Xavier Becerra is locking in his lead in California Governors race. Is it too late to catch him?

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Well, if you're the front runner in the Democratic nomination for the largest blue state in America, what do you do 3 weeks out?

[00:00:08]Well, the first thing is you're going to take in a lot of incoming fire.

[00:00:11]Everybody in the race, the Democrats anyway, they're going to have to come out and bring your numbers down in order to make themselves more competitive.

[00:00:18]And that's precisely what's been happening with Xavier Becerra as we enter the last 21, 22 days of this campaign before the June 2nd primary.

[00:00:27]Take a quick look at this clip. the governor's race, and being a frontrunner means being a target. Democrat Xavier Becerra is fending off attacks.

[00:00:35]>> And it's not just from his rivals, but also from his former co-workers in the White House. CBS LA political reporter Tom Wait is here to explain. And it just heats up every day, right? People have their ballots, they're voting, so all these kind of daily sort of news cycles, they matter because people are making choices. So, Becerra's poll numbers are on the rise, they have been for the past few weeks as he becomes more of a threat as Ruben Braun were saying, his opponents are taking more shots. What he may not have expected was that his former White House colleagues would be piling on.

[00:01:04]As Democrat Xavier Becerra's poll numbers rise in the gubernatorial race, so do the attacks on his candidacy, including fellow Democrats at the debates. Antonio's absolutely right about the secretary's failure on the immigration issue. There is a direct line >> absolute lie. And other Dems are piling on, too. Thursday, Politico reported that a half dozen former Biden administration officials who worked with Becerra are anonymously mocking his frontrunner status. One telling Politico, quote, "It gets the biggest political laugh every time we send around a poll." According to Politico, the whispers claim as Health and Human Services Secretary, Becerra bungled the COVID response, a migrant health crisis at the border, and other issues. Feel like it's a little too soon for the Biden people to be lecturing on, you know, what California voters should be doing. Uh These are officials some of whom you know we're kind of hiding from the country Biden's deterioration. The Becerra campaign is blasting those claims and provided statements of support from former Biden administration officials like former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm even a veteran California Republican strategist is minimizing the claims. Unless the former president were to come out and say something I don't think any of this breaks through. The only way to change the trajectory of the race to have something you Swalwell size. The candidates have gathered for three debates over the course of the last two weeks including the showdown CBS California and Pomona College hosted last week. New polling is out every day many of them showing support coalescing behind Becerra for the Democrats and Steve Hilton on the Republican side.

[00:02:48]Steve Hilton is just a more television friendly personality. The race is still fluid. Becerra is ahead right now but not by a huge margin. There's still an opportunity for other candidates to to pull up. Keep an eye on Matt Mahan.

[00:03:02]A staggering statistic in the race Tom Steyer's campaign spending. He's poured more than 150 million dollars of his own fortune into the campaign. He led Democrats in some polls for a while but has now slipped from the top. So polls change a lot day-to-day. We'll see where this goes.

[00:03:19]>> We're seeing it happen right now. Thank you Tom.

[00:03:23]Well for much more on the June primary and the people wanting your vote go to cbsla.com/votersguide to watch our candidate interviews and compare candidates side-by-side. So again a lot of these negatives are coming. You're talking about tens of millions of dollars are spent per week.

[00:03:39]And the question then becomes how do you manage this as a campaign?

[00:03:43]How do you deal with this when you're being outspent literally $135 to one in the case of Tom spot Tom Steyer the billionaire in second place running negative ads against Javier Becerra.

[00:03:57]Well, the first thing you got to remember is one of the unfortunate or fortunate realities, depending on who you are, about going negative as we call it is that as much as your negatives may be bringing down the target of your attack ads, more often than not your number starts to recede as well.

[00:04:13]And at least half of that equation is what's happening with Steyer.

[00:04:17]Most of the polls that have been coming out have been showing Becerra actually increasing. He's literally consolidating his lead going from 18, 19, 20 up to 23 in some polls. That low 20s range would basically lock him in as the Democratic nominee with just 3 weeks to go.

[00:04:35]But Steyer's dilemma is a little bit more complicated. With all of that money going up and people realizing that that Becerra's probably going to be the nominee, they're not liking seeing him being brought down or being hurt heading into a general election runoff with the Republican.

