California governor’s race: One candidate best understands working families | Analysis
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- This CA governor candidate stressed stabilizing working families to enable mobility.
- California would be Medi‑Cal backstop, ensuring providers are paid, this candidate says.
- Many CA residents work full-time but still qualify for Medi-Cal and CalFresh.
In the Jim Crow South, my father built houses; my mother cleaned them. Together, they supported 10 children, stretching modest wages with a garden, fruit trees and chickens raised for eggs and the dinner table.
I hear echoes of their story every week in the people I cover: hospital admitting clerks sleeping in parking garages between shifts, retail workers one car repair away from eviction and grandparents raising grandchildren on fixed incomes.
So when the McClatchy Media’s California editorial board interviewed candidates for governor of California, I listened for whether they truly understood the knife-edge economics of working-class life.
Some candidates get it:
The only woman still running for governor, former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, showed a ready command of the pressures crushing middle and working-class families.
Billionaire Tom Steyer emphasized inequality and wealthy redistribution.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan focused on government dysfunction and homelessness.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa emphasized job growth.
Some candidates don’t get it:
Republican Steve Hilton spoke about labor force participation, personal responsibility and getting people off welfare. But he spent far less time addressing the growing number of Californians who work full-time and still cannot afford housing, healthcare or retirement security.
Hilton also blamed rising health care costs in part on preventable chronic diseases. He supports President Donald Trump’s budget and other measures that would reduce access to Medi-Cal coverage and primary care. He returned several times to the themes of “dependency on welfare” and making sure that “people who are able to work are doing so.”
Xavier Becerra gets it:
My parents and their peers understood something many economists now document formally: Economies work better when working people can afford to live with dignity.
The candidate who consistently returned to the practical realities facing low-income Californians was Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general.
A graduate of Sacramento’s McClatchy High School, Becerra is the son of working-class immigrants. His father worked construction. His mother was a clerical worker. When he talks about economic vulnerability, he sounds like someone who has lived close enough to instability to recognize it immediately.
Becerra’s absence of contempt
What struck me during Becerra’s interview was not soaring rhetoric. It was the absence of contempt.
Becerra spoke repeatedly about helping people stabilize their lives so they can move upward, an idea rooted in the Depression era when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed that government should create dignity and security for working people rather than lecture them about self-reliance.
A former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Becerra also spoke more directly than the other candidates about the destabilizing effect federal healthcare cuts could have on working families and local economies. He pledged that “California will be the backstop” for Medi-Cal and guaranteed that providers would be paid even as hospitals and clinics slow hiring amid fears over federal cuts.
He recognized that, in many communities, health care is economic infrastructure. A clinic closure means lost jobs, reduced stability and fewer safeguards against medical crises.
Becerra stood out even in a field that included Porter, who demonstrated a particularly sophisticated understanding of the structural forces eroding economic mobility, especially housing costs, medical debt and outsized tax burdens.
The people most dependent on public systems are often already working the hardest. They do not need lectures about grit. They need wages that cover rent, healthcare that prevents financial ruin and affordable housing near jobs.
Becerra respects working people
Becerra also appeared less interested than some candidates in using poverty as a cultural wedge issue. You cannot build durable safety net systems if large portions of the electorate have been taught to resent people who need help.
Becerra’s rise in the polls may reflect growing voter appetite for the qualities I observed in our interview: tenacity and optimism, respect for working-class struggle and a practical understanding of government. He came closest to articulating a governing philosophy rooted in economic dignity rather than ideological performance. He talked less about punishing failure than reducing instability, less about blame than cultivating resilience.
The best governors do not merely praise work. They make work pay. Economic mobility is created when working people have enough stability to plan beyond next month’s bills.
After listening to the candidates, Xavier Becerra struck me as the one who most fully understood that truth.
And for families living one emergency away from disaster, understanding is not a small thing. It is where good policy begins.
This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California governor’s race: One candidate best understands working families | Analysis."
