There is a particular kind of irony watching California’s progressive establishment tie itself in knots over Tom Steyer. The state that gave the world identity politics, intersectionality seminars, and the sacred gospel of “lived experience” is now watching a 68-year-old white, straight, male billionaire attempt to purchase the governorship with what amounts to a small nation’s GDP. And the left, largely, is playing along.
Steyer — founder of the Farallon Capital hedge fund, longtime Democratic megadonor, and failed 2020 presidential candidate — has pumped nearly $200 million of his personal fortune into television, cable, and radio advertising alone.
That figure, compiled by ad tracker AdImpact, does not merely break records. It obliterates them, surpassing by more than $16 million the previous all-time record set by Republican Meg Whitman in her 2010 losing bid for the same office. Whitman, at least, had the decency to lose quietly. Steyer seems determined to keep spending until either California voters relent or his accountants stage an intervention.
The polls heading into the June 2 primary tell a story that should embarrass anyone who believed progressive voters could not be bought. A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey shows Xavier Becerra leading with 25%, Republican Steve Hilton at 21%, and Steyer at 19%. The Public Policy Institute of California places the margins nearly identical. Emerson College polling has Becerra at 19% with Hilton and Steyer deadlocked at 17%.
Three separate surveys, same basic conclusion: Steyer has flooded the airwaves for months, spent twenty times more than his nearest rival, and still cannot crack a lead. What he has done, against all odds, is remain competitive — which in California Democratic politics apparently counts as a mandate.
Meanwhile, the betting markets remain unconvinced. Polymarket currently has Becerra as the overwhelming favorite at roughly 70%, with Steyer sitting around 20%. The money, it seems, does not trust the money. Sophisticated forecasters looking past the primary noise see a Becerra-dominated November, and they are likely right. But the fact that Steyer is even in the conversation — that his checkbook has kept him viable where his ideas and personality have not — is a window into how California Democrats actually operate beneath the sanctimonious surface.
Consider what Steyer represents on paper. He is precisely the demographic profile that progressive activists have spent years telling us is the problem with American politics: a fabulously wealthy white man with no governing experience who believes his fortune constitutes qualification.
When Republicans ran candidates like this, the left called it plutocracy. When a hedge fund billionaire does it with a climate change bumper sticker, it is called a grassroots campaign focused on affordability.
“Californians deserve a life they can afford,” Steyer declared in his campaign launch video. The man who walked away from a billion-dollar fund to “give back to California” is now spending that wealth to give himself California.
His history makes the posturing harder to sustain. In 2020, Steyer burned through more than $200 million of his own fortune chasing the Democratic presidential nomination. He received zero pledged delegates, finished a distant third in South Carolina after making it his firewall, and dropped out before Super Tuesday. Now he is back, having apparently concluded that the problem last time was not enough zeroes on the check. If at first you do not succeed, spend another $200 million. Somewhere, Meg Whitman is taking notes.
The deeper question California’s voters should be asking themselves is not whether Steyer can win, but what it means that he is this close. A party that has spent decades lecturing the country about the corrupting influence of money in politics is on the verge of potentially nominating a man whose singular qualification is that he is willing to spend more of it than anyone in state history.
Katie Porter, herself no stranger to left-wing credentials, has been bluntest about it: her campaign has repeatedly called out Steyer for “trying to buy the governor’s office.” That criticism, notable for coming from within the Democratic primary, has done little to slow the spending or the polls.
As it is written in the book of Amos, “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” California’s progressives may not recognize the scripture, but they are living it out in real time. Principles, it turns out, have a price — and Tom Steyer has done the math.
Steve Hilton, the former Fox News commentator and British political strategist who carries Donald Trump’s endorsement, is the last man standing between California and an all-Democrat November ballot. Under the state’s top-two primary system, the leading two finishers advance regardless of party. Hilton has remained competitive on a fraction of Steyer’s budget, which is either a testament to Trump’s political pull in a deep-blue state or an indictment of what $200 million in advertising actually buys when voters are not sold on the product. Possibly both.
What happens on June 2 will tell Californians something important about themselves. If Steyer advances, it will confirm what cynics have long suspected: that progressive values are largely decorative, applied when convenient and discarded when a billionaire with the right slogans comes along. If he falls short, it will at least suggest that there are limits to what money alone can purchase, even in a state that has made a cottage industry of performative politics.
Either way, Tom Steyer has already proven something valuable. The next time a California Democrat lectures the country about democracy being corrupted by the wealthy, remember: they had a chance to send this one home, and many of them are still deciding.
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