California’s Future – Matt Mahan, the Bogus Conservative Whisperer
In less than two months, voting by mail will begin in California’s midterm primary election. The actual Election Day of June 2 is illusory. By May 4, hordes of ballot harvesters will hit the streets from San Diego to Crescent City, armed with the finest microtargeting tools ever deployed. They will scour every neighborhood and canvass every precinct, finding the votes they need in college classrooms, homeless encampments, prisons, and retirement homes. For voters who didn’t register, they’ll be armed with same-day registration forms and provisional ballots. They’ll pound the pavement until the last hour of the last day, securing victory for their side in all but the most lopsided races.
In California, managed democracy is a product of applied science, with outcomes governed more by algorithms and money than by serious policy debate. But in the one-party state, something’s a bit off this year. There are too many viable candidates, none of whom are willing to back down and drop out. In fact, in an unprecedented display of disunity, on February 22, California’s Democratic Party failed to endorse a candidate during their state convention.
California’s race to determine who will become the state’s next governor is a very large microcosm of what’s happening to the Democratic Party in America. Each Democratic candidate fills an iconic political stereotype and attracts a durable constituency of voters. There’s former state attorney general Xavier Becerra, courting the Latino vote and presenting himself as an experienced political insider who can get things done. Splitting the Latino vote is veteran Antonio Villaraigosa, who gained a reputation as a pragmatic politician while serving as mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013.
The list goes on. There is the unforgettable former member of Congress, Katie Porter, who, when she isn’t discrediting herself with on-camera tirades, appeals to progressive women and “anti-corporate” voters. Eric Swalwell, still serving in the U.S. Congress, has gained a large following primarily based on his anti-Trump vitriol and his carefully contrived tough-guy persona. Then there’s California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who built his career by doing whatever the powerful California Teachers Association told him to do, and Betty Yee, who courts Asian American voters while claiming her tenure as state controller gives her the skills to solve the state’s structural budget deficits.
All of these candidates have sufficient funding to wage a campaign through June 2. And all of them are part of a Democratic machine that, even as it spins into warring fragments, shares one thing in common: None of these politicians will make the changes necessary to fix California. Every one of them will stay the course, raising taxes, pandering to every whim of the reigning public sector unions, embracing every job-killing, opportunity-destroying regulation attendant to the “climate emergency,” and pouring additional billions into failed policies to address the homeless, housing, crime, education, energy, water, wildfire protection, transportation, and mass transit.
Under the leadership of any one of these politicians, California will lumber onward into the 21st century, an economic giant beset with parasites. These failed policies, all the product of the special interest consortium that rules the state, represent its political center of gravity. Once one of them is installed as the state’s next governor, the spinning political wheel will reel in its warring fragments, and for the progressive elites, life will return to normal.
California’s future is America’s future if the governing model that defines the state is allowed to go national. And it may be that the aforementioned candidates for governor are such easily discredited caricatures, at least on the national stage, that what they offer cannot be replicated in the rest of the country. But there are two more Democrat candidates vying to ascend to the November general election as their party’s representative. And they are dangerous because they are running smart campaigns. They are also dangerous because they represent an intensified version of what California’s political economy has always been. They epitomize the marriage of massive corporate and financial wealth with Big Government, relying on populist rhetoric to seduce voters. The climate emergency. Systemic racism. The “wealth gap.” Fighting bigotry. Fighting for the rights of women and people of color. Helping the poor. Helping the homeless. Fighting corporations. And so on. The policies fail, but the rhetoric works.
These two candidates are Tom Steyer and Matt Mahan. Both are dark-horse contenders that weren’t in the conversation a few months ago but are rapidly becoming visible. Both are adroitly positioning themselves as populist but practical, principled but moderate. And both of them have the capacity to spend tens of millions on their campaigns. Let’s start with Matt Mahan.
If you watched the February 3, 2026, gubernatorial debate, you would have noticed San Jose mayor Matt Mahan, perhaps for the first time. For voters looking for someone new, Mahan seems to check a lot of boxes. Articulate, authentic, bursting with common sense, willing to be candid, willing to stand up to extremists and grifters, resolutely centrist—what’s not to like?
For members of the Silicon Valley tech community, Mahan’s becoming the preferred choice, attracting a posse of billionaire donors that includes Sergey Brin (Google cofounder), Rick Caruso (who almost—almost—beat Karen Bass to become the mayor of Los Angeles), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir cofounder), Steve Jurvetson (SpaceX board member), and many other extremely wealthy titans of tech.
The betting markets are also recognizing Mahan’s potential, with Polymarket and Kalshi putting Mahan into second place behind Eric Swalwell, and PredictIt placing him third, just behind Tom Steyer. While the leader among all three political oddsmakers is Swalwell, he faces allegations that his supporters are buying bets on him to distort the odds in his favor. Notwithstanding the possibility that Swalwell’s odds are cooked, betting markets have established an impressive record of accuracy. Mahan’s candidacy is to be taken seriously.
This is a problem. Matt Mahan is not the moderate he claims to be, and to the extent he attracts votes from independents or even disaffected centrist Democrats, he undermines the chances that any right-of-center candidates will advance to the general election. For that matter, Mahan could surge in popularity based on his skillful in-person presentation and emerge as the “reasonable” alternative in November. For anyone hoping for lower taxes and more responsible government, this would be a disaster.
Mahan’s strategy is simple: leverage tens of millions in campaign cash to market himself statewide as a moderate that we can live with before the truth comes out, which is that during his tenure so far as San Jose mayor, he has been an avid supporter of every misguided tax scheme the local Left has cooked up since he’s been in office. To quote from informed local opponents (who wish to remain anonymous), “Mahan’s record is a litany of linking arms with economically illiterate schemes to raid our pocketbooks.”
These are not unfounded accusations. Mahan supported state ballot Proposition 5, which would’ve weakened Prop 13 taxpayer protections. Fortunately, in November 2024, county and state voters rejected Prop. 5. He supported the Bay Area’s RM4 Regional housing tax—a grotesque sop to the Homeless Industrial Complex—right up to the moment it had to be withdrawn due to ballot language falsehoods. He supported Santa Clara County’s Measure A in November, a deeply misguided bailout of the county’s bankrupt hospital system. He supports Senate Bill 63, a bailout for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, the county’s disgraced, dysfunctional transit agency, often cited as the worst-performing transit agency in the country. And while his political ambitions preclude him from supporting California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax, he nonetheless supports a federal wealth tax.
When Matt Mahan stands before voters and speaks in a carefully modulated tone, uttering what appear to be eminently reasonable ideas, remember his record. Mahan, for all his posturing as someone who is uniquely qualified to govern from the center, is a tax-and-spend liberal. His moderate persona is a political calculation that is belied by his actions as mayor of San Jose.
Whether or not Mahan’s record will catch up with him is an even bet. Because all he has to do is earn credibility as the least bad option that has a chance to win. That’s a low barrier. And no matter the outcome, Mahan is not going to improve California’s governance. Either he will attract enough votes to spoil the chances for other—possibly better—candidates, or he will actually win and govern California the way he governed San Jose.
Next week, Tom Steyer.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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