The Brief

Insurance is a social contract. When you sign up with State Farm or Allstate for home insurance, you confirm your membership in a community — your money will go to fix someone else’s burned or flooded home, and their money will in turn support yours. We let insurance companies sell policies on a private market, and we elect or appoint government officials to oversee that market to protect the interests of homeowners.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, but that’s not how it worked for Lynn McIntyre.

When McIntyre’s mother died in 2022, she willed McIntyre her longtime house in the “Alphabets,” a charming neighborhood not far from the coast in western Los Angeles. McIntyre and her daughter had only lived there for a year when her insurance company, Liberty Mutual, withdrew her fire coverage. She couldn’t find another private company to cover the home’s fire risk, so she enrolled in the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed “insurer of last resort,” paying another $5,000 a year in addition to her regular home insurance from Liberty.

After the Palisades Fire raged through the Alphabets in early 2025, McIntyre’s small bungalow was still standing. But it was full of smoke and ash that had crept in through vents and windows, and her belongings were stained beyond recognition by smoke. When she filed a claim with the FAIR Plan, the plan adjusters told her she was out of luck. They would pay for a temporary apartment, but nothing else.

Lynn McIntyre stands in front of her damaged home in the Alphabet Streets. McIntyre’s home suffered extensive smoke damage during the Palisades Fire, but the California FAIR Plan offered her almost no rebuilding assistance.

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Jake Bittle

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Grist

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McIntyre, who had worked for years as a real estate broker, spent months battling with 10 different adjusters and dozens of FAIR Plan representatives. It didn’t work. The employees batted her away at every turn, hiring third-party adjusters failed to get her anywhere, and her attorney professed himself confounded by FAIR’s obstinance. Even as most of her neighbors cleared their debris and started building new fire-resilient homes, many of them much larger than their old properties, her old bungalow sat stained with smoke.

It was only in late August, more than 18 months after the wildfire, that she was about to start repairing her home — not with insurance money, but with a nearly $200,000 loan from the federal government that she will someday have to pay back. To make matters worse, FAIR has been trying to cut off her apartment expenses, telling her that power and water have come back online in her area and that she needs to move back home — never mind that her house still has boarded-up windows and a scorched exterior. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual informed her this summer that they would be canceling her non-fire coverage.

“The next time a fire comes through, I'm just going to light it on fire, because I'm not going to go through this again,” McIntyre said wryly as we stood in her doorway, construction machines rattling at the other houses around us.

An aerial view of reconstruction efforts underway in Pacific Palisades after the Palisades Fire. Many residents of the community lost insurance coverage before the fire, forcing them to enroll in the California FAIR Plan.

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Qian Weizhong

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VCG via Getty Images via Grist

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Ensuring that Californians like McIntyre have access to affordable insurance falls to an elected official that many Californians have likely never heard of: the insurance commissioner. The commissioner, one of eight elected state officials in California, regulates the companies that provide fire, home, and auto coverage in the Golden State.

Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market. Now, as the current commissioner terms out, two Democratic candidates — Ben Allen and Jane Kim — have emerged claiming they can fix it. These candidates embody a debate in the Democratic Party about the best way to adapt to climate change. Allen, an established legislator representing Pacific Palisades, wants to rebuild the market, and Kim, a left-wing organizer from San Francisco, wants to ditch the idea of a private market altogether.

Whoever wins in November will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state, and other upheaval. Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm. The current crisis in the insurance market began with a series of unprecedented wildfires between 2015 and 2020. These fires scorched around 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, many in areas that had never been known to burn. Insurance companies like State Farm and Farmers had to pay out billions of dollars in claims, enough to negate the profits they had made from writing fire insurance policies over the previous two decades.

The companies believed they were charging Californians far too little, but the price of insurance isn’t elastic like the price of gasoline or paper towels. Insurers have to seek permission from the state insurance commissioner to raise their prices. California was strict about those price hikes, and it blocked insurers’ attempts to pass their post-fire bill onto the state’s homeowners. The insurance industry’s response was to ditch California. They dropped tens of thousands of customers across the state, and companies like State Farm announced they would withdraw from the state altogether and cease writing any new policies.

“There's something broken that so many of us are facing the same issues,” McIntyre said, “and they just think they can just ride roughshod right on over all of us.”

The lack of available insurance is starting to hurt the state’s economy: Around 1 in 7 California realtors said they had a home sale fall through in 2024 due to insurance issues, the state’s FAIR plan ran out of claims money last year, and average premiums could rise by 16% this year. The trend is now spreading out of the most flammable zones, and many homeowners even in low-risk areas are struggling to get insurance.

