SACRAMENTO — Matt Mahan, the mayor of San José and latest entrant into the jam-packed race for California governor, has in recent years raised his profile outside his Silicon Valley-area city by doing something most other elected Democrats would never: publicly criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom.
With the primary election almost four months away, candidates have already been busy trying to convince Californians that they can lead the state through its biggest challenges, including what they might do differently than Newsom on homelessness, crime and the high cost of living.
Democratic hopefuls have so far done so subtly, without taking direct shots at Newsom.
Until Mahan entered the race.
The 43-year-old-mayor began carving a moderate path in 2024, when he broke with Newsom and other Democrats to back Proposition 36, which increased penalties for theft and crimes involving fentanyl. Despite opposition from Newsom and legislative leaders, voters overwhelmingly approved it.
Mahan has also given mixed reviews to the Newsom administration’s approach to homelessness; he has praised efforts to make it easier for cities to clear homeless encampments but criticized inconsistent funding from the state to help local governments build interim housing.
Although most Democrats running to replace Newsom have praised his fiery opposition to President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, including the governor’s outlandish online trolling of Trump and his allies, Mahan was not impressed.
“Instead of spending so much energy attacking his opponents, the governor and his team should be addressing the high cost of energy, helping hard-pressed families make ends meet and keeping them and their employers from fleeing our state,” Mahan wrote last summer in a piece for the San Francisco Standard.
Mahan told reporters last week that his disagreements with Newsom are “rooted in substance” and praised the governor for muscling through major reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act and behavioral health treatment.
“I see the job of the next governor” as “building on many of the initiatives [Newsom] has championed,” he said, adding he would use those new reforms to build more housing and treatment facilities for people struggling with addiction and mental illness.
Newsom has routinely won approval from the state’s Democratic base, as well as respect and deference from its elected leaders, and his notoriety as a top foe of Trump continues to rise. Because the perch of California governor provides Democrats with an effective cudgel against the Republican administration, attacking Newsom could easily backfire in this left-leaning state.
“It’s a very delicate balancing act” to campaign to replace a leader of one’s own party, said Democratic strategist Garry South, who has worked on four California gubernatorial campaigns.
“The traditional way to do it is to try to project that you will build on things that the incumbent has done: programs they started, successes they’ve had,” he said.
South, who ran Newsom’s first, short-lived, campaign for governor in 2009, took issue with Mahan’s criticisms of the governor.
“To stick it to the incumbent of your own party might be OK if that person is viewed as a failure. … The fact is, Newsom is not unpopular. This guy’s had four massive victories in California,” he said, listing Newsom’s two elections in 2018 and 2022, defeating a recall in 2021 and overwhelmingly passing Proposition 50 last year.
Like Mahan, billionaire venture-capitalist-turned-environmentalist Tom Steyer has cast himself as an outsider of California’s Democratic establishment. Though he has so far avoided disparaging anyone directly, Steyer dinged “Sacramento politicians [who] are afraid to change this system” when he launched his campaign in November.
Early on in his campaign, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa indicated he would backtrack on Newsom’s strict oil drilling limits and what he calls heavy-handed regulations, which the industry has blamed for the state’s high gas prices.
A Phillips 66 refinery shut down last fall and a Valero refinery in Northern California plans to idle by the end of April, raising concerns that prices in the state’s isolated fuels market could climb even higher.
Villaraigosa previously told The Times he is “not fighting for refineries” but “for the people who pay for gas in this state.”
The former mayor took a more aggressive approach in the California’s governor’s race in 2018, when Villaraigosa accused Newsom of selling “snake oil” with his support for single-payer healthcare in order to win over the nurses union and progressives. Villaraigosa, who ran on a moderate platform, finished in a distant third place in the primary, and Newsom went on to win two terms as governor.
Former Rep. Katie Porter has gone in a more progressive direction on oil. When asked in October to name a policy arena in which she would act differently than Newsom, Porter said she would not have signed recent legislation to allow 2,000 new oil wells in Kern County.
“Drilling new wells is locking us into 100-plus years of energy of the past,” she said. “I absolutely know that we need our refineries to stay open. … But I’m concerned about the environmental consequences, the environmental justice consequences, the shortened lifespan and pollution that we see in some of our fossil fuel-producing places.”
While Newsom and most other candidates for governor have raised concerns about a proposed statewide ballot measure to tax the assets of billionaires, primarily to raise billions of dollars in revenue to blunt the impact of federal healthcare cuts, Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, has embraced the idea.
Even before the potential ballot measure drove some billionaires into leaving the state, Thurmond said that if elected, he would introduce a tax “solely on megamillionaires and billionaires to hire more teachers, healthcare workers, firefighters, construction workers and social workers,” who would earn “decent middle-class wages” to bolster the state’s economy.
Thurmond has also repeatedly said he would pursue single-payer healthcare in California, a promise Newsom also campaigned on before his first term but did not fully deliver.
Betty Yee, a former state controller and budget director, has pitched herself as the most qualified candidate to fix California’s ongoing budget deficits, and took swipes at accounting tricks Newsom and other governors have used in the past.
Newsom and state lawmakers have faced criticism for using short-term tactics like deferred spending and internal borrowing to fill budget shortfalls while ignoring the larger issue: The state regularly spends more money than it brings in.
“No more gimmicks. We can’t kick the can down the road anymore,” Yee said during a recent interview with KTLA. She said she would implement “spending cuts — not like DOGE” and explore “corporations and upper-income earners” potentially paying more tax revenue.
Newsom, aware that he’s entering lame-duck status, has jokingly called himself “a milk carton with a sell-by date” and admitted “these questions about who’s next and all that are uncomfortable.”
Asked specifically about Mahan’s criticisms, Newsom on Thursday declined to fuel any supposed rivalry with the San José mayor.
“I don’t know enough about him,” the governor said. “I wish him good luck.”
Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.
