2026 messaging. Becerra has a tough enforcement record as AG (opioid litigation) but a contested police-transparency record on SB 1421. Villaraigosa runs on a claimed 48% crime drop as LA mayor, a campaign-sourced figure. Mahan’s San Jose record is the most concrete, while the Democrats polling thinnest on crime have the least-developed platforms.

Notable proposals

Matt Mahan has the most substantive public-safety record in the Democratic field, grounded in governing San Jose. He endorsed Prop 36 when his party opposed it, expanded police staffing, deployed surveillance technology such as license-plate readers, and built the “Responsibility to Shelter” ordinance pairing shelter-refusal enforcement with court-ordered treatment. His unifying critique — that Newsom passed Prop 36 to voters and then declined to fund it — is the field’s sharpest intra-Democratic attack on the issue.

Chad Bianco offers the most detailed conservative program: full Prop 36 funding, reopening closed prisons, harsher theft and drug penalties, and gutting the SB 54 sanctuary law — brand-consistent for a sitting sheriff, if light on fiscal specifics. Steve Hilton’s plan is real but thinner and subordinated to affordability — enforce existing laws, clear open drug markets, reverse prison closures. Villaraigosa’s community-policing-plus-task-force proposal is rooted in his mayoral record, though the headline 48% figure is campaign-sourced, and Steyer offers a clear frame — rehabilitation for non-violent offenders, incarceration for violent ones — but no specific agenda. Becerra, Porter, Thurmond and Yee are the weakest, none with a developed 2026 public-safety platform on record.

Outside perspective

Analysts read this field as the clearest evidence that California’s punitive turn is now bipartisan-electoral, not just Republican. The 68% Prop 36 margin means no viable candidate runs against it; the contest is over funding and credibility. CalMatters frames the GOP fight as Bianco — literal badge, sheriff endorsements, harder edge — versus Hilton, who keeps crime secondary to affordability. On the Democratic side the notable pattern is silence: the front-runner and the most prominent endorsed progressive both lack developed crime platforms, leaving Mahan as the only Democrat with a coherent, record-backed identity on the issue. Law-enforcement institutional support has consolidated heavily behind Bianco, while the police union PORAC has endorsed Villaraigosa. The open question into November is whether a Democratic nominee could credibly own the implementation-and-treatment message voters endorsed at the ballot box.

Why it matters

Immigration is the issue where the 2026 race most directly intersects with national politics, and the one candidates have argued about most viscerally. California is home to roughly 1.8 million undocumented adults already enrolled in Medi-Cal and is the largest single target of the second Trump administration’s mass-deportation agenda. In June 2025, ICE worksite raids in Los Angeles triggered weeks of protest; President Trump federalized the California National Guard over Gov. Newsom’s objection and deployed roughly 700 Marines to the city. Newsom sued, and the Ninth Circuit let the federalization stand while litigation continued. That episode reframed the gubernatorial race: the next governor will be California’s chief antagonist to, or collaborator with, federal immigration enforcement.

The second pressure point is fiscal. By 2025–26 the cost of “Health4All” — full-scope Medi-Cal for all income-eligible residents regardless of status — ran roughly $2.7 billion over projection, and Newsom, facing a deficit, proposed freezing new undocumented-adult enrollment and charging premiums. The rollback is now the live test of how far the Democratic field will go to defend a signature progressive achievement under budget strain. Affordability still tops voter priorities at 32%, but immigration is the cleanest partisan dividing line in the field and the issue most likely to define the general-election contrast, especially if a Trump-aligned Republican advances.

Recent state action

California built the most expansive pro-immigrant policy architecture of any state, then began trimming it under fiscal and federal pressure:

• SB 54 / California Values Act (2017) — the sanctuary backbone, barring state and local law enforcement from using resources for federal civil-immigration enforcement. Courts up to the Supreme Court left it intact, and AG Rob Bonta has continued to defend it.
• Health4All expansion — California phased undocumented residents into full-scope Medi-Cal by age cohort, finishing with all remaining adults 19–49 in January 2024, the most ambitious such expansion in the nation.
• The 2025–26 rollback — an enrollment freeze effective January 2026, rising premiums (an interim increase from $30 to $50 a month, with a $100 premium set for 2027), and the elimination of full-scope dental and long-term-care benefits for immigrant adults. The Health4All coalition and labor leaders have demanded reversal.
• Resistance posture (2025) — Newsom’s lawsuit over National Guard federalization and continued defense of SB 54 set the template the Democratic candidates are running to extend.
• Longstanding services — AB 60 driver’s licenses, in-state tuition and Cal Grants for undocumented students, and state-funded deportation-defense programs remain in place and are not on the 2026 chopping block.

