California’s Future – Tom Steyer, the Oxymoronic Progressive Oligarch
It seems impossible that a man like Tom Steyer could have a realistic chance at being one of the two top finishers in California’s June 2 jungle primary. But Steyer, like the other seven Democrats and two Republicans that are running viable campaigns in the crowded race, doesn’t have to appeal to a very large percentage of voters to come out in first or second place. He’s up against several politicians with durable constituencies, splitting the vote so thoroughly that it is conceivable that the top performer could win with only around 20 percent of the vote.
In this unusual situation, two things will matter more than they already do: money and a competent campaign. Steyer has enough money to go toe-to-toe with any other candidate. And he is running a very, very effective campaign. In 2010, Meg Whitman proved that money alone won’t buy a gubernatorial election. As a moderate Republican woman, Whitman checked all the boxes GOP consultants insisted might induce a majority of voters to elect her as California’s next governor. Instead, Whitman managed to squander $177 million on a campaign that bought her a whopping 40.1 percent of the vote. This is preposterously inept. In 2022, the GOP’s Brian Dahle faced Newsom in the general election. Given no chance to win, Dahle only raised $2.5 million yet managed to attract 40.8 percent of the vote.
Clearly, campaigns are not just about money, but when money is spent wisely, it’s everything. Steyer’s primary media strategist is Rebecca Katz, who was instrumental in several decisive upsets, including De Blasio winning the NYC mayor’s race in 2013, Fetterman’s unexpected Senate upset in 2022, and Ruben Gallego’s 2024 Senate victory in Arizona. The competence shows. Steyer’s television commercials are working, and since he’s willing to burn through something like $200,000 every time one of his 30-second ads airs on primetime across every major media market in the state, his rise in the polls should come as no surprise.
But everything Tom Steyer’s doing exemplifies what has to be one of the most cynical alignments in modern political history. Steyer has secured the endorsements of three powerful unions: the United Domestic Workers, representing 250,000 home care and child care workers; the California School Employees Association, also representing an estimated 250,000 workers in school support services such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and custodians; and the California Nurses Association, which has more than 100,000 members.
It’s important to step back and examine the political agenda of these unions, most of which represent public sector workers. These unions are controlled by a hard-left leadership. They are party to a political agenda that, at least on the surface, would be anathema to anyone committed to a competitive capitalist economy. They support higher taxes, forced unionization, and escalating restrictions and regulations of private businesses. If there is anything that would epitomize everything they despise, both ideologically and emotionally, it would be hedge funds. And yet Tom Steyer’s billions of dollars in personal wealth came from his role as founder of San Francisco-based hedge fund Farallon Capital.
Steyer’s alliance with these unions is inexplicable unless we peek behind the facade of Big Labor and Big Finance being inherently opposed to each other’s respective economic agendas. The phony antagonism hides an identity of interests, united by a common objective: the destruction of the middle class and small businesses. For these unions, which are communist in all but name, California’s middle class is stereotyped and resented as white boomers, beneficiaries of unearned privilege and systemic racism, consuming far more than their share of resources and possessing far more wealth than it deserves. As for small businesses, they are perceived as dangerously unregulated open shops where workers are exploited, and owners harvest obscene profits on the backs of workers. None of this is balanced, fair, or accurate, but it plays well in labor negotiations.
For the corporate special interests that Steyer is intimately part of, the union agenda fits perfectly into their own agenda of consolidation and control. As union-sponsored regulatory excess smothers the ability of small businesses to survive, large corporations thrive. The compliance regimes that require full-time attorneys, environmental consultants, and a human resources bureaucracy are well beyond the ability of a small business to pay for and still remain profitable, whereas large corporations can allocate a small percentage of their cost overhead to these additional requirements and pass the slightly elevated costs on to their customers, while at the same time rolling up the assets of destroyed small competitors for pennies on the dollar.
Steyer is also aligning himself with the extreme environmentalist lobby in a gambit that, for all his possible sincerity, is also a natural economic match for corporate behemoths. California’s landmark 2006 “Global Warming Solutions Act” is the centerpiece in an agenda that has allowed unelected directors at regulatory agencies, such as the California Air Resources Board, to absolutely strangle the ability to construct homes, build roads, keep natural gas-fueled power plants open, invest in practical water supply infrastructure, or drill, extract, transport, and refine crude oil. The fanatics running these agencies have all but destroyed California’s timber industry, while at the same time effectively prohibiting any other forms of forest thinning, such as prescribed burns. Instead, superfires consume millions of acres of overgrown forests every summer; then, as the air statewide becomes too foul to breathe, we are reminded that it is a “carbon-neutral” conflagration and that if only we all drove EVs, the fires would subside.
This is madness. “Carbon accounting” is now a major industry, utterly parasitic and offering a sad distraction from genuine environmental challenges. But assessing and controlling the “carbon impact” of literally every form of economic activity in California is a perfect way to expand government and taxes, grow the headcount of unionized, dues-paying government employees, and, crucially, increase the role of politically connected corporate partners, often heavily subsidized, that can absorb the regulatory onslaught while every small entrepreneurial homebuilder, construction contractor, water agency, energy utility, or disfavored refinery owner or drilling rig operator either adapts, if they can afford to, or dies. Steyer’s entire political identity is oriented toward enforcing this oppressive scheme. The idea that anything he proposes will make California more affordable, or benefit anyone apart from the biggest corporations and the biggest labor unions, is laughable.
The problems with Steyer’s political agenda are nearly endless. He supports “split roll” property tax “reform,” wherein every commercial property will be subject to annual reassessments. This plays well with the populist Left, but it ignores the fact that protection from property tax reassessments is the only competitive advantage left for small family businesses in California. If Steyer gets his way on this, expect to see family-owned, magnificent legacy restaurants and retail businesses, pillars of communities and neighborhoods, with disciplined, debt-free balance sheets and protected from punitive, perpetually reassessed annual taxation on their real estate, suddenly become insolvent. If Tom Steyer guts California’s property tax protections, independent venues for food and commerce will die, and all the cultural beauty they nourish will be exterminated in the process.
Tom Steyer is possibly the most dangerous man in California today. Drawing from his own personal wealth, he has virtually unlimited campaign cash. He has secured the endorsements of some of the most powerful, radical labor unions in the state, most of them from the public sector, and there is a good chance some of the remaining union power brokers—the California Teachers Association comes immediately to mind—will recognize his viability and add their weight to his union coalition. And Steyer has a campaign staff that knows what it’s doing. Don’t be surprised if Tom Steyer breaks out from the pack and ends up on the November 2026 ballot. And if he becomes California’s next governor, his alliance of big labor, big corporate, and financial special interests will crush whatever remains of small businesses and competitive entrepreneurship.
Steyer’s value proposition is to “build a million homes” and “fight the corporations.” But his true agenda is to kill the market-driven corporations that offer affordable, competitive products and services, while subsidizing the crony corporations and NGOs that build “affordable housing” at disgustingly inflated costs, offer “renewables” at similarly exorbitant prices, and ration the consumption of energy and water in order to inflate the value of every energy- and water-producing asset in the state, assets that will systematically migrate into the hands of hedge funds.
Steyer’s entire campaign is a fraud. It has nothing to do with making California affordable again and everything to do with rewarding the most elite strata of the state. He is a menace, not only because of his hypocrisy but also because of his competence. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he may have even convinced himself that he’s doing God’s work. But God help us all if he actually wins in November.
Next week, Hilton vs. Bianco: Mutually Assured Destruction?
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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