The outcome of the November election could determine the trajectory of insurance bills for millions of Californians and decide the fate of fire-prone areas around the state. The election will also serve as a bellwether for how voters in the United States want to approach the expensive and difficult process of adapting to a warming world, and whoever wins will have to turn that mandate into a policy that can offer short-term relief. This would be a daunting job under the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

A sign in front of a State Farm insurance office in Pinole, California. State Farm is one of several insurance companies that dropped policies in risky areas following California’s spate of large wildfires.

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Justin Sullivan

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The roots of the insurance crisis

The current insurance crisis is new, but its origins are very old. Over the last century, California has built millions of homes in the “wildland-urban interface,” the flammable zone outside the state’s major cities. Developers rushed out into the mountains around Lake Tahoe and the desert hills east of San Diego and built without any thought for fire mitigation, throwing up homes with wooden sidings and flammable fences on crowded lots. These are the areas that are burning up in the state’s recent wildfires, and the areas that insurers are dropping en masse.

This history of unwise development has created a bizarre situation that the scholar Carolyn Kousky has dubbed “a tale of two markets.” Prices ticked up in places that weren’t risky, like wet San Francisco and low-lying Fresno, but the market went haywire in risky areas like Malibu and the High Sierras. Nearly half of all households in high-fire-risk areas lost their insurance between 2018 and 2024. The California FAIR Plan, which was intended as a fringe supplement, became the only option for thousands of homeowners. Since 2018, it has swallowed up a huge share of policies in risky areas, growing from less than 1 to 5% of the market today. In some places, it reached 80% of market share.

In theory, California voters have some influence over their haywire insurance market. Every state has an insurance commissioner, but California is one of around a dozen states where that is an elected position. The fact that it’s elected at all is a testament to the strength of the state’s pro-consumer slant — in 1988, voters who were incensed about high car insurance prices passed a measure that turned it from an appointed position into an elected one.

In practice, this is a job no one should want. The commissioner has the power to approve or deny rate increases, and to police the industry’s compliance with state law. They also oversee the FAIR Plan, the state-backed insurer, which offers limited and expensive coverage to people like McIntyre who can’t get it on the private market. But the commissioner can’t do much else to make private insurers offer coverage or to reduce overall fire risk in wildland areas.

“The insurance commissioner has a lot of power and authority himself or herself that they should use, but the insurance commissioner alone cannot address these challenges,” said Dave Jones, who served as commissioner between 2010 and 2019.

California’s incumbent insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara, right, talks with homeowner Bruce Breslau following a 2024 public hearing in Los Angeles. Lara has faced criticism for failing to prevent private insurance companies from pulling out of risky areas.

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Robert Gauthier

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The outgoing commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has been in office for almost the entirety of the state’s fire-induced market collapse. Lara vacillated between cozying up with the insurers or clamping down on them and running the risk that they might flee the state. First he pledged to reject all insurance industry campaign money, then accepted some of that money, then appeared to cover for it by stalling on rate increases, which led insurers like State Farm to drop more policies.

Lara’s attempt at resolving the crisis was to strike a deal with the companies. He allowed them to pass on the cost of their reinsurance (or insurance for insurance companies) to customers, and he also allowed them to use forward-looking catastrophe models to predict future risk, something every other state had already allowed. That would translate to higher rates, and in return the insurers had to commit to writing more policies in the risky fire areas they wanted to abandon. But the deal turned out to be full of loopholes — insurers can meet their mandate without returning to the riskiest areas, and the state FAIR Plan has kept absorbing more market share after the Los Angeles fires in 2025. Lara said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year that the industry had “bullied” him. (His office declined interview requests, and representatives for the FAIR Plan did not respond to requests for comment.)

The next insurance commissioner

Despite the entrenched nature of the state’s insurance problems, a dozen candidates piled into the election to replace Lara. This led to a crowded primary between four Democrats, five Republicans and two independents; none of the candidates had the funding to run a full statewide campaign, and there was limited public polling. The results were surprising even to the candidates. The top two candidates who advanced to the November runoff were Democrats. In first place with around 27% was Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and Bernie Sanders ally who had pitched a government-run single-payer program for disaster insurance. In second place was Allen, the state senator who represents the Palisades and is one of the legislature’s foremost experts on insurance.

Allen and Kim agree on a lot. They both believe in simplifying typical insurance policies and forcing companies to be transparent about their spending and investment in fossil fuels. They both believe in beefing up the FAIR Plan so it would cover smoke and other damages, which would have saved McIntyre from months of confusion and delay. They have both vowed to crack down on insurers who delay and nitpick claim payments after disasters. And they have both rejected campaign contributions from the insurance industry.