The debates

The real fault lines run within the Democratic field, not just left versus right:

1. “Abolish ICE” versus “reform ICE.” Steyer, Porter and Thurmond explicitly back abolishing ICE; Steyer goes furthest, proposing the state criminally prosecute ICE agents. Mahan rejects abolition as “largely symbolic,” calling instead for a “complete restart.” This is a substance-and-tone split among Democrats.
2. Defending versus quietly accepting the Medi-Cal rollback. Every viable Democrat says undocumented residents should have health coverage, but none has put forward a funded plan to reverse Newsom’s freeze. The gap between “health care is a right” rhetoric and a concrete budget mechanism is the field’s biggest unaddressed tension.
3. Becerra’s federal record as a liability. Villaraigosa and Mahan jointly attacked Becerra at the May debate for “failing” on immigration as HHS Secretary, specifically the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s release of unaccompanied minors later tied to labor exploitation. Becerra’s stated position as a longtime DACA champion diverges from that contested record.
4. Dismantling versus defending SB 54. Both Republicans want to gut the sanctuary law and cooperate with federal mass deportation; all Democrats defend it. This is the clean partisan line.
5. Bianco’s enforcement contradiction. Bianco campaigns on dismantling SB 54 and working with ICE, yet his own department’s policy is that it “has not, are not and will not engage in any type of immigration enforcement,” because SB 54 makes that the law.

Notable proposals

Steyer’s “Stop ICE” plan is the most detailed and most provocative in the field. It is not merely “abolish ICE” sloganeering: it would direct the state Attorney General to criminally prosecute ICE agents and leadership for unlawful conduct, create a state unit to monitor ICE operations and detention facilities, and fund a legal-defense “superfund” for detainees. It also carries the biggest vulnerability: Farallon’s former CoreCivic stake makes “abolish-ICE billionaire who owned the ICE-detention company” an attack opposition groups have ample money to repeat.

Thurmond’s 50% detention-facility tax is the only other concrete state-level mechanism, though it is under-resourced, and Mahan’s pathway-plus-border-security framing is the field’s most centrist serious position. The weakest on specifics are Becerra, Porter and Villaraigosa: all hold strong stated positions but none offers a funded path to reverse the Medi-Cal rollback. On the Republican side, Hilton has no written immigration platform, and Bianco’s repeal-SB-54 vow is concrete in intent but legally constrained.

Outside perspective

Pro-immigrant advocacy groups — Health Access, the Health4All coalition, CPEHN — are focused less on the candidates than on reversing the Medi-Cal rollback, pressing all Democrats to commit to restoration, which none has done in funded form. The ACLU, which defended SB 54 in court, frames the next governor primarily as steward of California’s resistance posture against federalized enforcement.

Conservative outlets have made Steyer’s CoreCivic history and the cost of undocumented Medi-Cal their central storylines, arguing Democratic coverage commitments are fiscally unsustainable. CalMatters analysts note the paradox that the Trump-aligned enforcement positions winning the GOP primary are precisely the ones that struggle in a state where about three-quarters of voters disapprove of Trump.

Why it matters

Climate, energy and water do not poll as a single voter priority the way affordability or homelessness do — but in 2026 they have collapsed into the affordability frame, which is why they keep surfacing. Voters do not experience “climate policy” abstractly; they experience a homeowner-insurance non-renewal letter, a $5.50 gallon of gas, an electric bill that has roughly doubled in five years, and the smoke from the next wildfire season. Every viable candidate has been forced to answer for those four pain points, and the central disagreement is less about whether climate change is real than about who pays for the transition and how fast it should go.

