The California governor’s race was supposed to give Democrats a chance to elevate a new party leader in the nation’s most symbolically significant liberal state, and fill a powerful perch with a progressive voice leading the opposition to President Trump.
Instead, the contest to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom has played out more like a series of unfortunate events, culminating with the demise of Representative Eric Swalwell’s campaign in a stew of sexual misconduct accusations.
The state’s most wide-open race for governor in a generation had begun with the potential field-clearing candidacy of Kamala Harris, the former vice president. She was looking for her next step after losing the 2024 presidential race and consulted advisers and friends about running to lead her home state.
But she ultimately opted against the race and is instead “thinking about” a third presidential bid.
Some Democrats salivated over a possible run by Senator Alex Padilla, one of the nation’s most prominent Latino leaders. He, too, passed.
An early front-runner, Katie Porter, a former congresswoman, went viral for the wrong reasons, with a new clip of a highhanded interview with a journalist and an old one of her berating an aide. And two Democrats who ran for president with little traction in 2020 jumped in: the billionaire financier Tom Steyer, 68, and Mr. Swalwell, 45.
Then came the sexual misconduct accusations against Mr. Swalwell, including from a former aide and other women who detailed unwanted advances. He transformed overnight from putative front-runner to pariah and quit the race Sunday evening.
“This has been a bombshell,” said former Senator Barbara Boxer, a longtime lion of California liberalism who retired a decade ago. “It is awful. It is awful.”
Now Democratic voters in the state are left to sift through the remaining choices — the filing deadline passed last month — who have mostly failed to capture either their attention or imagination, or both.
Perhaps nothing shows the seemingly diminished 2026 ambitions of California Democrats better than the fact that the most urgent goal advanced by the party leadership has been to avoid fumbling away the governorship entirely.
“I don’t get the luxury of wishing for a different kind of dynamics,” Rusty Hicks, the chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in an interview. “This is the one we have.”
No Republican has won statewide for two decades. Yet because of the state’s unique primary rules — the top two vote-getters in June will advance, regardless of party — Democrats face at least some risk of being boxed out of the general election.
There are two top Republican candidates, while more than a half-dozen low-polling Democrats threaten to divide the rest of the vote. Mr. Hicks has spent recent weeks warning loudly about the need for Democratic candidates with no chance of winning to quit. The party released a recent poll showing two Republicans atop the race. (Mr. Swalwell, narrowly and within the margin of error, had been the top Democrat in that poll.)
In addition to dropping out of the race, Mr. Swalwell is now facing calls for his resignation or expulsion from Congress, as well as a criminal investigation. He has called the allegations of sexual assault “false” and also said he was “sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made.”
The Democratic race has captured the unique challenge of running in a state as sprawling and decentralized as California, with its nearly 40 million residents scattered across expansive and expensive media markets.
Simply put, it is extraordinarily hard to become known statewide.
It took Mr. Newsom two terms as lieutenant governor and two elections as mayor of San Francisco — plus the groundbreaking move to legalize gay marriage in the city in 2004 — to build a big profile. He was preceded by Gov. Jerry Brown, who served four terms as governor across multiple decades and whose father was governor before him. Before that, it was a celebrity, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor turned politician whose fame helped catapult him into office.
Notably, to the degree that any Democratic candidates in the governor’s race have achieved any level of renown it has been mostly as opposition figures to Mr. Trump, rather than for their own achievements.
For Mr. Swalwell, that meant years of cable news appearances and social media attacks on the president.
For Ms. Porter, it was wielding a white board and grilling Mr. Trump’s allies back when she was in Congress during his first term.
For Mr. Steyer, it was funding millions of dollars of television ads calling for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in his first term — and spending hundreds of millions more on a failed run for president in 2020.
“Trump himself occupies so much of the political conversation that the only way for anyone at the state or local level to break through that noise is to position themselves as an anti-Trump figure,” said Brian Brokaw, a Democratic strategist based in Sacramento who has served as a past adviser to Mr. Newsom and Ms. Harris.
That is true beyond the governor’s race. Mr. Newsom, who cannot run for the office again because of term limits, has vaulted himself to the forefront of the 2028 presidential conversation in large part because of his ability to stand up to Mr. Trump during the redistricting fight last year and also for mimicking his caustic social media habits.
In the race to succeed him, Mr. Steyer has pumped roughly $120 million of his fortune into a blanket of advertising that has helped him rise from 1 percent in the polls to double digits. His campaign accounts for nine of the 10 most expensive TV ads in the contest, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking service.
Mr. Steyer has campaigned for governor as a progressive who would tax billionaires like himself and corporations. He has also embraced a universal health care program in the mold of what Senator Bernie Sanders has supported, reversing his position from his 2020 run for president.
“Boy, was I wrong, and boy, was Bernie right,” Mr. Steyer has said.
Ms. Porter got the most attention for an uncomfortable television interview last fall in which she questioned the need to win over Trump supporters. “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” she asked her interviewer.
Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, entered the race late in January to fanfare from Silicon Valley financiers but has struggled to attract voter support for his moderate message. Allies have circulated plans for a do-or-die $35 million rescue plan.
The other candidates running include a former Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, who last won an election in the early weeks of President Barack Obama’s first term; Xavier Becerra, a former congressman, state attorney general and federal health secretary; Betty Yee, a former state controller, who announced her candidacy more than two years ago; and Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction. None have broken out of the single digits in polls.
Ms. Boxer, 85, supports Mr. Villaraigosa, 73, but said she understood the instinct of voters for a fresh face.
“I think most people would say we need some new young person. OK, I hear you. I mean, I’m not arguing with that. But I’m looking at the field and I’m saying to myself, given this awful turn of events,” she said of the Swalwell allegations, “What do we need? We need someone who knows how to do this.”
She described this as a “moment of opportunity” for Democratic candidates who have yet to gain traction — but also a risk of a Republican vs. Republican general election.
“I think the odds are 20 percent,” she said. “I don’t like that. But 80 percent that it won’t happen.”
The two Republicans are Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, and Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host whom Mr. Trump endorsed last week.
To say that voters have been underwhelmed with their options is an understatement.
In a poll last month from the Institute of Governmental Studies at U.C. Berkeley, not one of the 10 major candidates had a net favorable rating — where more people viewed them favorably than unfavorably — among the entire electorate.
And the candidates remain obscure to broad swaths of voters. The best-known candidate was Ms. Porter — and still nearly 30 percent of voters had no opinion of her.
Mr. Newsom has largely steered clear of the fight over who his successor will be, trying to maximize his time running the nation’s largest state government.
“I’m a milk carton,” Mr. Newsom said last month. “I got a sell-by date.”
But come June, voters are going to be voting in a primary to select his successor, whether they’re ready or not.
“Voters have to come terms with the fact that one of these people is going to become governor,” Mr. Brokaw said. “There’s no shining knight coming down the hill to the rescue.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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