Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary under President Joe Biden, is joining the burgeoning field to be California’s next governor — regardless of whether Kamala Harris seeks the post.
The former California attorney general, who has been mulling a run for the state’s top job for at least a year, launched his bid in a brief video on Wednesday shared first with POLITICO.
“I watched my parents — a construction worker and a clerical worker — achieve the California dream,” Becerra said in a bare-bones, direct-to-camera clip. “Can we do that today, with this affordability crisis? Very tough. But we’ve taken on these tough fights. … We can do that, but you need a leader who can be tough.”
Becerra’s entrance into the race injects new intrigue into a contest that for months had been stagnant as Democrats and their deep-pocketed funders wait to see if the former vice president will jump into the fray. But recently the campaign has seen stirrings; former Rep. Katie Porter launched her own bid last month and other contenders have taken increasingly pointed swipes at Harris and her drawn-out decision timeline.
Becerra’s campaign insists he would not drop out of the race even if Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2024, declares her candidacy for governor.
In his own bid, Becerra, 67, is not overtly carrying the progressive banner or pitching himself as a centrist Democrat. Instead, he seeks to make the race a referendum on experience, hoping to convince voters he has the most credibility to manage the gigantic state and take on President Donald Trump, whom he sued more than 120 times when he was California attorney general during the president’s first term.
In a happenstance twist of timing, his campaign launch dovetailed with the Trump administration’s mass firings at the Health and Human Services Department that Becerra once ran. He had been hitting the airwaves in recent days to blast the department’s gutting as a “man-made disaster.”
Becerra plans on making his stewardship of HHS, which under his leadership employed more than 85,000 people, a centerpiece of his campaign. But his tenure there was uneven. He took the brunt of criticism over the administration’s poor handling of sheltering an influx of migrant children and was criticized for having little sway in setting policy around Covid.
He found stronger footing when it came to shoring up the Affordable Care Act and forcefully supporting abortion rights. Still, POLITICO reported last year that there was little expectation among Democrats that Biden would keep him in the job if he had won a second term, or that Becerra would want to stay.
Before joining the Biden administration, Becerra served more than 30 years as a California public official — first in the state Legislature and then as a longtime House member representing the neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles. He ascended the leadership ranks, serving on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and as Democratic Caucus chair, and was a central figure during the Obama era in negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform, an effort that ultimately failed.
He was appointed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to serve as state attorney general in 2017, replacing Harris after she was elected to the Senate. The top law enforcement job gave Becerra the platform to be the face — albeit a mild-mannered one — of California’s litigation-heavy resistance during Trump’s first term.
For all those years in elected office, however, Becerra still is not especially well-known among California voters. Public polling, as well as private research by competing campaigns, has put Becerra in the mid-single digits.
But Becerra has proven himself to be a strong performer when on the statewide ballot. He won nearly 7.8 million votes when he ran for attorney general in 2018 — more than Gavin Newsom won when he was on the ballot for governor that same year.
In his quest to be the state’s first Latino governor in 150 years, Becerra’s candidacy has the potential to tap into a powerful, but unreliable voting bloc: California’s Latino residents, who make up a majority of the population. But he is vying for that title with two other Latino contenders — former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state schools chief Tony Thurmond — that could threaten to fracture that community’s vote.
The interplay between the Villaraigosa and Becerra campaigns will be especially intriguing because of how much their political pathways intersect. Both have their power bases in Los Angeles, historically a less advantageous jumping off point for statewide races. They both ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2001; Becerra won 5 percent of the vote and was eliminated in the first round, while Villaraigosa won 46 percent and went on to lose to James Hahn in the runoff.
This time, Becerra is betting his subsequent statewide and national roles give him the ability to reach a wider audience than his fellow Angeleno.
Becerra’s campaign team includes Kyle Layman — a veteran of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who ran the independent expenditure committee backing Adam Schiff for Senate last year — as the general consultant and Emma Harris, who led freshman Rep. George Whitesides’ campaign to flip a northern Los Angeles County House seat, as campaign manager. His fundraisers are Terri New and Elizabeth Tauro of Capital Strategies, as well as Sacramento-based fundraiser David Pruitt. His media firm is AL Media, and Dan Gottlieb, formerly of the DCCC, is serving as communications adviser.
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