Two external shocks reframed the issue mid-cycle. In June 2025, President Trump signed Congressional Review Act resolutions purporting to revoke the EPA waiver underpinning California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule — the regulatory engine behind the 2035 ban on new gas-car sales. California disputes that the CRA even applies to EPA waivers (both the GAO and the Senate parliamentarian agreed it does not) and is litigating the question. That turned the ZEV mandate from a Sacramento policy into a federalism fight. Second, the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires accelerated an insurance-market unraveling that now touches millions of homeowners and has made “insurance” a permanent debate-stage topic.

Layered on top are the slow-burn fights: Newsom’s stalled $20-billion Delta Conveyance tunnel, the NEM 3.0 rules that reshaped rooftop-solar economics, and a Cap-and-Trade program rebranded “Cap-and-Invest” and extended to 2045. Together they make climate, energy and water the policy area where the field’s ideological range is widest — from Tom Steyer, the NextGen-founder climate-left anchor, to Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, who want to drill more and roll back the regulatory regime.

Recent state action

• Advanced Clean Cars II (2022) — the CARB rule banning new gas-only car sales by 2035; its EPA waiver was granted in December 2024 and then revoked by Congress and Trump in June 2025, leaving enforcement in court. EVs remain about 7% of vehicles on the road.
• Cap-and-Trade to “Cap-and-Invest” — reauthorized in 2025 and extended through 2045, rebranded to emphasize ratepayer dividends and project spending.
• SB 1137 (2022) oil-well setbacks — 3,200-foot buffers around homes, schools and hospitals; the industry referendum challenge was withdrawn in 2024, leaving the law in force.
• SB 253 / SB 261 (2023) climate disclosure — the largest corporate emissions- and climate-risk-disclosure mandates in the U.S.; implementation timelines have slipped amid litigation and agency capacity limits.
• NEM 3.0 / Net Billing Tariff (CPUC, 2022) — cut rooftop-solar export compensation roughly 75–80%, shedding industry jobs while pushing battery-attachment rates above 50%; a state appellate court upheld it in March 2026.
• Delta Conveyance fast-track (2025, failed) — Newsom’s budget push to streamline permitting and confirm bond authority died twice in the Legislature; the administration pivoted to a $200M Delta-community accountability plan.
• Insurance “Sustainable Insurance Strategy” (2024–26) — lets insurers use forward-looking catastrophe models and reinsurance costs in rate filings in exchange for writing in wildfire-distressed areas, paired with the Make It FAIR Act to add FAIR Plan transparency and reduce reliance on the Plan.

The debates

Behind a broad acceptance that the transition is underway sit real disagreements.

1. Speed and cost versus affordability. Steyer wants to accelerate decarbonization but routes it through an affordability argument, telling Volts that breaking the electric monopolies is climate policy. Villaraigosa argues the transition has been too fast and too punishing on working-class drivers, hence his “all-of-the-above” pivot. The Republicans want to halt or reverse it.
2. Refineries — keep them open or let them close. The sharpest intra-Democratic split. Villaraigosa would actively subsidize in-state refining; Steyer says keep refineries open during the transition but cap their profits; the Republicans want to expand in-state production outright.
3. Utilities — regulate, break up or deregulate. Steyer’s distinctive plank treats PG&E, SCE and SDG&E as monopolies to be broken into a distributed system. Becerra would freeze utility rates; Mahan would make AI data centers pay their own grid costs; the Republicans frame high bills as a regulatory problem.
4. Insurance — freeze rates or let them rise. Becerra vows to freeze premiums; Porter explicitly rejects that, warning every remaining insurer would leave (KQED). Hilton wants rate decisions in 60 days; Steyer attacks the risk side by reducing wildfire hazard.
5. The Delta tunnel — supply security versus Delta impact. A north-south, urban-versus-Delta-county fight that cuts across party lines, with few candidates staking out loud positions.
6. Oil money. Whether a Democrat can credibly lead on climate while accepting fossil-fuel cash is itself contested. A pro-Becerra independent expenditure took $500K each from Chevron and California Resources Corporation; Steyer and Porter are cited as candidates who decline oil money.