Where they differ is on the question of how to get people off the FAIR Plan and stabilize the market — in other words, on the fundamental question of the state’s insurance system. Allen believes that if the state allows insurers to raise rates on risky homes, invests to harden homes in vulnerable areas, and takes a data-driven approach to measuring wildfire risk, it can entice insurers back and restore a healthy market. Kim would prefer to discard the market altogether. She proposes creating a state-run public insurance program for all homes and all disasters, replacing private companies and the FAIR Plan. Rather than doling out profits to investors, this program would spend its excess revenue to harden old homes against wildfire. Private insurance companies could still write coverage for burglary and other perils, but the state government would collect all wildfire insurance and pay out all claims, a model based on similar programs in New Zealand and France.

The philosophical debate in the election is much deeper than a question of state policies or affordability — it’s about whether the private market can protect us against climate change at all.

State Senator Ben Allen hosts a discussion with local leaders and residents to mark 100 days since the Palisades Fire.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Allen believes it can. He decided to run for commissioner after the Palisades Fire scorched a good portion of his district, plunging many of his close friends and acquaintances into a hell of displacement and insurance litigation. (Indeed, many of the Palisades homeowners I met knew him on a first-name basis, including McIntyre, who is supporting him in the election.) Even before that, he had already spent several years leading state legislative committees on insurance, energy, and wildfire risk, making him arguably the most qualified person in the state for the commissioner job.

“I think we need someone in this office who really understands climate science, who understands the markets, who understands the legislature,” he said. The Palisades Fire, he said, gave him a “level of understanding from going through the experience that is just different” — he heard about friends trying to itemize vaporized dining room furniture and saw phosphate pollution harming marine mammals in the water off his home in Santa Monica.

Rather than use the insurance commissioner post to push for a major statutory change like Kim’s public fund, Allen speaks about the commissioner as having a poder de convocatoria, a Spanish phrase that translates to “convening power.” He wants to bring together the state agencies and the insurance industry to have a real conversation about reducing fire risk and cajole the state’s market back into existence. He has just passed a bill that offers low-interest loans to homeowners who want to fire-harden their homes. He wants to pursue a sort of grand bargain with the industry, speeding up rate increase decisions while also disciplining the insurers who delay and deny claims.

Kim’s audacious proposal may be gaining more traction than Allen’s proposed compromise. She outperformed Allen in the primary in almost every county, including in his home county of Los Angeles, and given her progressive background, she did fairly well in the rural and red parts of the state. She admits her strong performance is partially “a mystery to me,” but attributes it to the fact that many voters are fed up with the insurance industry.

California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim speaks to reporters during a rally in San Francisco. Kim is pitching a single-payer disaster insurance model that would replace the private market for wildfire coverage.

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Stephen Lam

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“There's this sense of immense unfairness, and once we articulate the problem, and then on top of that, actually propose big policy ideas, I think that that resonates,” she told me. We were speaking at a home in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, where Kim was attending a fundraiser for the radical climate activism group Climate Defiance.

Some experts are skeptical of a government takeover in the style Kim is proposing. Jones, the former insurance commissioner, said the program has two key flaws. First, Kim’s promise to keep insurance affordable could mean keeping prices too low on mansions in fire-prone areas, where homeowners may currently pay premiums that are inadequate to their risk. Second, insurers in California are required to have tens of billions of dollars in extra cash to pay during big loss events, and Kim’s new fund would have to find that money in a state whose public budget is already strained.

“Not only does she not come clean as to where the money's going to come from, if her thought is that it's going to come from the general fund of the state of California, good luck,” said Jones. He pointed out that the model Kim cites in New Zealand is far smaller than California’s, has low coverage limits, and doesn’t cover fires. (Allen described the proposal as “red meat, sugar rush stuff,” and said taxpayers would end up footing the bill if the public plan lost money.)

Kim allows that the legislature might not jump for her public insurance fund, but she has a compromise in her back pocket — one not dissimilar from Allen’s own agenda. Instead of creating a single-payer insurance program that would use profits to fund fire resilience, the commissioner could turn the FAIR Plan into such a program. The plan already pools money from all the state’s big insurers, and Kim could force them to pay an extra fee that would fund hardening for FAIR Plan homes. She returned to this theme when she delivered a stump speech to the activists in the Presidio Heights living room, saying that private companies would never act on their own to reduce the state’s fire risk.

