From Willie Brown to billionaire politics: What happened to California Democrats? | Opinion
At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the party faced a crisis. Willie Brown, who would later become speaker of the California State Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, was then a young Black California legislator challenging Democrats to do better.
“Give me back my delegation,” Brown famously commanded after party leaders moved to strip California’s delegation of its voices and votes on the convention floor.
Brosn’s effort was meant to pull more voices into the Democratic Party, not fewer.
More than a half century later, the California Democratic Party has spent its time and money undermining new voices trying to reshape the party beyond a white and wealthy establishment.
And what of Brown? He endorsed Tom Steyer, a white billionaire, to be governor of California. What does the California Democratic Party stand for?
The 2026 gubernatorial primary has been a managed exercise in institutional self-preservation, all at the expense of working-class people, ethnic and racial minorities and grassroots activists.
Organized labor and progressives aligned with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders — movements that have argued that billionaires represent a fundamental threat to democratic life -- have lined up behind Steyer.
Some environmental organizations are also backing Steyer, who made his fortune running a hedge fund that invested heavily in coal exploitation and oil development.
Establishment Black and brown political voices are endorsing Steyer, who made millions investing in private prisons. The institutions built to represent working people have replaced conviction with calculation, and it shows.
Steyer’s decision to sell campaign merchandise emblazoned with “class traitor” and position himself as the only billionaire willing to fight billionaires, has landed with the thud of an accidental confession about everyone else in the room.
The actual class traitors are the political voices claiming to stand for working people, progressive endorsers, and party operatives who spent institutional capital on the candidate with the largest checkbook.
It gets worse when you consider how the California Democratic Party has chosen to spend its money.
Rather than investing in voter education, community outreach, or building the kind of broad coalition that a majority-minority state with seven million people lacking basic needs,Democrats spent its money commissioning polls specifically designed to pressure candidates into dropping out of the race for governor.
It was research deployed against the party’s own candidates, in service of narrowing the field to a predetermined outcome.
Worse, it used political data to frighten voters and candidates into believing that if they didn’t drop out, two Republicans would lock Democrats out of the governor’s race.
Those choices were not made on behalf of the farmworkers, warehouse workers, and home health aides who form the working backbone of California’s economy.
They were made on behalf of the professional political class, donor relationships, institutional arrangements, and power structures that have accumulated inside the party over decades of one-party dominance and that have every incentive to keep things exactly as they are.
Californians have held onto their ballots because they have been calculating how to prevent the wrong kind of runoff.
They are voting against an outcome rather than for a candidate or an idea, and that’s a damning indictment on the state of California’s democracy. It is also the logical endpoint of a party without a thesis. When you stand for nothing specific, your voters have nothing specific to stand for either.
They can only stand against something. They exist only by what they oppose. California has the highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate in the nation. More than half of children in California from birth to five qualify for Medicaid.
The state’s median income looks prosperous until you price a one-bedroom apartment in any coastal community. There is no shortage of things California Democrats should stand for.
A housing market that working families can survive. Wages that keep pace with the cost of living. Schools that have been allowed to erode. Healthcare that doesn’t depend on which Zip Code you were born in. These were the promises the party once made to working people in exchange for their loyalty, and that they have been quietly walking away from for years.
The party that stood, often heroically, against President Donald Trump has allowed that opposition to become its dominant identity.
Being against something is not a governing philosophy. The Californians living in poverty are not waiting for the Democratic Party to figure out its runoff math.
They are waiting for someone to make an argument — a real one, grounded in conviction rather than calculation about what this state should be for them.
In 1972, Willie Brown stood up loudly and boldly. Today, he’s the party power broker telling us the solution is to pick a billionaire and in the process silencing the working class minority voices he used to elevate. Give me back my delegation, indeed.
Mike Madrid is a political analyst and a special correspondent for McClatchy Media.
This story was originally published June 1, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "From Willie Brown to billionaire politics: What happened to California Democrats? | Opinion."