Notable proposals

Independent observers rate Steyer’s energy and utility platform the most detailed in the field — costed in directional terms (return-on-equity cuts, interconnection penalties, a tripled EV credit) and tied tightly to the affordability frame. It is also the most legally ambitious, since breaking up investor-owned utilities would require sustained CPUC and legislative fights, and it sits awkwardly against his Farallon-era coal record, which both opponents and some sympathetic progressives raise.

Villaraigosa’s package is the most fully articulated alternative vision — a Refinery Retention and Investment Act, a carbon-capture credit, a CARB overhaul and a fuel-affordability guarantee form a coherent centrist program, even as it reads as a deliberate break from his green record as Los Angeles mayor. Among the rest, specificity drops off: Becerra’s rate freeze has been criticized for lacking a pay-for; Mahan’s data-center-pays plank is novel but his only developed energy idea; Porter has a strong congressional anti-Big-Oil record but a thinner state energy plan; and Thurmond has effectively no standalone climate platform. On the Republican side, Hilton and Bianco offer direction — drill more, deregulate, speed insurance approvals — rather than detailed policy.

Strikingly, no candidate has staked out a loud, detailed position on the Delta Conveyance tunnel, the single largest water-infrastructure decision the next governor will inherit. Its north-south, intra-Democratic explosiveness makes silence the safer play.

Outside perspective

Energy-economy analysts covering the race largely read the Democratic field as converging on an affordability-first climate message while diverging on mechanism: progressives (Steyer, Porter) lead on holding utilities and oil companies accountable, while the centrist (Villaraigosa) and front-runner (Becerra) are more cautious — Villaraigosa openly courting fossil-fuel-adjacent labor and Becerra accepting oil-linked money that critics say undercuts his clean-energy framing. Insurance specialists warn that the popular “freeze rates” pitch is in tension with the state’s bet that allowing risk-based rate increases is the only way to lure insurers back and shrink the FAIR Plan — a tension Porter has made explicit. The Republicans’ rollback framing tracks free-market critiques of California’s regulatory cost burden but has little chance of enactment under a Democratic Legislature; its real function is general-election positioning on gas prices and bills. Notably, the largest independent-expenditure force in the race is the roughly $92.6M anti-Steyer coalition — including realtors, building trades and PG&E — a direct reaction to his utility-breakup plan.

Why it matters

Healthcare ranks behind affordability and homelessness among voter priorities, but it is the issue where the next governor inherits the most concrete near-term decisions. Roughly one in three Californians — about 14 to 15 million people — relies on Medi-Cal, and the program is now the center of a two-front war: a federal Medicaid overhaul that the California Health Care Foundation projects will cost the state $28–30 billion a year and could push up to 3.4 million Californians off coverage, and a state-level retreat from the Newsom-era Health4All expansion to undocumented adults that the May 2026 Revision codifies through premium hikes, an enrollment freeze, asset tests, and a transition out of managed care.

At the same time, the next governor will own three Newsom-era frameworks midway through implementation: Proposition 1’s $6.4B behavioral-health bond and the Behavioral Health Services Act, with county integrated plans due in mid-2026; the MCO tax that voters made permanent via Prop 35 but which still expires in its current form at the end of 2026; and the CalRx generic-drug program, whose first-in-the-nation $11 insulin pen began rolling out January 1, 2026.

The race is also a stress test for California’s post-Dobbs identity as a sanctuary state for abortion and gender-affirming care. Both viable Republicans have indicated they would scale back protections, which makes the contrast between the parties structurally sharper than in any year since Roe fell.