“What the insurance industry does is that they price risk, but they don't actually address it,” she said. If that’s the case, she argues, then the industry shouldn’t be the one charged with keeping Californians safe from climate disasters.

For all their other points of alignment, this question represents the major philosophical disagreement between Allen and Kim. Allen agrees that the industry has not yet acted to reduce California’s enormous fire risk, but he believes that it can fill that role — and he can be the one to make that happen.

“The insurance commissioner is uniquely positioned to bring the insurance to the table … and actually say to the insurance industry, ‘OK, guys, you've got to be a part of the solution here,’” Allen said.

A daunting challenge

The problem for both Kim and Allen is that reducing risk is very difficult.

Take the case of Tony Byers. He is a retired electric utility worker and a longtime resident of Placerville, an old mining town high in the forest-covered hills east of Sacramento. He bought insurance from AAA for years, but the company dropped him after a 2022 fire burned a nearby stretch of the Sierras. State Farm gave him a quote, but then rejected him because it claimed he didn’t have a fire hydrant near his house, even though he did. Byers ended up going with Lemonade, the online insurer, and even paid to have some flammable trees removed at the company’s request, but last year they told him they were leaving California. He ended up on the FAIR Plan, and he now pays $3,400 a year for fire insurance alone, triple what he used to pay. Byers lives at the end of a narrow mountain road, and if he wants to get back on a private insurance plan, he’d likely have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit his property, which is a lot more than he can afford on a retiree’s budget.

The only people who can opt out of this gauntlet of risk reduction are those who can pay for elite coverage. That was the case for Kevin Roberts, a retired golf course owner who lives in Huntington Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the edge of the Palisades Fire burn scar. Roberts likely couldn’t get fire coverage for his two-story Spanish colonial from bigger insurers like State Farm, but years ago a former fraternity brother told him about a company called Chubb that offered boutique insurance at high prices. The company now charges him more than $30,000 a year for his coverage on a “surplus lines” policy that isn’t subject to state regulations. It’s an eye-watering payment, but the company came through with a $2.65 million payout for smoke damage after the fire. Many of the state’s wealthiest homeowners are already on this unregulated market: the number of surplus lines policies in California has doubled over the last four years to around 1.3 million.

“You'll pay more, but if you need them, they'll deliver,” said Roberts.

Neither Byers nor Roberts expressed strong feelings about the insurance commissioner’s election, and indeed, both candidates will face tremendous barriers before they can address the issues that someone like Byers faces in Placerville. That’s because scaling California’s efforts to reduce more than a century of fire risk is one of the most daunting adaptation efforts faced by any place in the United States. The challenge is not just in finding the money to help homeowners who can’t do it themselves, but in figuring out how to reduce risk for millions of old and ill-built homes.

The day after Kim’s fundraiser, I met two employees from North Coast Opportunities, a poverty-fighting organization that serves Lake County, north of San Francisco. The organization is the first to receive money from a $117 million state grant program designed to retrofit whole communities against wildfire. The organization chose to focus on a tight-packed community called Kelseyville, where hundreds of homes cluster on small lots against the side of a windy mountain ridge. As the employees from North Coast drove me through the area, it became clear just how hard it will be to achieve the scaled-up resilience that both Allen and Kim want.

Lake County has an urgent need for this. The mountainous area is among the state’s most vulnerable to wildfire — some 85% of its land area has burned since the turn of the century — and it is also one of its poorest counties. Insurers have abandoned the area en masse, forcing many people onto the FAIR Plan, or causing older homeowners to go without insurance altogether.

The state program is the exact kind of intervention that insurers have long said will induce them to offer more coverage and stop raising rates. The nonprofit can give each participating home in Kelseyville about $70,000 to fund easy tweaks that will stop ignitions — such as removing trees from around homes, replacing vinyl siding with fiber cement, and deconstructing flammable wooden decks. The mitigated houses don’t look much different from the old ones, except for the emptier yards and fresh paint, but even these tiny fireproofing changes required painstaking work. North Coast has had to ask contractors to redo flawed retrofits and cajole local hardware stores into selling fireproof equipment. Many homeowners aren’t interested in participating at all.

“What creates an insurable community is for the whole community to have buy-in,” said Deanna Fernweh, the program manager. “It's changing the mentality, because they're like, ‘Well, we've always done it this way.’” She said she’s cautiously optimistic that companies will come back — insurers have been reaching out to learn more about her work, but they’ve also pushed for full neighborhoods to meet the strictest fire standards.

