The Brief

Xavier Becerra says California needs to build more housing by reducing permitting times and making affordable housing funding easier to access, but he doesn’t want to say how many new homes he would deliver as governor. To address inequality, he’s considering whether the public should own shares of artificial intelligence companies, but he won’t commit to pursuing that policy.

If the Democratic candidate’s promises remain vague to Californians who, polls show, widely favor him for governor this November, he has an explanation — in the form of a regret dating back to 1993.

After campaigning against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the first-term Los Angeles-area congressmember was persuaded to vote for it, believing that adding some labor protections and a domestic lending program would shield American workers and small businesses from foreign competition. It only took a few years, Becerra recalled in an interview with CalMatters, to see American jobs displaced anyway.

For the young politician, it was a “pivotal lesson” with an enduring takeaway: Don’t back anything until you’re sure.

“No one gets my vote unless I know what I’m voting for completely,” he said.

Becerra would go on to serve a dozen terms in Congress, including in House Democratic leadership, and become California’s first Latino state attorney general, then the first Latino U.S. secretary of health and human services. Now he’s approaching the governor’s office with a mix of the deliberativeness he learned earlier and a painstaking effort against overpromising.

As a result, he’s been slow to declare specific policy directives and pushes back when pressed to take positions or outline goals. Instead, he points to past experiences as proof he can take on the state’s challenges, and says his best offer for voters is a steady hand to run the government.

To pay for the state’s public healthcare programs, he says he wants to eliminate some administrative spending, waste and fraudulent billing — but won’t say how or how much he would save. On housing, he criticized fellow Democrats for setting moonshot targets like 2 or 3 million new housing units in a four-year term. But even as he considers a more realistic goal, such as doubling the current output of about 106,000 units a year, he hesitates to say he would deliver it — concerned it “could be an inflated promise.”

No incentive to go out on a limb

It’s a marked contrast from not only the Democratic opponents Becerra beat in the primary, but also his Republican opponent Steve Hilton, who has rolled out numerous policies and big promises, like $3-a-gallon gas and halving electricity bills with a deregulatory agenda. The current governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, won on a campaign full of lofty goals — millions of homes, single-payer healthcare, strong climate regulations, universal preschool and more. He has not achieved all of them.

While fellow candidates this year honed in on proposals to limit insurance regulations or control utility spending to rein in the cost of living, Becerra proposed to declare a state of emergency so he could study the causes of high electricity and insurance rates — effectively avoiding deciding what to do until later.

He has been noncommittal on whether he would keep the state’s mandate to phase out the sale of new gas cars by 2035.

“If we invest in it, it absolutely is feasible,” he said onstage during a Politico event last week. “If we don’t invest in the infrastructure, then it’s not feasible.”

He also said “there’s a lot of room to expand” on AI regulation and that “we could buy some equity in AI to make sure that we all gain from having this new technology.” But to reporters afterward, he denied supporting such a policy outright, saying “if there’s something along those lines, it wouldn’t be totally far-fetched.”

The vagueness of Becerra’s positions is “textbook political science,” said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College.

Because he faces Hilton in the general election, Becerra is likely to win based on Democrats’ voter registration advantage in California alone. He doesn’t have to do much to persuade Democrats to pick him, needing only to excite liberal voters enough to turn out in the last few weeks before November, Michelson said.

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks during an election night event in Los Angeles on June 2, 2026.

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Jae C. Hong

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“He doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb” on policies, she said. “You don’t want to mess up, you don’t want to do anything crazy.”

But Becerra’s distaste for risk goes beyond avoiding controversies. Asked onstage last week what voters could expect him to do as governor, he declined to name a single policy commitment.

“I would prefer not to run on inflated promises,” he said. “I will run on my record.”

Mulling things over

Born in Sacramento to working-class Mexican immigrant parents and educated at Stanford Law School, Becerra, 68, rose to power during a wave of Latino political activism in the early 1990s.

He first clinched a state Assembly seat in an upset in the east Los Angeles suburbs in 1990, then just two years later was elected to Congress in a safe Democratic seat he held onto until 2017. He and his wife, OB-GYN Carolina Reyes, moved to Washington, D.C. during that time and raised three daughters; the couple have now settled back in Sacramento.

Former staffers described Becerra as detail-oriented, sending back memos if they contained typos and insisting on marking even a few thousand dollars in costs as a potential “fiscal impact” when evaluating legislation that affected the attorney general’s office. On policy matters he was focused, they said, on how immigrants or middle- and low-income Americans would be affected.

