How Xavier Becerra Became The Joe Biden Of California’s Governor Race

Xavier Becerra is becoming the Joe Biden of California’s gubernatorial campaign.

Like the former president before his South Carolina revival in 2020, Becerra had been languishing for months before shooting to the top tier of his primary. Like Biden, he had little money. And he is now defying conventional wisdom about what Democratic voters want and is surpassing flashier, more progressive opponents pledging to upend the status quo.

And he has done it with overlapping appeal, promising stability brought by decades in governance amid remarkable political upheaval. (For Biden, the contrast was against a president who he said “sows chaos.” For Becerra, it is that plus the opening that Eric Swalwell’s implosion provided — Becerra’s own South Carolina — and the lesson from Swalwell’s campaign of the risk that a lesser-known quantity can pose.)

“In comparison, Tio Joe, and in this case, Tio Becerra, both give you stability — somebody who you've known, who you've seen, who's been around national and state politics,” said Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, Biden’s 2020 California director. “It's about somebody who's stable and ready to lead on day one.”

Both men are “name brand” Democrats who appeal to high-propensity voters, said Danielle Cendejas, a Democratic consultant who works for progressive candidates in California.

“Even with the 2020-esque ‘we want big changes,’ we still ended up with Biden,” said Cendejas. “We saw it in 2016, too. Hillary did very well in that primary when people thought the energy was going toward Bernie Sanders. It’s the ideology of the Democratic Party.”

Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, was an early donor to Becerra’s campaign.

Becerra, like Biden, came to the race with baggage. But much of it had been aired years earlier since both have had such long careers in politics — whether it was Biden’s plagiarism of a speech or Becerra’s response to a migrant child crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. A notable exception is KQED’s reporting Friday that Becerra backpedaled from his support for single-payer health care during his successful bid for the California Medical Association’s endorsement. 

Becerra’s trajectory is hardly identical to Biden’s. Biden benefitted in 2020 from the support of national Democratic Party power players. Becerra, conversely, drew limited third-house support before Swalwell’s collapse, and he was widely seen as a target of the California Democratic Party’s calls for non-viable candidates to drop out of the race.

“There's no real party machinist here,” said Gonzalez, who has known Becerra since volunteering for his Los Angeles mayoral campaign in 2001 but hasn’t endorsed anyone in the field. “No one cleared the field for Xavier. Remember, there were calls for him to drop out, and so I think voters gravitated toward him on their own.”

It also helped that Becerra drained down his campaign account in early April, just before sexual assault allegations against Swalwell broke and toppled his candidacy. The share of undecided voters has shrunk drastically in polls conducted since then, suggesting some of Becerra’s new supporters had not been engaged until recently.

“The idea had always been to try to understand what the best timing would be, when voters would begin to start to pay attention, and that helped drive the secretary and the campaign's thinking in terms of when to best put our money out there,” said Michael Bustamante, a Becerra campaign spokesperson. “The idea is to position yourself best to be able to capitalize on any eventuality.”

But Becerra’s shock surge last month only placed him into a statistical tie for the lead among Democrats. Now, as with Biden, institutional players in Democratic politics are working to push him over the top. The CMA, the insider of insiders, the Latino Legislative Caucus, dozens of members of the state Legislature — and as of this morning, the United Food & Commercial Workers Western States Council — have endorsed Becerra since his rise in polls. (He may need their help; many recent surveys showing him at the top of the Democratic pack were conducted before Tom Steyer began spending millions of dollars attacking Becerra.)

For now, though, polls suggest Latino voters are beginning to coalesce around Becerra — a demographic that could power him much the way Black voters lent key support to Biden.

“The validating piece that Biden had was being Obama's VP and what that meant for the Black community,” said Cendejas. “For Becerra, he’s got roots that people find familiar at a time when we still have ICE presence in our state.”

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