Recent state action

• Health4All expansion (2022–24) — phased full-scope Medi-Cal to undocumented adults, ultimately covering about 1.6 million new enrollees (CalMatters).
• Proposition 1 (March 2024) — a voter-approved $6.4B behavioral-health bond and restructure of the 2004 Mental Health Services Act into the BHSA, funding treatment beds and outpatient slots and channeling more of the millionaire-income tax to housing.
• Proposition 35 (Nov 2024) — made the MCO tax permanent and earmarked revenue for Medi-Cal rate increases, taking effect January 2026 (Cal Budget Center).
• CARE Court (2022) and SB 43 (2023) — a civil-court process to mandate treatment plans for adults with untreated psychosis, with SB 43 broadening the “gravely disabled” definition to expand involuntary-hold eligibility.
• CalRx — an insulin glargine pen launched January 2026; naloxone already in market; SB 40 capped insulin cost-sharing at $35 a month.
• AB 1400 / CalCare (2022) — the single-payer bill, sponsored by the California Nurses Association, that died on the Assembly floor without a vote; the LAO costed the program at $494–552B a year. A successor measure was reintroduced in February 2026.
• 2026–27 May Revision (May 2026) — Newsom proposes Medi-Cal retrenchment: raising undocumented-adult premiums, reinstating asset tests, eliminating full-scope dental for undocumented adults, transitioning those enrollees out of managed care, and maintaining the enrollment freeze (Governor’s Office).
• Emergency rural-hospital grant (May 2026) — a $25M program enacted within a week of introduction to forestall closures after Glenn County’s only hospital closed.

The debates

The healthcare fight in this primary is not a generic left/right axis. The real fault lines:

1. Single-payer as litmus test versus operational fantasy. The California Nurses Association and the progressive base treat support for CalCare as table stakes, while the medical association, hospitals and the Newsom administration treat it as an unaffordable diversion that federal approval under a Trump HHS makes effectively impossible. Steyer and Thurmond are unconditional yes; Porter has reversed twice in 12 months; Becerra has walked away despite 30 years of congressional support; Villaraigosa is a firm no; Mahan, Hilton and Bianco oppose.
2. Whether to defend Health4All or accept the retrenchment. Newsom’s own May 2026 Revision scales back the expansion he championed. Becerra promises to build toward universal coverage but has not committed to reversing the specific cuts; Steyer, Porter and Thurmond reject the cuts more forcefully; Villaraigosa says the cuts fall hardest on Latino and Black communities but stops short of promising reversal; the Republicans want the cuts deeper.
3. How to backfill federal Medicaid cuts. Thurmond is the only candidate endorsing a one-time billionaire wealth tax to offset the federal cuts. Steyer proposes closing the Prop 13 commercial-property loophole and the “Water’s Edge” corporate election, claiming $20B a year. Villaraigosa rules out new taxes; Becerra emphasizes fraud reduction and federal litigation.
4. Treatment-mandated care and Prop 1 implementation. Mahan is the most aggressive, seeking to make involuntary commitment easier and to tie behavioral-health dollars to a public progress scorecard. Becerra, Porter, Villaraigosa and Steyer support the Prop 1 buildout but are wary of expanded involuntary care; Thurmond emphasizes voluntary, community-based approaches.
5. Reproductive rights and gender-affirming care. All eight Democrats commit to defending both. Hilton has said he would allow extradition of a Bay Area abortion provider to Louisiana and would oppose state funding for out-of-state abortion travel; Bianco says abortion “is not healthcare” and would defund Planned Parenthood. On trans-youth care, Porter and Mahan committed at the LGBTQ+ forum; Villaraigosa endorsed gender-affirming care while opposing trans participation in girls’ sports; both Republicans declined to participate.
6. Provider shortage and workforce. There is near-consensus that California needs more clinicians, especially in rural and Latino-majority areas, but no candidate has put major money behind a workforce plan. Becerra proposes a workforce investment fund; Yee and Villaraigosa emphasize community-college and regional pipelines; Mahan focuses on streamlining licensing.

Notable proposals

Independent observers describe Becerra’s platform as the most operationally detailed — concrete proposals to expand CalRx (insulin, inhalers, EpiPens, naloxone, antibiotics), a named Healthcare Workforce Investment Fund, a telehealth executive order, and aggressive Prop 35 implementation. Its weakness is silence on whether he would reverse Newsom’s May Revision rollbacks, the most pressing near-term Medi-Cal decision. Steyer’s single-payer-plus-revenue package is the most ambitious and the only Democratic plan pairing CalCare with a specific pay-for, though it does not close the gap the LAO put at $494–552B a year — and Steyer’s own answer, that “God is going to be in the details” on funding, concedes the math is unfinished (KFF Health News).