“I think he always kept people like his parents in mind,” said Sirat Attapit, who worked for both Becerra’s congressional office and as his liaison to the California Legislature when he was attorney general. “You always knew based on the kinds of questions he asked, that was always in the back of his mind.”

Attapit said his reputation for being a slow and thorough decision maker was a sign of good policymaking, enabling him to consider multiple perspectives “even if we were diametrically opposed.” Becerra in the early 2010s was part of a bipartisan group of House members meeting secretly to discuss immigration reform.

“He was thoughtful and methodical to the point where perhaps some of his colleagues thought he mulled things over or took too long to make a decision,” she said. “Whenever he made a decision, you had to get to a point where he had educated himself and heard from all of the stakeholders. Everybody who had a perspective, he wanted to hear from.”

Then-U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra spends time with two of his daughters, Natalia, 3, and Olivia, 4, at his campaign headquarters in Los Angeles on Jan. 9, 2001. Becerra was running for mayor of Los Angeles.

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Gina Ferazzi

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That approach was apparent later in one of his most controversial decisions as attorney general. In 2019, he refused to release records of police investigations of officer misconduct, as required by a new state transparency law. Local police unions were fighting the law in court, arguing it could endanger officer privacy.

Becerra said he would wait for further direction from judges on whether the law covered retroactive records that journalists sought, even after one appellate court ruled the records were public. Brian Marvel, president of the politically influential Peace Officers Research Association of California, said he appreciated the attorney general’s caution.

“He just wanted to make sure that it was a clear direction on what needed to be released,” Marvel said.

But David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said it was clear the law covered the sought-after records, and called Becerra’s position “baffling.” A coalition of news organizations sued, and the courts ordered Becerra’s office to release the records and pay over $1 million in attorneys’ fees.

“In fairness, I suppose, it was a brand-new law,” Snyder said. “But I can’t recall a time where an agency simply refused to interpret the law itself and said, ‘We don’t know what the law means until a court tells us.’”

Asked whether being so deliberative could hinder being bold or decisive as a leader, Becerra said there’s a time and place for quick action — like when he leapt to sue the Trump administration to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program or to intervene in a lawsuit with Texas to preserve the Affordable Care Act.

A pragmatic progressive

If he becomes governor, the cautious Becerra will become de facto leader of a state Democratic Party that is pushing further left.

Supporters like Amanda Renteria, who worked in the U.S. Senate and drafted parts of the federal healthcare law with Becerra, said his unassuming style belies progressive goals.

He was an early supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and universal public healthcare. Since his earliest days in Congress he took firm stances on defending the rights of asylum seekers and immigrants’ access to public benefits, sometimes clashing with fellow Democrats over it.

“He can work between two worlds,” Renteria said, praising “his ability to both be in Democratic leadership and at the same time be one of those members of Congress that (was) also pushing the progressive agenda where he sees it's possible.”

But Becerra himself hesitated to portray his potential term as governor the same way. He considers himself a “pragmatic” progressive, and suggested his agenda itself is flexible.

When President Joe Biden, nominating him as health secretary, warned him he was against single-payer healthcare, Becerra said he accepted it despite being a longtime supporter and agreed to focus on increasing enrollment in Medicaid or the ACA market instead. (During the primary campaign, Becerra reportedly told the state’s doctors’ association he would not push for single-payer as governor.)

Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra at the Planned Parenthood offices in Sacramento on June 1, 2026.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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“Just because I didn’t get single-payer, doesn’t mean I’m not a progressive, and just because I didn’t fight for single-payer doesn’t mean I am establishment,” he said. “At this stage of my life, at this stage of my career, I just want to get things done.”

To that end, he’s careful to trade ambition for achievability.

Last week, he floated a “power hour” proposal to give low-income utility customers two free hours of electricity in the middle of each day during the sunny but temperate period when power suppliers produce excess solar energy.

When asked by CalMatters whether that idea counts as a campaign promise, he ran through an analysis of whether he could commit to it: there were still stakeholders to consult, like the utility companies and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electricity rates. On the other hand, low-income households are already enrolled in utility discount programs, so it would be easy to deliver the free power to them. And because it wouldn’t be a universal program for all customers, it wouldn’t create too much demand, he mused.

“I’d like to make it a promise, because it’s not pie-in-the-sky,” he said. “Is it realistic? Can I make it into a promise? I probably can, because I’ve limited it.”

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

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.