The Left is eating its own. And it isn’t pretty.
Now a major Democrat crash out is tearing down these two key players.
One Day Out, And The Gloves Are All The Way Off
The man who ran for president on the promise that he “walked away” from his hedge fund billions to give back to California spent the final weekend before the June 2 primary dropping what his rival’s campaign calls “textbook defamation” — and Becerra’s attorney sent him a cease-and-desist letter in reply.
With roughly 24 hours remaining before polls opened in California’s jungle primary, Tom Steyer’s campaign released an attack ad suggesting that Xavier Becerra could face a federal indictment in connection with a corruption case involving his former chief of staff, Sean McCluskie, and former adviser Dana Williamson. The two had recently pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to siphon $225,000 from a dormant campaign fund. Federal prosecutors explicitly stated in their charging documents that Becerra was not implicated in the case. Steyer’s ad implied he might be anyway.
Becerra’s campaign attorney called the ad “textbook defamation.” Becerra himself was pointed in his response at a UCLA event. “If we’re talking about that deceptive ad that lies about my record Tom Steyer put out, we were in touch with his campaign. I don’t believe we filed, but we continue to keep all legal recourse in mind.” His campaign spokesperson Jonathan Underland added: “Someone should tell Tom that voters have a word for what he’s doing: it’s lying. And it’s not a quality Californians are looking for in their next governor.”
Steyer’s legal team responded with the confident brevity of a man who has spent $213 million on advertising and is not particularly afraid of the blowback: “By all means, proceed with legal action.”
The Race That Money Can’t Fully Buy
Steyer’s final ad buy is a drop in his personal ocean. He has spent north of $213 million of his own money on the race — shattering every previous California gubernatorial primary spending record, including Meg Whitman’s roughly $94 million in 2010 (approximately $142 million in today’s dollars). That spending has made him ubiquitous on television, on radio, on social media, and apparently on billboard trucks circling gas stations highlighting Becerra’s past associations with Chevron.
It has not, however, made him the frontrunner. The final Emerson College/Inside California Politics poll released Saturday showed Becerra leading at 28%, with Steyer at 22% and Republican commentator Steve Hilton at 21%. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco was in fourth at 12%. Democrats Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, and Antonio Villaraigosa were in single digits — their campaigns effectively over despite all that progressive institutional support.
The tightness of the Democratic race is precisely what makes Tuesday’s results so consequential. California uses a top-two primary system, meaning the two highest vote-getters advance to November regardless of party. If the Democratic field splits badly enough — and with multiple Democrats still pulling votes, that remains a live possibility — both Hilton and Bianco could conceivably advance together, shutting Democrats out of the governor’s race entirely for the first time in two decades.
What The Mud Fight Reveals
Steyer’s decision to drop an indictment-adjacent attack ad the day before the primary tells you something about where his campaign believes it stands. It is not the tactic of a candidate with momentum and a clear path — it is the tactic of a campaign looking to disrupt a front-runner in a race where every percentage point matters for the top-two cutoff.
The ad also neatly illustrates the central paradox of Steyer’s candidacy. He has built his campaign on the argument that corporate money has corrupted California politics — that corporations pay to play and ordinary Californians pay the bill. He is making that argument while spending $213 million of his own hedge fund fortune and, in his closing weekend, running an ad that falsely suggests his chief rival may be headed for federal prosecution.
Whatever happens on June 2, the race has ended in the place that California’s $200-million-plus gubernatorial primaries tend to end: with the wealthiest candidate running out of options other than scorched earth, and voters deciding whether they prefer the machine or the billionaire. Hilton, watching from the Republican side of the field, is presumably enjoying the spectacle.