Mahan’s behavioral-health buildout — 10,000 beds by 2030, a progress scorecard, and an easier involuntary-commitment standard — is the most specific behavioral-health plan and most aligned with Prop 1’s institutionalist direction, and is also the proposal civil-liberties and disability-rights advocates have flagged as most at odds with their norms. Villaraigosa’s five-pillar plan is structured and credible but lacks a funding source. The vaguest are Hilton and Bianco, who campaign largely on immigration-eligibility rollback and fraud rhetoric rather than a system plan; Thurmond, who has a clear single-payer-plus-wealth-tax brand but no implementation roadmap; and Porter, whose two CalCare reversals in 12 months have muddied her substance.

Outside perspective

KFF Health News frames single-payer as a litmus test in this primary with “still no way to pay for it,” citing a $731.4B estimated state cost and a Becerra reversal that, in its read, confirms the political ceiling on CalCare. The California Health Care Foundation has published the most rigorous quantification of the federal cuts (up to 3.4 million in coverage losses) and is the closest thing to a neutral fact base in the campaign, while the California Budget & Policy Center has been the loudest in-state critic of Newsom’s May Revision retrenchment. Behavioral-health groups are generally optimistic about the Prop 1 buildout but warn that the 2026 county-plan deadline is colliding with federal Medicaid cuts that will hollow out its financing base.

The defining endorsement split maps the single-payer fault line cleanly: the California Nurses Association endorsed Steyer, the sponsor of CalCare, while the California Medical Association endorsed Becerra after he walked back his single-payer support. Reporting notes that Becerra’s win with the physicians’ lobby came at the explicit cost of his decades-old single-payer brand.

Why it matters

Education sits at the center of California Democratic politics. The California Teachers Association (CTA) and its 310,000 members are among the most powerful organized forces in the state, and the schools budget — at roughly $20,427 per pupil in 2026-27 under Proposition 98 — is the single largest line in the General Fund. Yet in the 2026 governor’s race, education has been overshadowed by affordability, homelessness, and immigration, surfacing mostly through proxies: who holds the CTA endorsement, who is “pro-charter,” and a governance fight Newsom himself set off.

That fight is the cycle’s defining education story. In his January 8, 2026 State of the State address, Governor Newsom proposed stripping the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction of operational control over the California Department of Education (CDE), handing day-to-day management to a governor-appointed commissioner beginning January 1, 2027 — after both Newsom and current Superintendent Tony Thurmond leave office (EdSource). It landed in a gubernatorial field that includes Thurmond himself: a sitting education officer running for the office that, under the plan, would absorb much of the authority his current one now holds.

For voters, the stakes are concrete. Reading scores remain stubbornly low — just 42.8% of third-graders were at grade level in 2024 — even as the state completed universal transitional kindergarten. Whoever wins inherits a system better funded than it has been in decades but still producing mediocre outcomes, plus a governance model the outgoing governor has tried to rewrite on his way out the door.

Recent state action

The Newsom era leaves the next governor a mix of completed expansions and unfinished fights:

• Universal TK (AB 130, 2021 → full rollout 2025-26). Free pre-K for every four-year-old, the largest grade-level expansion in California history, requiring an estimated 12,000 additional teachers and 16,000 aides.
• AB 1454, the “science of reading” law (October 2025). It funds structured-literacy (phonics-first) training and requires the State Board to adopt compatible materials, but makes the training optional — the concession that won over the CTA and English-learner advocates who had killed earlier mandate bills.
• LCFF, the funding engine. Jerry Brown’s 2013 reform pairs a base grant with extra grants for high-need students; projected at $85.8 billion in 2026-27, its 2.4% cost-of-living adjustment is a flashpoint.
• AB 1505 (2019) charter reform. It gave local boards more authority over authorization and forced some State Board-authorized charters to find new authorizers by 2028, even as enrollment kept rising amid fraud scrutiny.
• CDE governance overhaul (January 2026, pending). The Assembly Education Committee passed a rewritten version of Newsom’s plan that tilts more power to the Legislature than he proposed (EdSource); all ten superintendent candidates and Thurmond have opposed it.

