The next California gubernatorial primary isn’t for the better part of another 34 months, but why not take a quick look at the men and women who hope to succeed a term-limited Gavin Newsom?
After all, the field has begun to take shape—on the Democratic side, at least.
Definitely planning on a 2026 run: Eleni Kounalakis, California’s current lieutenant governor (her husband, Markos, is a Hoover visiting fellow), and Betty Yee, a former state controller and current vice chair of the California Democratic Party.
Reportedly thinking it over: Rob Bonta, California’s state attorney general, and Tony Thurmond, the current state superintendent of public instruction.
And potentially complicating matters in the unlikely chance that any decide they want Newsom’s job: at least three prominent California Democrats with a chance to shake up the race (we’ll get to those three in a moment).
I won’t bother with handicapping the field—that’s best left for polling as we edge closer to California’s June 2026 primary. Instead, let’s look at what, if any, institutional advantages the candidates enjoy.
Here, Kounalakis seemingly has a leg up thanks to one of the great ironies of California politics: while the job she holds is hardly the most powerful in Sacramento (it’s not a coincidence that Kounalakis’s media feed is heavy on “visits” and “tours” as opposed to policy deeds and pronouncements), the title of lieutenant governor has a ring of gravitas with voters. That partially explains why the last two Democratic lieutenant governors who ran in regularly scheduled gubernatorial races—Newsom and Gray Davis—were successful in their quests (Cruz Bustamante, at the time a sitting lieutenant governor, finished second in California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election).
That two former Democratic “lite guvs” managed to attain the highest office in the Golden State provides Kounalakis with a second advantage: road maps.
How did Davis win his gubernatorial primary back in 1998? By playing the part of an understated insider, while his deep-pocketed, self-financed rivals engaged in a rock fight. As for Newsom, his path to success came about by embracing ballot referenda—cannabis legalization, gun restrictions—that resonated with his party’s progressive base.
Perhaps Kounalakis goes the Davis route, staying out of the fray while her fellow Democrats trade insults. To date, Kounalakis’s approach to self-promotion differs from Newsom’s in that she hasn’t been the public face of controversial measures. The highest-profile moment of her tenure as lieutenant governor? Maybe this historical footnote: in April 2022, and while serving as acting governor while Newsom was out of the state, becoming the first woman to sign a bill into California law.
And that takes us to what arguably is Kounalakis’s biggest challenge during the preamble to the 2026 governor’s race: proving she has the skills and experience to handle the complicated job that is managing California’s state government.
By the time of his successful gubernatorial run in 2018, Newsom could point to two terms each as California’s lieutenant governor and San Francisco’s mayor. Davis, running two decades prior, had served as lieutenant governor, state controller, and Assembly member.
Then again, a thin political resume isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker with California voters: Jerry Brown was elected governor in 1974 with only one term as California’s secretary of state under his belt. But timing (a Watergate-era electorate suspicious of establishment politicians) worked to Brown’s advantage. “I think people appreciate someone in government being honest with them,” Brown said early in his first term. “And telling them this is the way it’s going to be, instead of promising rosy tomorrows with no pain and no sacrifice, because that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Remember those words—“pain” and “sacrifice”—come the time Democratic special-interest groups have to decide which gubernatorial hopeful to back. Teachers’ unions spent heavily in 2018 making sure that Thurmond prevailed over a less conformist riva,l while organized labor championed Bonta’s run in 2022. Will the same players rally behind one candidate, or will they “play the field,” i.e., spread the money among multiple candidates in the hopes that not one but two Democrats advance to the general election, as was the case in 2018?
Such financial considerations are a matter of political hardball. Meanwhile, there’s a question of whether the 2026 governor’s race will office a curveball—a later entry who shapes up the field.
One consideration: geography. Bonta, Kounalakis, Thurmond, and Yee all have political roots in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s not a prominent Southern California Democrat in the lot (this is a familiar complaint in state Democratic circles).
Who, then, to add some geographical diversity to the race?
Here are three possibilities (none of whom will likely run):
First, senator Alex Padilla. There’s precedent: Pete Wilson, at the time a second-term US senator, was elected as California’s 36th governor in 1990. Besides, as you’ll see in his Senate press releases, Padilla is fond of California-centric topics, unlike those senators who become more globalist the longer they serve in Washington.
A second longshot: Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. As the first woman to run California’s largest city, a Bass candidacy would be an act of political defiance—Los Angeles mayors have been cursed in trying to add new chapters to their political careers. Besides, it’s not as if Bass lacks for present challenges, such as a contentious Hollywood labor strike.
A third and even more remote possibility: vice president Kamala Harris (this assumes the Biden-Harris ticket loses next year and she’s looking for political employment).
It’s happened once before in California history—a former vice president running for governor two years after losing a national election. Although, it wasn’t a storybook ending. In 1962, Richard Nixon lost to Pat Brown, Jerry Brown’s father—Nixon’s campaign ending with his infamous “last press conference” (Nixon, in no mood for dealing with reporters that day, told an aide on the way to the podium: “Losing California after losing the presidency—well, it’s like being bitten by a mosquito after being bitten by a rattlesnake”).
About Nixon’s “last” appearance in Los Angeles over sixty years ago: it took place at the Beverly Hilton, which up until a few days ago was the site of this week’s Democratic Governors Association’s summer policy conference.
That conference would seem a plum opportunity for aspiring California governors to rub elbows with what would hopefully be future peers, much less for the current governor to showcase his policy agenda.
But that conference came with a catch: Beverly Hilton employees have been on strike this summer, joining thousands of other hotel workers in Los Angeles and Orange County who’ve engaged in rolling walkouts. Had the two-day event stayed at the venue (it’s since been relocated to the downtown Westin Bonaventure), Newsom and his fellow Democrats would have been forced to decide whether to attend the meetings or make good on promises not to cross a picket line.
For aspiring California Democrats, it’s an unwritten rule for going about party business: don’t dignify hotels in the midst of a labor dispute. Just as the party’s elite do their best to stay out of impasses pitting organized labor versus the high-end donor class (this is one reason why Newsom—and his wife, an actress and documentary filmmaker—have kept low profiles during the Hollywood strike). Along those lines, California Democrats typically have avoided doing business at the Sacramento’s downtown Hyatt Regency, as it’s a nonunion establishment (Arnold Schwarzenegger lived in the same hotel, which is across the street from the State Capitol, during his eight years as governor).
If that sounds complicated, welcome to the tricky world of campaigning for the highest elected office in California—tricky both for the candidates and for the special interests that hope to bet on the winning horse.
