Katie Porter, Newsom Clone

The good news from California is that a) Governor Gavin Newsom is termed out and his time in office is over, and b) former Vice President Kamala Harris decided not to run for the state’s highest office. In her years as California’s Attorney General and U.S. Senator, Harris like Newsom endorsed far-left positions on immigration, affirmative benefits for illegal immigrants, and supported so-called gender-affirming care for the LGBTQ+ community.

California’s bad news, however, cancels out the good. With Newsom and Harris gone from California’s political scene, the gubernatorial front runner is former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter (D), a candidate who is unlikely to reverse the states’ sinking-ship status. Porter’s campaign website is focused on what she perceives as President Trump’s flaws on the economy, health care, clean energy and California’s housing shortages. From Porter’s press release, “Our state faces serious challenges, and Californians know that everything from healthcare to housing is way too expensive. Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to make things even harder.”

Porter was given up for politically dead after Senator Adam Schiff squeezed her out of the primary by spending millions in advertising to support Republican Steve Garvey. In a ruthless act of political cynicism, Schiff’s carefully orchestrated campaign invested more than $10 million in ads that raised Garvey’s profile by portraying him as a conservative threat to California. If elected to the Senate, one of Schiff’s mailers warned, Garvey “will be a reliable vote for [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and his extreme Republican agenda.”

In fairness to Porter, few of the other Democratic gubernatorial candidates have the political courage to take a stand on the issues that have driven California’s residents and businesses out of the state.

Here are Porter’s leading challengers: Republican and former Fox News host Steve Hilton. The latest polling has Porter at 18% and Hilton, 12%. The last time a Republican won California’s governorship was 2006, when former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger scored reelection. And though Trump made inroads in California in November 2024, the state has gone blue in the presidential race every cycle since 1992.

Xavier Becerra, former California Attorney General and the Biden administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Becerra will face a tough road when other candidates and the media quiz him about the 85,000 unaccompanied minor children who went missing on his watch. Becerra faced several congressional hearings in 2023, and Republicans grilled him over reports of unaccompanied minor refugees being placed with sponsors who send them to work for slave wages in dangerous conditions. A New York Times report written by investigative journalist Hannah Dreier found that HHS could not reach more than 85,000 children after being placed with sponsors and the agency lost “immediate contact” with one-third of the children. Dreier cited HHS statistics as her source.

Surprisingly, Porter does not mention immigration on her website, perhaps because funding medical care for millions of illegal immigrants pushed California to bankruptcy’s brink. A year after granting Medi-Cal access to low-income, adult illegal aliens, Newsom proposes freezing enrollment of new recipients and charging premiums in a move expected to save the state more than $5 billion. The Legislature will likely block Newsom’s wished-for cuts. Without the savings, California’s budget deficit will remain $20 billion deficit, a total that squares with the Department of Finance and the Legislative Analyst’s Office statement that California has what’s called a “structural deficit” that ranges from $10 billion to $20 billion a year, an albatross that the Democratic primary winner will inherit

Whichever Democrat survives the June 2, 2026, top two primary, may find out that Trump-bashing isn’t enough to get elected in a state as troubled as California. The GOP candidate, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, is a long-shot but his law-and-order priorities appeal to most Californians who are fed up with illegal alien coddling, crime and homelessness. On immigration, Bianco pledges to work with the federal government to stop illegal border crossings, to abolish sanctuary state policies and ensure local law enforcement collaborates with federal partners when dealing with criminal illegal immigrants, to prioritize the deportation of violent illegal immigrants and to combat the illicit drug and human trafficking organizations that are destroying California.

A vote for Porter or Becerra guarantees that California will continue along the same failed path that governors Gray Davis, Jerry Brown and Newsom established. In the 2024 mid-terms, Californians overwhelmingly elected the same worn-out, ineffective Democratic U.S. Reps.---Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Eric Swalwell, Judy Chu, Zoe Lofgren, etc. All of them and 38 more never-Trump Democrats will be on the 2026 ballot along with nine Republicans.

Thomas Jefferson, American Founding Father, Declaration of Independence’s primary author and third U.S President said it best: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.”

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org