The laws governing California politics shouldn’t be confused with Sir Issac Newton’s laws of motion—least not with Newton’s “third law” and the notion of every action having an equal and opposite reaction.

Case in point: former vice president Kamala Harris’s decision, late last month, to forgo a run for governor in 2026.

Applying the Newtonian principle, a significant figure should have entered the race to fill the void left by Harris. Instead, a week later, California Lieutenant Fovernor Eleni Kounalakis likewise took herself out of the gubernatorial contest and reset her sights on the office of state treasurer. In giving up her dream of becoming the Golden State’s 41st governor, she ended a vision quest that began way back in April 2023 (such hypercampaigning isn’t new for California gubernatorial hopefuls, by the way; Gavin Newsom, Kounalakis’ spredecessor as lieutenant governor, began in his 2018 campaign in February 2015).

If the lack of a big name in the running to be the next governor of America’s most populous state seems odd, that might be because . . . well, it’s an odd set of circumstances as the summer of 2025 comes to an end.

For openers, there’s no clear frontrunner, as was the case the last two times the job was vacant (i.e., a term-limited governor couldn’t re-up for another four years).

In 2018, that was Newsom, who cleverly used his eight years as California’s second-in-command (an outdated quirk in California’s constitution makes the lieutenant governor the acting governor when the incumbent temporarily leaves the state) to raise his profile. That included Newsom making himself the very public face of pair of ballot initiatives having to do with gun control (2016’s Proposition 63) and recreational marijuana legalization (2016’s

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