The next governor of deep-blue California will almost certainly be a Democrat. But what kind of Democrat?

The establishment favorite for overseeing the world’s fourth-largest economy, Xavier Becerra, has trod a traditional path. As governor, based on past performance, he would keep his party and the state on the rutted road of corporate-friendly liberalism.

Becerra’s top Democratic rival, Tom Steyer, is a threat to the status quo in a state where 7 million people live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are among the highest in the country. While Silicon Valley and AI boom, deprivation is widespread.

Steyer promises to upend corporate power and give California a sustained progressive jolt. If he wins, the country’s largest state party will likely go through a major ideological challenge. During the last 15 years, while Democrats have controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, they’ve avoided disrupting the status quo. State budgets have routinely failed to protect low-income Californians.

The California Democratic party is a corporate entity, as I saw up close for 10 years while on its state central committee. The party’s center of gravity is occupied by California’s two Democratic senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, mainstream liberals who rock few corporate boats and vote in harmony with the military-industrial complex that has massive footholds in the state.

Overall, Becerra – who went from Congress to serving as California’s attorney general and then president Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services – is central casting for the kind of political sensibilities that have dominated the state party, which internally boosts identity politics above (rhetoric aside) such considerations as economic justice, labor rights, public health, environmental protection or peace.

Scant policy differences exist between Becerra and outgoing governor Gavin Newsom. “While Steyer is vowing to raise taxes on corporations and his fellow billionaires, Becerra is skeptical of tax increases that could push businesses to leave California,” Politico reports. Preventing capital flight from the state is the same argument that Newsom has used in his vehement opposition to a ballot measure endorsed by Steyer for a one-time billionaire tax, while one study after another has shown such capital flight to be largely a myth.

Days before the 2 June primary, in which the top two vote-getters advance to the November general election, Steyer called his main Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, “a Maga extremist” and Becerra “a career politician backed by a deep roster of corporations and billionaires”. At the same........

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