Tom Steyer wants Californians to know he is the only billionaire on the ballot for governor—but not, he is quick to add, the only billionaire spending on the race. The quip captures the odd position the climate activist and Democratic megadonor occupies in California’s gubernatorial primary. Running against the party establishment and corporate donors, the hedge-fund veteran is courting the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s a former single-payer skeptic who is now campaigning on Medicare for All. And he’s taken to wearing a pale cap emblazoned with the words “class traitor.” His self-funded campaign hinges on whether voters find these paradoxes convincing.
Steyer hardly resembles the archetypal populist insurgent, but he is his own kind of political figure. At 68, Steyer is a practicing Christian. Every day he draws on his wrist a Jerusalem Cross—a simple cross with smaller crosses in each of its four quadrants—as a reminder “to tell the truth.”. He met his wife on the running track at Stanford in the 1980s. The couple joined The Giving Pledge—committing to donating their wealth in their lifetimes—and now have four grown children.
If only one Democrat advances out of California’s “jungle primary” tomorrow, in which the top two vote-getters advance, regardless of party, that candidate will be heavily favored to win in November. If two Democrats advance, the general election will become a far more bruising intra-party fight. In most polls, Steyer trails Xavier Becerra, the former congressman, California attorney general and Biden health secretary, who inherited much of the party establishment’s support after sexual assault allegations forced Eric Swalwell from the race in April. Becerra is all but guaranteed to reach the general election, leaving Steyer and Steve Hilton, the former television host and Trump-endorsed Republican, as favorites for the second spot. Matt Mahan, the pragmatic, centrist San Jose mayor buoyed by Silicon Valley money, and Katie Porter, the fiery former congresswoman whose campaign was hobbled by a video of her berating a staffer, are also challenging the status quo, but both have languished below double digits in the polls.
Steyer’s campaign is built around, you guessed it, affordability. His campaign consultant, Fight Agency, was central to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, as well as Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate bid in Maine. Like those Democratic insurgents, Steyer is apparently unworried about overpromising. He wants to cut electricity rates by 25 percent by taking on the utility monopolies. He wants to build a million homes by closing what he calls the “Trump Tax Loophole,” a commercial property tax break he says would raise $20 billion a year if eliminated. He wants single-payer healthcare, financed by a tax increase, which, he argues, households already pay in premiums.
When I met Steyer at his San Francisco campaign office, he was much as I had expected: tall but unimposing and prone to long, nerdy digressions. An unprompted detour into the 2015 Paris climate conference, which he attended, ate several minutes of our conversation. Passion for climate is a brand he leaned into heavily in his presidential run, though Steyer now says winning was never his goal six years ago. He entered that race, he told me, to push climate issues further into the Democratic conversation.
Now, Steyer says, he’s “running to win.” He has clearly absorbed the lesson that climate language alienates voters skeptical of the Democratic Party’s priorities, and he has translated accordingly. “When I talk about introducing competition to the electric monopolies, I don’t use the word climate,” he told me. “I use the word cost.”
He has cast his bid as a fight against business interests, who he says have made California unaffordable. When we talked, Steyer wanted to reassure me that his concern for working people is not a new consultant-led creation. His activist efforts predate his electoral ambitions by decades, he said “I’ve been working on this for over 20 years, if you include the political stuff I was doing while still working in the private sector.” (Steyer founded a community bank focused on lending in redlined neighborhoods over a decade ago—“now [worth] several billion dollars and delivering loans to the places where normal commercial banks won’t go”—and spent two decades advocating for the climate by bankrolling ballot initiatives and nonprofits.)
“The idea that suddenly I’m this progressive, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Twenty years ago, I was doing this so I could fake something in 2026? Really? That’s silly.”
Still, for some voters, Steyer’s capitalist biography makes it difficult to buy into his populist candidacy. The Yale-educated mogul made his billions running Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that once held major stakes in private prison operators tied to ICE contracts. Steyer has since apologized for these former investments and now holds the strongest anti-ICE stance in the gubernatorial field—including a pledge to arrest Stephen Miller, Supremacy Clause be damned.