The debates

The real disagreements in this field do not map cleanly onto left versus right:

1. Who controls CDE — voters or the governor? The sharpest education divide of the cycle scrambles partisanship: Thurmond opposes it as a usurpation of “the will of voters”; Republicans Hilton and Bianco favor gubernatorial accountability but are wary of empowering a Democratic governor; most Democratic candidates, who would inherit the expanded power, have stayed quiet.
2. Charters: cap and pause versus expand. Thurmond and Steyer (CTA-aligned, opposed to public money for private or religious education) anchor the skeptic pole; Hilton and Villaraigosa anchor the choice pole. Charters have been “glaringly absent” as an explicit campaign issue compared with past cycles.
3. More money versus better outcomes. With per-pupil funding at record levels but reading scores flat, the question is whether the answer is more spending (Steyer, Thurmond, Porter) or accountability and management reform (Mahan, Hilton, Yee).
4. The CTA’s grip. The union’s endorsement of self-funding billionaire Tom Steyer over its own two-time champion Thurmond signals it now prizes a candidate who can fund pro-tax ballot fights over one with the deepest education resume but no money (EdSource).

Notable proposals

The two most substantive education agendas belong to Steyer and Thurmond, the field’s most CTA-adjacent figures. Steyer’s “free cradle-to-community-college” plan is the most expansive and most clearly costed, tied to specific revenue (commercial Prop 13 reform and the Waters’ Edge loophole) that most rivals lack; Thurmond’s “Literacy Moonshot” ($1.5B over five years) is the most policy-specific K-12 plan and draws on his record, though critics call him a “convener” more than an operator. Porter’s tuition-free college plus universal free childcare is the field’s only standalone free-childcare proposal but lacks a revenue plan, and Hilton’s “Great Kids” is the most detailed reform-conservative agenda (A-F school grading, the parent trigger, charter expansion, teacher accountability). The thinnest are the front-runners: Becerra publishes no education section, Bianco offers a plank with little detail, and Mahan, despite a teaching background, offers only a cellphone-and-social-media-restriction plank.

Outside perspective

Policy analysts frame California’s moment as “more money, mediocre results.” The PPIC and the Learning Policy Institute broadly credit LCFF with directing more dollars to high-need students but find the equity dividend uneven and outcomes lagging the investment, and on TK they flag the staffing pipeline and participation gaps for Black, Native American, and Pacific Islander families. EdSource, the indispensable beat outlet, treats the CDE governance fight as the genuinely consequential education story of 2026, noting the irony that the Legislature is rewriting Newsom’s plan partly to claim power for itself; on higher education, the LAO and CalMatters highlight the cost of a UC resident-enrollment shift (an 18% nonresident cap at the most selective campuses). The consensus expert read: the field is long on funding aspiration and short on the outcomes-and-governance questions that define California’s education problem.

Why it matters

“Government reform” is the connective tissue of the 2026 affordability argument. California voters do not rank “make the bureaucracy efficient” as a top standalone priority — affordability tops the list at roughly 32% in PPIC’s early-2026 polling — but nearly every candidate routes their affordability pitch through a government-performance argument. The right (Hilton, Bianco) holds that a bloated, overregulated Sacramento is the problem, so cutting government is the fix; the moderate-Democratic lane (Mahan, Villaraigosa) holds that government is well-intentioned but badly managed, so better execution delivers affordability without abandoning the programs; the progressive lane (Steyer, Porter, Thurmond) frames reform less as “shrink government” than “clean up corruption and corporate capture.”

The backdrop is a credibility problem Democrats cannot easily wave off: the state spent more than $24B on homelessness with worse outcomes, the high-speed-rail and EDD-fraud sagas remain live punchlines, and Newsom’s term has featured management embarrassments — most recently the Dana Williamson plea, a former chief of staff who pled guilty in a scheme that diverted $225K from a dormant state account. That gives the “government doesn’t work” critique unusual bipartisan resonance in an open-seat race.

Two operational fights are unusually salient this cycle. Newsom’s return-to-office mandate for state workers turned into a multi-front labor standoff, still unresolved, with the in-office order pushed to July 2026 — after the primary. And the June 2025 CEQA reform package (AB 130 / SB 131) reset what counts as “real” permitting reform, so every candidate’s CEQA position is now measured against a baseline the Legislature already moved.