[00:04:50]And so Steyer's numbers are actually dropping. An average of six points or more in the last four or five polls that have been either put out publicly or that are being circulated around Sacramento, which you'll be seeing, I assure you, in the next coming days.

[00:05:03]These numbers all points to a really big challenge for both campaigns.

[00:05:09]Becerra's got to make a decision. Does he respond to the attacks by going negative or does he just trust in the fact that Steyer's doing his own dirty work for him with his own money? Does he keep running positives trying to gather up that small shrinking share of undecideds that pops him up up to that upper uh level of uh the high teens, low 20s?

[00:05:30]Or does he try something maybe different?

[00:05:33]Does he turn his gunfire on the Republican nominee, Steve Hilton, who is also running away, by the way, with the race?

[00:05:39]The separation from Steve Hilton, the the likely Republican nominee, who was Trump endorsed and has done a really good job during the debates, the four debates that the Republican candidates have had, is setting a wide distance, opening up a pretty significant lead over Chad Bianco, a Riverside County Sheriff who's tried to take a more populist MAGA frame from from the Hilton candidacy. That's not working either.

[00:06:04]You're seeing Bianco and Steyer on the Republican and Democratic side both beginning to fade while the frontrunners are starting to consolidate their lanes and consolidate the vote. If either were to begin attacking the other, if Hilton were to begin attacking Becerra, which he's already begun to do, and Becerra were to respond by attacking Hilton, that sets the narrative and starts to gel in both parties' minds, the Democratic voter base and the Republican voter base, who the nominees are going to be and that partisanship that so many Californians and Americans feel right now is going to be rallying around the flag to protect them from the attacks of the other parties' nominee.

[00:06:43]So, pay attention to that. Three weeks to go, one of the best, I think, strat strategies for both parties to employ is attacking the other major party nominee as a show that they're confident in their lead, that their leads are, in fact, growing, and that this sets up the precursor to what's going to be a November election runoff.

[00:07:03]Three weeks to go, other candidates behind the pack, Mahan has demonstrated some upward trajectory in one poll hitting 10% and internal poll, but still looks pretty methodologically sound.

[00:07:15]There's just not enough time. Way too much way too much ground to make up, not enough money, but more importantly, even if there were enough money, there's just not enough time to pull up 14-15 points in 3 weeks because, remember, in California, we don't have an election day on June 2nd. That's when ballots stop being counted at 8:00 p.m. that first Tuesday in June.

[00:07:37]We actually have an election month.

[00:07:40]Ballots are already out. Ballots are in the hands of voters. Excuse my lean here. I got my ballot over a week ago, about a week ago, give or take. I haven't even opened mine yet. I'll be waiting till probably the very end and a lot of California voters will be.

[00:07:55]But my point is, with millions of ballots out there, there are votes being cast literally every day and every vote that's cast, that's cast, that's mailed in, limits the universe of people that are eligible to to vote. You're You're literally shrinking the the size of the number of the fish in the pond.

[00:08:15]So, as long as Becerra holds this lead, as long as Hilton holds his lead, every vote is likely to move in that's direction. Undecideds also, by the way, have a very strong tendency to break in the direction of where polling trend lines were going. That's why we can usually, with a pretty high degree of confidence, anticipate where outstanding ballots are on election night, which direction they're going to break in.

[00:08:39]They have a very very very strong tendency to break along the lines of where election day voters were going because that's where sentiment was last at, that's where the trend line is is is is directing. That's again why momentum matters so much, why watching the trend line and directional movement is absolutely key to understanding what's likely to happen. It's not just going to be like the votes are going to be closed on June 2nd and all of these hundreds of thousands of votes will be counted and processed and have an entirely different look than what you saw during the course of the next couple of days and or weeks.

[00:09:14]Hope that made sense. Hope that was helpful. Keep an eye on the California governor's race. I think it's far far more eventful than what we're hearing, especially from a lot of the East Coast pundits. With a wide array of choices, with very disparate lanes, these candidates are going to give you a preview of what's likely to happen in the 2028 presidential contest. And again, the fact that Hilton is separating, that Becerra is separating, we're looking like we've got both nominees.

[00:09:42]Um, but of course, you've got to wait till every vote is counted. But until then, um, we'll talk next time as the next round of polling comes out.