The project underscores the scale of the challenge the next commissioner will face in reducing fire risk. The project only touches around 300 of the 1,200 eligible homes in the neighborhood, and the grant typically isn’t even enough to do full mitigation on each home. The funding came from the federal government after years of delay. The best possible result is to bring insurers back to just a few streets, a fraction of the risk in Lake County alone. For millions of homeowners who don’t have access to grant funding, resilience is still out of reach.

“A home is only as strong as the weakest link,” said Steve Hawks, a longtime California fire official who is now the director of wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, which develops standards for fire hardening. “If you leave a weak link on the table, a fire of [significant] magnitude can exploit any vulnerability.”

Hawks describes the challenge as “daunting,” and that may be an understatement. Retrofitting a home for fire can cost several times as much as building a new fire-resilient home, and the bill for hardening the millions of homes in California’s fire zones would run to the double-digit billions at least. This money has to come from somewhere, and Allen and Kim both acknowledged that their biggest challenge is to find out where.

This is the irony of the fact that both candidates are appealing to voters by talking about “affordability.” No matter which path one takes through the maze, one arrives at the same conclusion — to fix this crisis will take money, and much of that money will come from the people of California. As Allen says, “risk doesn't disappear, it gets allocated.” The “affordability” challenge in this case is not to help voters keep up with inflation but to pay down a massive debt of risky development that has been accumulating for decades. The challenge is to remake a society that was not designed to be remade.

“I think we’re still at the beginning,” said Holly Sacks, the director of underwriting for Mercury, a California-based insurance company that has committed to remain in the state and to help incentivize risk mitigation. The company is selling in burned places like Paradise and Altadena, but only for hardened homes, and Sacks says it’s one of the only companies doing so. “We are out there, and we don't hear about a lot of other carriers getting out there,” she said. “I think there's still a ways to go … to really make the market more stable.”

The scale of this work is enormous, but the stakes are even larger. When we purchase insurance, we purchase not only the privilege of owning a home or driving a car, but also the privilege of belonging to a community in which all support all. Insurance, as Kim likes to say, is a prerequisite for participating in the economy. A healthy insurance market is also an indication that society can still hold together, that there is no home so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the rest of the community can’t afford to protect it.

Of all the things that climate change may take from us, this guarantee might be the most dear.

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna took an early lead in the race to head the department he’s run for the last four years.

Returns in the sheriff’s race heavily favored Luna over challenger and predecessor Alex Villanueva after polls closed. A win for Luna was largely expected going into the election after he handily beat Villanueva in 2022.

The background

The candidates painted starkly different pictures of the department — the largest sheriff’s agency in the country — during the campaign.

Villanueva claimed the department has fallen apart on Luna’s watch. Luna argued his leadership has brought down violent crime and cut homicides by 25% in areas patrolled by his deputies.

No matter the winner, the department faces a slew of challenges.

Luna has been criticized for his management of county jails. The U.S. Department of Justice recently launched an investigation into conditions at the Men’s Central Jail and, last year, California’s attorney general filed a lawsuit alleging inhumane and unconstitutional conditions inside county jails.

The Sheriff’s Department also is dealing with ongoing staffing challenges, allegations of excessive use of force, deputy gangs and ongoing friction with the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission.

The next sheriff will also have to help oversee security for the 2028 Olympic Games in and around Los Angeles.

This year’s race was a rematch of the 2022 election, in which Luna unseated then-incumbent Villanueva with a 23-percentage-point margin.

Villanueva’s term was marked by clashes with county supervisors and criticism over investigations he launched into critics, including an L.A. Times journalist who covered the department.

After he left office, Villanueva was placed on a "do not rehire" list after the County Equity Oversight Panel found that he violated discrimination and harassment policies during his term. Villanueva denied the allegation.

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Xavier Becerra is California’s next governor after easily securing a victory that ensures Democrats continue their 16-year streak controlling the state.

The Associated Press declared Becerra the winner shortly after polls closed.

He will be the first Latino to serve as governor in a century and a half, and the first to be elected to the seat.

Becerra’s win caps a whirlwind and unexpected rise for a mild-mannered, risk-averse politician who just eight months ago polled so low he was being pressured to drop out of the race.

But when the leading Democratic contender in a crowded primary dropped out in April over sexual assault allegations, Becerra was the mainstream Democrat whom party insiders and interest groups coalesced behind the most. By the time he and Hilton finished first and second in the primary election in June, he was already being considered the presumptive next governor of California.

In a comfortable position in the polls and facing a GOP opponent whom he could easily tie to President Donald Trump, Becerra avoided sweeping policy promises and instead focused on his longtime experience in government.

