California blues: Races for governor, Los Angeles mayor feature weak Democratic frontrunners and insurgent Republicans

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — Democrats’ governance in one of the bluest states in America is being put to the test Tuesday, as California voters in primaries for governor and Los Angeles mayor weigh crowded fields led by relatively weak or unpopular frontrunners.

President Donald Trump may be less popular with voters now than he’s ever been. But Democrats are battling their own political problems: Polls show voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the party. A botched Democratic National Committee report and a Jill Biden book tour have reignited debates over the party’s mistakes in 2024 — distracting from efforts to win House and Senate majorities in this November’s midterm elections.

In California, the contest to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ reelection bid share some dynamics. Both feature Democrats who have so far failed to break out of the pack — as well as conservative candidates who accuse those Democrats of being bad at their jobs.

And similar issues — concerns over homelessness and drug use, housing and affordability, crime and entertainment industry job losses — have dominated both races, with Republican candidates arguing Democrats, who have full control of the city and state governments, have failed their voters.

“The people in charge — they’re the ones letting this happen,” Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star taking on Bass, said Thursday on CNN. “I’m the one who’s saying, ‘Enough of these corrupt politicians taking our tax money and then increasing homelessness and death on our streets.’”

In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans about four-to-one, the mayor’s race is nominally nonpartisan, and Pratt has sought to distance himself from party labels. But he is a registered Republican, and Democrats have sought to lump him in with Trump and highlight his ties to controversial conservative figures like Alex Jones.

Pratt launched his campaign after his home burned down in last year’s Palisades fire. He blames Bass, who was in Ghana when the fire broke out, for mismanagement of the city’s response — and is casting it as emblematic of an entrenched Democratic establishment’s failures on a host of other intractable issues, including drug use, crime and homelessness.

“It’s just not rocket science,” Pratt said. “The reason I have success is I’m telling people the truth with common sense. This isn’t political.”

California holds jungle primaries, with all candidates appearing on the same ballot. The top two vote-getters — regardless of party — advance to the general election. Polls show a wide range of possibilities in both races.

Surveys show Bass, Pratt and progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman, who is taking Bass on from the left, are in a close race for the two spots on November’s ballot. A UC Berkeley-LA Times poll conducted May 19-24 found Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22%. The poll found that Bass was viewed unfavorably by 57% of likely voters — the same percentage that viewed Pratt unfavorably.

The governor’s race features a larger field of viable contenders. But in polls and conversations with California strategists in both parties, a consensus has formed that the two favorites to advance to the general election are Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton — but that the outcome is far from a certainty.

A PPIC poll conducted May 14-18 found Becerra with 23% support and Hilton with 20%, followed by three other candidates with double-digit support: Democratic billionaire activist Tom Steyer at 15%, Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco at 13% and Democratic US Rep. Katie Porter at 12%.

However, another new poll published Friday raised the prospect of Steyer closing on Hilton. The Berkeley IGS poll found a tightly bunched top three, with Becerra at 25%, Hilton at 21% and Steyer at 19%. Bianco is at 11% in that survey, and no other candidate reached double digits.

Becerra and Bass are both running in part on their long experience, at a moment when many voters appear to be looking for change.

Can Becerra consolidate Democrats?

Democrats long feared a potential nightmare scenario of Hilton and Bianco advancing — with the two Republicans benefitting from a much more fractured Democratic field that also includes moderate San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who was backed by millions of dollars in Silicon Valley spending. The field previously included former US Rep. Eric Swalwell prior to his dropping out in April amid sexual misconduct allegations.

But Trump’s decision to endorse Hilton, a former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and conservative political commentator, in April might have ended that possibility. The PPIC poll found that Republican likely voters in the state have largely aligned behind Hilton: 53% support him, compared to 33% for Bianco.

Becerra has wrapped up a smaller 39% plurality among Democratic likely voters, compared to 23% for Steyer and 15% for Porter. Independents are closely divided between the top five candidates.

