Xavier Becerra was polling at 3% weeks ago. Now, days before California's 2 June primary, he's locked in a three-way fight with billionaire Tom Steyer and Trump-endorsed Fox News personality Steve Hilton for the top two slots in the state's jungle primary. The trajectory tells you everything about the race: nobody planned this, nobody controls it, and the party's structural dysfunction is the protagonist. The field is a consequence of sequential absences. Kamala Harris declined to run for governor after losing the presidency to Trump. Alex Padilla passed. Rob Bonta passed. What remained was a roster of credentialed Democrats — Swalwell, Porter, Villaraigosa, Yee, Thurmond, Mahan, and more — none commanding more than 20% support. Then Swalwell, who had been consolidating endorsements, imploded after multiple women alleged sexual misconduct and assault. He denied the allegations, ended his campaign, and resigned from Congress. The field fractured again. The result is a contest that maps the party's internal contradictions with unusual clarity. Steyer, a billionaire investor, has become the progressive standard-bearer, winning backing from Our Revolution and a tepid nod from the Democratic Socialists of America. Becerra, a former attorney general who filed 122 lawsuits against the Trump administration in its first term, is running on institutional credentials with Planned Parenthood's endorsement and Jasmine Crockett's star-power assist. Meanwhile, Steve Hilton — British-born, Trump-endorsed — campaigns on "fresh thinking after 16 years of one-party rule." As Jodi Hicks of Planned Parenthood wrote: socialists backing a billionaire, MAGA backing an immigrant. Mike Madrid, former political director of the California Republican party, diagnosed the core problem: "The Democratic party has defined itself almost entirely on what it is against and not what it's for." The state party convention in San Francisco earlier this year deadlocked on an endorsement. The California Federation of Labor Unions hedged with a multi-candidate endorsement of Steyer, Porter, and Villaraigosa. DNC chair Ken Martin acknowledged the risk of Democrats "shooting ourselves in the foot." These are not signals of a party that knows what it wants. Beneath the candidate carousel is California's affordability crisis — the structural question the race should be about but mostly isn't. Ruby Ortega, a 50-year-old veteran working as a healthcare aide in east Los Angeles, can't pay rent or gas. Lorena Gonzalez of the state labor federation argued the state must "take on the current economic system" so "the rest of the nation can see that it's possible." The ambition is real. The mechanism for delivering it — which candidate, which coalition, which theory of governance — remains unresolved. Republicans are probing the opening. Hilton's ads splice images of Newsom, Harris, and LA mayor Karen Bass with promises to make California "golden again." In Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt — the reality TV figure who lost his home in the Palisades fire — is running against Bass for mayor, channeling the same anti-establishment current that elected Zohran Mamdani in New York. Most observers call Pratt a longshot, but his viability as a candidate at all reflects the depth of voter frustration. California's voters aren't likely to go Republican — they overwhelmingly passed Prop 50 in November to redraw congressional maps in response to a Trump-backed gerrymander in Texas. But the party's inability to consolidate around a vision, a candidate, or even a coherent theory of its own purpose means the world's fourth-largest economy heads into its most consequential election in a generation with a field that one national strategist compared to "a minor league baseball game when you thought you had a ticket to the World Series." Dan Schnur of USC put it plainly: there is no precedent in modern California political history for a field this big or this amorphous.