With Becerra’s election, it’s unlikely the state will significantly depart from the policies of outgoing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, including in its longstanding disputes with the Trump administration. Becerra has said he supports changes Newsom and the Democratic-led Legislature have enacted to speed up housing construction, and he generally supports the state’s transition to clean energy — but also wants to find ways to lower gas prices.

He is, however, likely to differ in style compared to his predecessor. Newsom’s signature was ambition; he swept into office eight years ago with a litany of goals such as millions of new housing units and progressive moonshots like single-payer healthcare, not all of which he achieved. Becerra has avoided such promises, instead speaking generally about prioritizing working families, and says he doesn’t want to lose any public trust by overstating what he could accomplish.

Hilton, meanwhile, rolled out a litany of deregulatory policies and called for tax cuts, abolishing the Department of Motor Vehicles, canceling the high-speed rail project and ending the state’s climate goals in an aggressive campaign of lowering the cost of living. But he faced long odds running as a Republican in a blue state, during an election in which Democrats were expected to sweep offices nationwide.

He represented the best hope in years for a GOP victory. He has raised more than $33 million to Becerra’s $38 million and is running hard on a series of ambitious promises to lower costs by slashing regulations and taxes. He portrayed Becerra as the embodiment of the California political status quo, someone who would make decisions that benefit influential special interest groups like organized labor.

“It’s the people against the machine,” he said of his campaign in a virtual town hall last week.

His message of change, promises to slash gas prices and frequent invocations of Californians moving out-of-state resonated with Brad Gerig, who voted in Roseville last week. It was the first time Gerig, 34, could recall voting for a Republican, he said. The EMT and firefighter said he wants to be able to afford to stay and raise a family in California, so he was willing to “try something different.”

“I think it’s worth a shot,” Gerig said. “I think for everybody living in this area there’s an inherent angst for a little bit better. There’s no reason it should be as expensive as it is.”

But Hilton has struggled to rid himself of the baggage from President Donald Trump’s endorsement in a state Trump lost by 20 percentage points in 2024.

Becerra has reminded voters of Hilton’s link to Trump at every turn, and cast himself as a fighter who would, like Newsom, challenge decisions in Washington such as Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign.

He has dismissed Hilton as unserious and primarily campaigned on his longtime experience representing Los Angeles in Congress and serving as state attorney general and as U.S. health secretary. Those roles have earned him a wide swath of influential liberal allies.

“Xavier Becerra has stood with us for more than 30 years,” said Tony Hoang, executive director of the LGBTQ+ rights organization Equality California, at an event in San Francisco last week.

He highlighted Becerra’s role as one of the small minority of congressmembers who voted against the anti-gay marriage Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.

At the same event, Becerra touted his opposition to Trump.

“Donald Trump is on this ballot,” he said, without naming his opponent once. “We see right through you, Donald Trump. And we see through all those MAGA friends and relatives who are trying to push that agenda on us.”

Becerra’s comfortable standing is reflected in the relatively muted nature of his campaign: Becerra agreed to meet for only one debate with Hilton this fall. He has spent much of his time campaigning not for himself but against a Republican-backed voter ID measure and on behalf of other California Democrats.

The election comes at a particularly delicate time for California.

Street homelessness rose for years and only began to decline again in 2025. Wildfires have made it harder to buy homeowners insurance. Inflation, much of it attributable to Trump’s war in Iran, tariffs and immigration crackdown, have added to the already-high cost of living.

The state budget, always subject to the boom and bust of the stock market, has become particularly dependent on the fortunes of the artificial intelligence industry. Under Newsom, the state has made aggressive regulatory moves to curb the use of climate-warming fossil fuels. But despite recent polling that shows a majority of Californians support the green transition, fewer are willing to pay higher prices for energy than were a decade ago.

And the state’s liberal politics have often put it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which has withheld federal funds, challenged California’s environmental policies and attempted to intervene in this election.

Both candidates agree the state has become unaffordable for working families. That’s about all they agree on.

Becerra has proposed mostly incremental changes to existing state policies, such as continuing recent efforts by Newsom and lawmakers to reduce the bureaucratic hurdles to approving new housing construction.

He wants to expand state mortgage assistance programs and said he’s committed to the clean energy transition, but open to delays or tweaks to trim costs. He has not endorsed any new taxes on residents, but wants the state to assess a fee on corporations whose employees make so little they qualify for public healthcare.

Hilton, a British American who was once a close adviser to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, ran on a deregulatory agenda, promising to slash environmental rules and the gas tax and allow more home construction on exurban, undeveloped land.