With Swalwell’s departure and Steyer failing to break through despite a barrage of self-funded ads, Becerra has emerged as the safe — or least-objectionable — pick in many Democrats’ eyes. He’s a former California congressman and state attorney general and was secretary of health and human services in former President Joe Biden’s administration.

However, Becerra has also had his share of stumbles.

He was mocked by rivals in May when he told a local reporter ahead of an interview that he expected “some tough questions, but not only tough questions.”

He has touted his experience managing the Covid-19 pandemic and leading an agency of 80,000 employees as he argues he is best positioned to manage California’s 245,000 state workers. But some former Biden Administration colleagues have called his competence into question.

Xochitl Hinojosa, a veteran Democratic strategist who was a Justice Department spokeswoman in Biden’s administration, said on CNN in May that Becerra “was not effective in government.”

“A lot of people in the Biden administration are talking about this because they realize he was not an effective HHS secretary. If you ask any Cabinet secretary, they would tell you the same thing,” she said.

In a recent interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson, Becerra said he’s “got the momentum” while other candidates have stagnated.

Becerra isn’t offering a break from the policies of Newsom and the state’s Democratic leadership. However, he said, he’ll move faster to address the issue of affordability — particularly by quickly building more housing.

“We’ll get more things done, and we’ll get them done a lot faster, because the crisis is upon us. And it takes someone who’s actually had to deal with crises to know how to get us out of them,” he said.

Steyer is self-funding his campaign and has spent $195 million on advertising – vastly outpacing all other candidates and accounting for 64% of all ad spending in the race, according to AdImpact. His ads portray Steyer as a reformer who can’t be bought by special interests who are funding ads supporting other candidates, including Becerra. (Becerra shot back in a recent interview that Steyer is trying to buy the office of governor.)

Hilton, meanwhile, is campaigning against the state’s Democratic leadership. In a debate hosted by CNN in May, he said that the Democratic candidates for governor “won’t take responsibility, and all they can talk about is Trump.”

“We need to change,” he said. “We need some fresh thinking after 16 years of one-party rule.”

Has Bass earned a shot at a second term?

Bass is making the case for a second term in the city that will host the 2028 Olympics. And while she acknowledges her tenure has at times been bumpy and bureaucratic barriers have slowed her down, she touts reductions in homelessness and homicides.

The former state Assembly speaker and US House member said in a recent interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson that her experience also separates her from Raman and Pratt.

“You cannot run the nation’s second-largest city without intimate knowledge, long-standing relationships, and collaboration on every level of government,” she said.

Her two main rivals, Pratt and Raman, would pose drastically different challenges in a general election.

Raman is a democratic socialist who would take Bass on from the left — a race that could evoke comparisons to last year’s New York mayoral election, when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination over a more moderate figure with deeper ties to the Democratic establishment, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani then again fended off Cuomo, this time running as an independent, in the general election.

Pratt — who insists he isn’t running on a partisan platform — is channeling a much more visceral anger with the way things are going in Los Angeles. He’s an ever-present figure across social media platforms and a pro-Pratt filmmaker who does not work for his campaign created a viral video portraying him as Batman, taking on Bass — portrayed as the Joker — with Los Angeles residents pelting the state’s most prominent Democratic figures with tomatoes. Pratt has shared that, and other supportive videos, on social media.

Pratt insists that fixing Los Angeles’ decades-old challenges with drug use, homelessness and crime is simple — and comes down to much more aggressively enforcing already-existing laws. He said homeless residents who are addicted to drugs would be taken to a new facility for mandatory treatment and workforce training and said the facility would be partially privately funded. (Experts have questioned the cost and feasibility of his proposals.)

“It’s going to be somewhere where people go, and they say, ‘Thank God for Spencer,’” he said. “This is the greatest thing in the United States of America. Everyone needs to copy this model.”

What could limit Pratt’s electoral upside, though, is the reality that he is a registered Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. Four years ago, Bass’ advertising focused on the Republican history of her rival in that election, billionaire developer Rick Caruso.

“I am not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician. I am a fighter for the people,” Pratt said.

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