The left of the party, for its part, seems to have accepted this apology. Steyer secured endorsements from Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution in late April and a recommendation from the California DSA in early May. Bernie, he told me, has “had more impact on democratic thinking than anybody else in the United States in the last 20 years.” But despite his overtures to the progressive left, Steyer’s backers extend beyond progressive groups: they include YIMBY Action, the influential free-market housing group, and the moderate California political kingmaker Willie Brown.
That’s because Steyer also sells himself as a pragmatic fixer: A devoted YIMBY who will reduce bureaucracy and cut red tape. Less than an hour after I left Steyer’s office, he took to Reddit’s r/YIMBY subreddit for an “Ask Me Anything.” Many users were receptive. “Just the fact that you are willing to interact with this subreddit … already shows you are worthy of at least my support, as nothing can get worse than the current Democrat establishment,” one scrutinous Redditor said.
Others were less impressed. “I’m growing increasingly wary of this guy,” one participant wrote.
Corporate interests, for their part, see Steyer as a threat. Big oil and developers have poured over $50 million into knocking him down and boosting Becerra. PG&E has spent more than $12 million against him, Uber almost $1 million, Meta almost $1 million, and Chevron half a million.
Thanks in part to this barrage, Steyer may fall short of Becerra, who leads the polls. It also helps that California primaries are usually won by candidates who project party familiarity. Becerra does that automatically and has amassed endorsements from Planned Parenthood and Equality California, the prominent LGBT group. Finally, Becerra would be the first Latino governor since the 19th century, and he has made strong inroads with the Latino voters, who comprise 40 percent of the state’s population.
Becerra’s deep connection to the Democratic establishment may be the most important factor in his favor. Establishment-backed candidates usually trounce their progressive challengers in the state’s primaries. Adam Schiff in the 2024 Senate primary, for instance, warded off several progressives, including Katie Porter. Over a dozen state assemblymen publicly endorsed Becerra in the days after Swalwell dropped out, as did most of Swalwell’s major donors. Politico likened Becerra’s rapid consolidation to Biden’s in 2020.
Thus, it’s hardly surprising that Becerra’s imperative in this race seems to be to make himself legible as the safe candidate. In a CNN interview, Becerra was reluctant to name specific changes he would pursue as governor, settling on housing after being pressed by the interviewer. Becerra just months ago championed single-payer healthcare, only to flip-flop on it amid meetings with the California Medical Association, which staunchly opposes single-payer.
Single-payer is popular in California, and polling also shows that more than half the state supports a billionaire wealth tax, which Steyer alone has endorsed. In this sense, Steyer’s billionaire status obscures a central truth: judged by policy alone, he can claim to be the field’s consensus candidate.
The Becerra campaign has tried to obscure his inconsistency by relying on pre-screened questions and keeping him away from the press after debates. During a recent televised interview, Becerra asked a journalist, “This is a profile piece, not a gotcha piece, right?” When told that hard questions were, in fact, part of the conversation, he scolded the journalist: “A profile is talking about all the things I’ve done, things I want to do, and along with some tough questions. But not only tough questions.”
Becerra has also largely sat out the increasingly important podcast circuit, sticking to safe venues like former Democratic National Committee Chair Jamie Harrison’s At Our Table with Jamie Harrison. Steyer, by contrast, is Mr. Podcast, most notably sitting for a marathon interview with Hasan Piker.
But paid media is key in this most populous of states: Steyer has spent or booked more than $195 million in TV and radio ads, setting a record for a California state election. Steyer has also paid social media influencers to endorse him, some of whom failed to disclose that they were on the campaign payroll. (At least one influencer-turned-Becerra strategist also failed to disclose payments from the Becerra campaign.)
Steyer has been seeking elective office for six years, and now the stars may be lining up to make him the next governor of California. If he loses, his campaign will look, in retrospect, like one more overfunded California experiment. But for now, the experiment is still alive. By tomorrow night, Steyer may look ridiculous. Or he may look like the favorite to become governor.