One of his signature campaign promises was to eliminate the income tax on residents’ first $150,000 in earnings and make the income tax flat above that — amounting to an expensive tax cut for the highest earners that he’s said he would pay for with spending cuts. It’s one of his many promises that would need legislative approval, and he has not said how he would get Democrats in the Capitol to support them.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California State University staff began voting Tuesday to ratify a deal their union reached with the university system over the weekend. If the around 15,000 members of the California State University Employees Union authorize the agreement, the Board of Trustees will formally approve it at their next meeting.

Union members — who include non-faculty staff from administrators to janitors — could start receiving a bonus check of around $3,500 by December, as well as pay raises, according to Catherine Hutchinson, CSU Employees Union president.

The agreement allows for implementation of the salary step scale, an incremental pay scale based on the job grade and years of service.

“The amount of money that we're receiving this year and the correction of our step placements and eligible employees getting put properly on steps, it was worth it to sign a TA [tentative agreement] now,” she said.

In a statement, a CSU spokesperson said, “The CSU is pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with the California State University Employees Union. The agreement would complete implementation of the negotiated salary step system, with employees placed on their target salary steps retroactive to July 1, 2026, while providing meaningful compensation improvements.”

Bethany Price, president of the union chapter at Cal State Long Beach, said the new agreement will give her a financial boost.

“My salary would move me to the end range of the position that I'm in, and I've been in the same position for over 20 years and seen movement in my salary only in those times when the union negotiated salary increases,” she said.

Mixed feelings about the deal

Price will be voting against ratifying the agreement, however.

 "For those of us who work on this campus at Cal State Long Beach, it does not address one of the biggest issues, which is the abuse of temporary contracts by our system,” Price said.

Many staff employed at Cal State Long Beach in positions such as administrative coordinators are in full-time roles but on temporary contracts, “which means that they can be curtailed at the discretion of management, and that they can be non-renewed for no cause or no purpose,” Price said.

Hutchinson said under the new contract, like the old, CSU is allowed to employ a person for four years on a temporary contract.

“We have some campuses, such as Cal State Long Beach, that abuse that, because what happens is if you have a break in service, the temp status restarts,” she said. “So what campuses will do, is they will have that person for 11 months, say 'Oh, we don't have enough money,' break the service, and then maybe a couple months later say, 'Oh, we got some funding again. We'll hire you back.'”

The new deal, Hutchinson said, contains a provision that CSU and the union will form a working group to address temporary employment.

Price said she is “spicy” about this new deal because three years ago the contract also called for a separate committee on temporary contracts, and, she said, nothing happened. “Instead what we've seen on this campus is an increase in the abuse.”

 "When the bargaining team says that this is the best we can get at this point, then I have to trust them,” she said. “It doesn't mean that I have to take my vote and put it in the yes column for this tentative agreement that I don't believe serves this campus.”

If ratified, the new contract will run through 2029.

It can be hard to know what to focus on in midterm elections. There are so many races, from elections for governor and senator to the House and state legislatures. For a better idea of how the night might go to see which party might control Congress, here are six things to watch:

1. The early bellwethers for Republican turnout and the Latino vote

There are two states, Indiana and Kentucky, that will see results in the 6 p.m. ET hour. And then there's Florida, which is split between the Eastern and Central time zones. But most of the state is on Eastern time. So lots of House race results will be coming in during the 7 p.m. ET hour, even if statewide contests like the Senate and governors races won't be called at the earliest until 8 p.m. ET.

Some races to watch for early indicators of what might come later in the evening — Indiana's 5th Congressional District, Kentucky's 6th and Florida's 22nd and 27th. Indiana's 5th and Kentucky's 6th are seats held by Republicans that are more competitive now than at the beginning of the cycle. If these are close or tipping to Democrats, it could be a sign of low Republican turnout and a bigger Democratic wave.

Florida's 22nd is held by a Democrat but redrawn to tip in Republicans' favor. Trump won Florida's 27th by double-digits so this heavily Latino district could be an indicator of how this key subgroup votes.

2. Do Republicans get 46% with independents?

Independents are a key swing group, but they are also a lower-propensity voting group in midterms.

It used to be that Republicans had to win a bigger share of independents before the Trump era. Mitt Romney, for example, won 55% of independents in 2012 but lost the presidential election. But there's been a political realignment in this country with blue-collar white voters trending toward Trump, fewer people identifying as Democrats and better-educated white voters shifting toward Democrats.

So in the decade since Trump has been on the political scene, Republicans have done well when they win at least 46% of independents. When they haven't, they've lost.