Recent state action

The Newsom era hands the next governor three live operational threads:

• Return-to-office. Newsom ordered most state employees back at least four days a week from July 1, 2025; unions filed PERB charges and CalHR later cut deals that delayed the four-day order to July 2026 — deliberately punting the decision past the primary.
• CEQA and permitting. The June 2025 AB 130 / SB 131 package is the most significant CEQA overhaul in decades — a broad infill-housing exemption on sites up to 20 acres plus exemptions for child-care and advanced-manufacturing projects — pre-empting the easiest “streamline CEQA” pitch.
• AI in government. A 2023 executive order launched the state’s GenAI framework; in 2025 Newsom signed SB 53, the first U.S. frontier-AI transparency law, after vetoing the tougher SB 1047, leaving the next governor both an AI-regulation and an AI-adoption posture.

The debates

The real fault lines are not left-versus-right on whether government should be efficient (everyone says yes). They are:

1. Cut versus fix. The sharpest divide: Hilton and Bianco want to shrink the state (waste-hunting, sunset clauses, deregulation); Mahan and Villaraigosa want to manage it better (pay-for-performance, digital permitting, accountability boards) while keeping the programs.
2. Whose ox gets gored on CEQA. Hilton would bar private CEQA suits and cap impact fees, Villaraigosa wants NEPA-style standing limits, and Mahan wants faster timelines — while Becerra used CEQA as Attorney General to slow some market-rate housing, a record-versus-rhetoric tension now that he campaigns as pro-build.
3. Return-to-office as a labor litmus test. An RTO stance signals a candidate’s relationship to the roughly 100,000-strong state-worker unions; no leading Democrat has championed forcing workers back, while Republicans are more comfortable doing so as part of the “bloat” critique.
4. AI: regulate the companies versus deploy in government. Steyer, Porter and Thurmond lean toward regulating AI firms and protecting workers; Mahan leans toward using AI to run government better (pothole detection) with “a human in the loop,” though he is funded by some of the tech figures he says he will regulate.
5. Is the waste real? Hilton’s roughly $80B-a-year fraud figure is the campaign’s signature claim and its biggest credibility risk — a campaign estimate, not an audit, with disputed methodology.

Notable proposals

The two most substantive agendas come from opposite poles. Hilton’s is the most developed conservative reform plan — “CalDOGE” plus concrete regulatory mechanics (sunset clauses, regulatory budgets, “permit paybacks”) borrowed from red-state and UK playbooks — though it carries the unaudited $80B fraud number and an unanswered question about how near-elimination of income tax funds the services he would keep. Mahan has the most substantive managerial agenda and the only record to back it: pay-for-performance bonuses, a documented permitting-speed improvement, and an AI-in-government deployment with a human-in-the-loop guardrail. Villaraigosa’s Housing Acceleration Act (CEQA standing reform, a digital permitting platform, an accountability board) is the most concrete permitting plan in the Democratic field. The rest are vaguer: Becerra leads the polls with no detailed plan and a CEQA-as-housing-blocker record; Porter’s brand is campaign-finance, not operations; Steyer’s is corporate-capture-focused; Thurmond has no standalone efficiency plan. And return-to-office is a telling near-silence — the live fight delayed to July 2026, on which no leading candidate has staked a sharp public position.

Outside perspective

Analysts treat the reform debate as a proxy war over Newsom’s legacy, with CalMatters framing the Democratic contenders as forced to triangulate around seven years of Newsom — defending climate and health wins while conceding the homelessness-spending failure. On CEQA, the land-use bar’s read is that the Legislature already executed the “big” streamlining with AB 130/SB 131, reframing the candidates’ pitches as either finishing the job or rhetoric without a next step. On AI, Brookings positions SB 53 as a deliberately narrow, transparency-first compromise, leaving AI adoption inside government — where Mahan is the only candidate with a demonstrated approach — as the open question. The cross-cutting skepticism: Hilton’s $80B waste claim is the field’s most aggressive reform assertion and its least audited.