Hilton and Becerra are still leading as California's primary gets meaner — and now the editorial boards are asking the questions the trail has been ducking. I'm Cassidy. This is California Governor's Race — two weeks out, an independent Mercury News poll has two names at the top, and Dan Walters is basically shouting into the void about education. I'm Adam. Steyer is on camera trying to close, Mahan is answering new finance questions, and somehow nobody's forced the frontrunners to deal with the biggest line in the state budget. And the Sacramento Bee's editorial board has all the major candidates on video, so now we get to compare the closing arguments with actual scrutiny instead of just the spin. From Dan Walters at Mercury News:
According to the latest Democratic Party poll, released Tuesday, Republican Steve Hilton, a British-born former Fox News commentator, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former attorney general, are virtually tied at 22% and 21% respectively. Billionaire Tom Steyer still holds a chance at 15%, but all other candidates who were once viable are lagging behind by single-digit percentages.
The Mercury News has the latest Democratic Party poll: Hilton at 22, Becerra at 21, Steyer at 15. That gives us a second independent data point confirming the two-name shape — and unlike the Bee's CDP-funded poll, this one matters more because we already flagged the methodology on that earlier one. And that 15 for Steyer is the number I want to stress-test. Is that his floor because he's spending to hold it, or does he actually have a demographic lane that survives once the airtime money stops? The CalMatters influencer story dropped last week, and his number didn't crater. So on whether the scrutiny moved votes? Not yet. For now, 'behind but not out' is probably the cleanest read. Also, this is still a party-commissioned poll. Same sourcing caveat we used on the Bee's CDP poll applies here too. Put the two together and you can say consolidation around Hilton and Becerra is real — you still can't say how close that third spot is in likely-voter terms. Here's ABC7 News:
Recent polls show Mahan losing ground, and his campaign has faced scrutiny following developments involving campaign funding. A pro-Mahan political committee refunded $1 million to Netflix Chairman Reed Hastings, a major backer. Additionally, Mahan faced a corruption complaint related to alleged coordination with a billionaire-funded political action committee. Mahan said Hastings did not request the refund and continues to support his campaign. He also noted that the complaint was rejected.
Here's Kiara Adams at The Sacramento Bee:
Some of the issues Steyer is running on are homelessness, affordability, immigration and Artificial Intelligence. Steyer says he approaches homelessness with a harm reduction mindset. He proposes emergency interim housing to get people into safe environments, and he says that the current seven-year wait times for interim housing aren’t working. He also believes that the state should be encouraging the development of more dense housing, especially near public transit.
The Bee's editorial board interview series is out, and Steyer's on camera, which is exactly the kind of test CalMatters set up with that paid-influencer disclosure story last week. The Mercury News poll has him third but alive, so this is the moment to see whether the on-camera answers hold up. He's running the anti-insider frame, which is a nice bumper sticker — but Steyer is also a billionaire who spent tens of millions on his own presidential run. If the Bee's board didn't press him on what 'anti-insider' means when you're self-financing, that's a missed layup. The platform he's pitching — homelessness, affordability, AI, immigration — is basically the same umbrella every Democrat is standing under. What I'm watching is whether the editorial board got him to say anything specific about education, because Dan Walters just flagged it as California's biggest budget line and the candidates are barely touching it. Seven-year wait times on interim housing is a real number. If he said that on camera and nobody challenged it, that's probably the sharpest policy edge he's thrown so far. But 'we're going to think differently' without a funding mechanism isn't a closing argument — it's a TED Talk. From Dan Walters at Noozhawk:
The single largest item in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recently proposed budget— and arguably its most important — is the $91 billion (plus $60 billion in local and federal funds) it would spend to educate California’s nearly 6 million students, from transitional kindergarten through high school. How well they are educated, prepared for higher education or the job market, will be a big factor determining whether the state’s economy, and thus its socioeconomic whole, succeeds or fails.
Dan Walters via Noozhawk is asking the pointed question here: education is California's single largest budget line — ninety-one billion state dollars, plus sixty billion more in local and federal funds — and the candidates are barely touching it on the trail. That doesn't happen by accident. A hundred and fifty billion dollars total, and the frontrunners are talking about it less than they talk about housing vibes? Walters is right that this is a number story — just not one anybody seems willing to run toward. Hilton, Becerra, and Steyer — the three names the Mercury News poll just put at the top — have had every debate stage and editorial-board camera to put a real K-12 or higher-ed position on the record. The silence is a choice, and the Bee's interview series this week is a straight-up chance to see whether any of them make a different one. Education ranks near the top in every California voter priority survey, and Walters flags that too. So the candidates are actively avoiding an issue their own voters care about. That's a calculation, not a gap in the platform — and I'd like to know which consultant signed off on it. KCRA 3 News, with Ashley Zavala:
Leading up to the June primary, we're talking to the 10 leading candidates running for the state's highest position. Here's how we decided who to invite for these long form interviews. Each candidate we invited has received more than 1% in the polls. This is based off of 6 statewide polls from August to February.
KCRA put out full thirty-minute sit-downs with the top ten candidates before June. Their bar was simple: one percent in at least one poll, and a million dollars raised per Secretary of State data. That's a more transparent methodology than most editorial boards bother to publish. The cutoff is fair, but ten candidates is still a crowded frame when the Mercury News poll is basically naming three people. I want to know whether Hilton or Becerra said anything on camera that doesn't sound like the stump speech — that's where thirty minutes gets interesting. And this is exactly where we check the Bianco water claim. We flagged his 'seventy percent forced to the ocean' number as an immediate fact-check target, so if any Democrat sat across from KCRA for half an hour and didn't push back on that, that's a story about what the frontrunners are choosing not to fight. Same goes for education. Walters is right that it's California's biggest budget line, and the trail has been nearly silent on it. Thirty minutes of direct questioning is the format where you can't just pivot to affordability and run out the clock. Have a question, a story idea, or a correction for our California Governor's Race coverage? Send us a note at californiagovernorsrace at lantern podcasts dot com. We do read what you send.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, if you want to dig further into any of the reporting behind this episode.
That's California Governor's Race for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.