Xavier Becerra gets to play it safe in the race for governor, and he isn’t making promises

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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CalMatters

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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.