California’s Future – Elaine Culotti’s Independent Vision
California is a one-party state. Gubernatorial elections have been predictable rituals. But not this time.
In less than four weeks, California’s protracted voting process begins. Ballots will be mailed to every registered voter on May 4, and nearly two months later, on July 2, voting results will be officially certified. If this is a typical election cycle, a Democrat will win the primary, then go on to decisively win the general election. But 2026 is not a typical election year.
The coalition that has controlled California politics for decades is fracturing. The model is broken. Over-regulation has made it impossible for private companies to provide affordable products and services, and the progressive response has been to impose even more regulations and more taxes to fill the gap with government programs and subsidies. It doesn’t work. Prices rise again. The gap widens. This is California’s doom loop. Across every issue—housing, energy, water, forest management, crime, education—progressives have claimed that if only there were more taxes and more regulations, their failed approaches would finally succeed.
Voters aren’t buying it anymore, and in response, for the first time ever, the ruling party has splintered into factions. Steyer, Swalwell, Porter, and Mahan all have substantial backing. Becerra, Villaraigosa, Thurmond, and Yee, despite lacking significant donor support, command small but loyal constituencies. And against a fractured Democrat field, Republican candidates Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco both show voter support that is higher than any of the Democrats.
Into this unusual race, Elaine Culotti has entered as an independent candidate. At 61, she is a real estate developer and farmer and, in 2021, was a star in season 2 of Discovery Channel’s Undercover Billionaire. As noted on her campaign website, she has lived in the state since 1991 and built businesses while paying substantial taxes. Through her recent “Mayors Matter” initiative, she interviewed dozens of mayors across California.
As an independent who didn’t officially enter the race until mid-February, Culotti doesn’t have a lot of time. But in a wide-open race where polling has yet to show any candidate with even 20 percent support and undecided voters are polling as high as 25 percent, anything can happen.
In a state where, now more than ever, voters are searching for new ideas, Culotti offers solutions to problems that other candidates rarely address in detail. These include streamlining disaster recovery, fixing unfair sales tax allocation, and an alternative to the proposed billionaire wealth tax.
For example, since the 2025 fires destroyed about 16,000 structures in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Malibu, the cleanup is still unfinished, and local landfills are overwhelmed. Culotti proposes using the never-opened $500 million Puente Hills Intermodal Facility, owned by the Los Angeles Sanitation District, to move debris by rail to the Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial County. This site holds a 100-year permit and has 600 million tons of capacity. Union Pacific has approved the route, and the landfill is only 12 miles from Altadena and 34 miles from the Palisades. Culotti claims her plan could finish the remaining cleanup far faster than current methods while saving billions of dollars.
To support faster rebuilding in Pacific Palisades, Culotti advocates creating a Pacific Palisades Community Services District. This would give the community greater local control over services, including parks and infrastructure. Formation would require petitions and a two-thirds voter majority within the Palisades. It could open a path toward greater autonomy or even de-annexation from Los Angeles. Culotti has suggested Mayor Karen Bass endorse the idea, and that Rick Caruso’s Steadfast LA nonprofit could handle day-to-day management, drawing on its existing recovery work. The district would suspend the Measure ULA mansion tax locally and grandfather pre-fire zoning to speed rebuilding.
These ideas cut to the heart not only of what’s delaying recovery from the January 2025 fires, where even now only a handful of structures have been fully rebuilt more than a year later due to permitting delays, but also serve as a model for how reforms can streamline permitting throughout California at the local, regional, and state levels, where process is prioritized over results, and developers waste billions of dollars and decades of time navigating the swamp of litigation and bureaucracy.
Culotti has also addressed problems in sales tax collection and allocation under the Bradley-Burns law. California recorded roughly $750 billion in retail sales in 2024, according to federal data. Online purchases likely represent 30 percent or more of spending, potentially as high as $250 billion annually, yet estimates based on census data claim only $138 billion. This leaves a possible gap of up to $112 billion. In Los Angeles, the city collects about $650 million from the one percent local Bradley-Burns tax based on $65–70 billion in reported sales. But this is because fulfillment centers route much of the revenue to warehouse counties instead. Culotti claims that Amazon alone may add $35 billion to $57 billion in the Los Angeles market. Other sellers, like Temu, Alibaba, and direct-ship vendors, complicate tracking further. To bring badly needed sales tax revenue back to California cities, Culotti argues Sacramento needs to implement more accurate modeling and calls for either a destination-based allocation or a 50–50 split to restore fairness to residential communities.
Her most ambitious idea is the Great American Credit Union. It offers a voluntary alternative to the proposed 5 percent billionaire tax on unrealized gains. California has an estimated 214 billionaires with an estimated net worth in excess of $2 trillion. Instead of a one-time levy of 5 percent, contributors would provide long-dated loans of cash or securities. They would receive a modest 2 percent fixed coupon plus profit participation. These funds would be used to support small businesses in California through $500,000 loans, potentially creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Funds would also go into market-rate investments aiming for 7 percent (or more) annual returns. Additional portions would finance public–private infrastructure partnerships managed by experienced builders, and, also, investments would be made in California-based trade schools. The credit union would be member-owned, with billionaires holding shares based on contributions. A mixed board and private-sector oversight would limit political interference. Bids would favor California companies to keep economic benefits local.
To describe the advantages of having private-sector billionaires fund the Great American Credit Union, Culotti uses a Las Vegas analogy: the house backs the best players to win. She believes private discipline can succeed where state bureaucracy has failed. Culotti’s plan also calls for tort reform to ease litigation burdens on small businesses.
These proposals are creative but come with obvious challenges. The rail plan requires a level of cooperation that conflicts with California’s bureaucratic and litigious political culture. The Community Services District proposal will come with lengthy legal fights against entrenched opposition. Sales tax reforms face powerful special interests that will resist changing current allocation rules.
Probably the most innovative of Culotti’s proposals is the Great American Credit Union. It addresses what is perhaps the most fundamental challenge facing Californians: Even in cases where we can still agree on what infrastructure projects are most urgent, there isn’t enough money. Could this work? If California’s billionaires are faced with a wealth tax, and investing in the GACU is offered as an alternative, will they take it? Or will they follow so many before them and simply move to Texas, Florida, or some other state that hasn’t yet declared war on private wealth? Moreover, attractive returns on infrastructure projects are difficult to achieve.
To Culotti’s credit, nobody, not even the brilliant GOP candidate Steve Hilton, whose policy proposals are transformative and comprehensive, has completely answered the trillion-dollar question: Where do we get the next trillion dollars to rebuild and reinvent the state’s infrastructure?
Culotti is advancing fresh ideas in a campaign season short on innovation. The progressive political machine that runs California offers nothing. They’re the reason infrastructure projects are perpetually stalled, and they’re the reason the state is broke. None of the Democrats running for governor have any idea how to fix the broken system, and even if they did, the system owns them, and the system doesn’t want to get fixed. As for the two Republican candidates, their ideas are sound, but the probability that a majority of voters will support either of them in November is vanishingly low.
Elaine Culotti entered the race for governor relatively late. Her challenge is to overtake candidates who have earned visibility by campaigning much longer. It’s possible that Culotti’s policy ideas, if she does establish momentum, may be most likely to attract votes from moderate-leaning independent voters who’ve had it with the Democrats. That might actually help a GOP candidate advance to the general election, particularly if Republican voters recognize that Chad Bianco has absolutely zero chance to win in a general election and shift their support to Hilton.
No matter what happens, along with Steve Hilton, Culotti brings to the race an intelligence and a willingness to embrace complexity that have been missing from California politics for far too long.
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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