3. Black voter turnout in key states

The Michigan Senate race is important for control of the Senate. If Republicans flip it, the magic number for Democrats goes from four to five, meaning Democrats would have to win five seats held by Republicans to win control of the Senate.

For Abdul El-Sayed (D) to win in Michigan, a key is going to be Black voters in Wayne County. If he runs up the score in and around Detroit, he has a path to victory, but if he doesn't, it becomes that much harder — and it's been an area of vulnerability for him.

During the Trump era, Democrats have needed 68% or more in Wayne County to win Michigan unless, like Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024, they can overperform in the suburbs.

Wayne County Democratic margins
2024 Slotkin 63% Win (11% share)
2024 Harris 62% Loss
2020 Biden 68% Win (12%)
2020 Peters 68% Win
2018 Stabenow 69% Win (15%)
2016 Clinton 66% Loss (13%)

4. The margin with young voters

Voters 18 to 29 see a drastic drop off in turnout between presidential and midterm elections. During presidential races since 1992, 43% of registered young voters cast ballots. But in midterms, that falls to 21%, just 1 in 5 who show up at the polls.

But they are crucial to Democratic success. In the last 20 years, when Democrats won this group by more than 20 points, they have done well, winning presidencies or making gains in midterms. The only exception was 2022, but arguably, the strong margin Democrats won with young voters that year, helped them stem what could have been a much larger Republican tide. That year, Democrats lost nine House seats, but gained a Senate seat.

Democratic margin with voters 18-29, election result
2024 +11, Trump wins presidency
2022 +28, Republicans win House, Democrats gain Senate seat
2020 +25, Biden wins presidency
2018 +35, Democrats win House
2016 +19, Trump wins presidency
2014 +11, Republicans expand House majority, win Senate
2012 +23, Obama wins re-election
2010 +17, Republicans win House
2008 +34, Obama wins presidency
2006 +22, Democrats win House

5. In Texas, the keys will be the difference between Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Ken Paxton's (R) vote totals – and the Latino vote in South Texas

Given past polling errors in Texas that underestimated the Republican vote, there's a healthy skepticism that Democrat James Talarico's margin of error lead in polling averages is enough to win.

There was lots of enthusiasm in 2018 for Beto O'Rourke's (D) 2018 bid against an unpopular Republican senator in Ted Cruz, but Cruz still won, although by less than 3 percentage points. No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994, and no Democrat has been elected to the Senate from Texas in 38 years.

For it to actually happen in this state Trump won by 14 points in 2024, two groups are key – Republicans and Latinos. Ken Paxton (R) is unpopular. Republican Gov. Greg Abbot is also facing a tight race, but he's thought to be in better shape than Paxton. In 2018, Cruz won about 400,000 fewer votes than Abbott, but Cruz still won by more than 200,000 votes. So watch if the difference between Abbott and Paxton is more than 400,000 for Talarico.

Voters cast their ballots in Anchorage, Alaska on Nov. 1, 2026.

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Christian Moorman

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AFP via Getty Images

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The second part of Talarico's path to victory runs through South Texas. Statewide, O'Rourke won 64% of Latinos in 2018, and they were 26% of the electorate, according to exit polls. If Talarico is north of both of those, that's how he wins the seat. Talarico would need to improve on O'Rourke's totals in these Latino-heavy counties: Cameron 63%, Hidalgo 69%, Webb 71%, Nueces 51%. As a bonus, watch the fast-growing and heavily populated Dallas suburbs – Collin 47%, Denton 46%, Tarrant 51%.

6. Party identification

Because of the political realignment that's taken place in the Trump era, watch how people identify in exit polls.

The percentage of those saying they were Democrats hit a low in 2024 at 31%. That trend is happening as the base of the Democratic Party has become more liberal and more disaffected with their own leadership. This year, though, Democrats were among the highest in enthusiasm levels, according to the latest NPR poll, but they are likely going to have to be far higher than 31% as a share of the electorate to do well.

Democrats as a share of the electorate
2024 31%
2022 33%
2020 37%
2018 37%
2016 37%
2014 35%
2012 38%
2010 39%
2008 39%

That's quite possible given the opposition to Trump in this election is sky high – 53% of likely voters in the latest NPR poll said they strongly disapproved of the job he's doing. That is very likely to be a unifying force for the left in this election. As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Along these lines, it's going to be important to watch races like the Michigan Senate race and the contest for Michigan's 7th Congressional District, both of which have very progressive Democratic candidates trying to win in purple places. Democratic unity – and the party's ideological future – is going to be a key storyline of the 2028 presidential primary and could define the American left for years to come.
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