California’s gubernatorial race has become unusually crowded, even by the state’s standards. The Democratic frontrunners are Billionaire Environmentalist Tom Steyer, Former Rep. Katie Porter, Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. Additionally, Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond and Former Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa are in the race, though all are polling below 5% and therefore did not meet the threshold to be included in the April 22nd debate hosted by Nexstar. Former Rep. Eric Swalwell will still appear on the ballot despite withdrawing after rape allegations surfaced and his subsequent resignation from Congress.
I saw Mahan speak at a town hall in Oakland, led by former Oakland councilmember and 2-time mayoral candidate Loren Taylor, on Thursday, April 16th. If you had asked me two weeks ago what my opinion of Mahan was, I would’ve said he was the tech bro candidate, which is not false by any means. Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, have all contributed to his campaign. But Mahan leaned heavily on a different narrative. He put a big emphasis on his middle-class upbringing in Watsonville, a farming town about an hour south of San Jose. His mom was a public school teacher, his dad a mailman. His family owned a small house and relied on the public library as his after-school program. They “made it.” Today, many families cannot.
He’s not wrong at all. The average cost of a home in San Jose is $1.4 million. It’s the most expensive of the top-20 largest American cities. So what has Mayor Mahan done to tackle the cost-of-living crisis? Well, after a year of zero market-rate housing units breaking ground, San Jose turned around. It cut fees for developers to make building new housing actually financially viable, and in 2025, 2,000 units of housing broke ground. And 2,000 more are likely on their way in 2026.
Mahan’s housing policy is the most ambitious of any candidate in the race. And that’s how he wants to tackle affordability and bring back the middle class. One of his more specific proposals is to revive condominium construction, which has dropped roughly 90 percent in California over the past two decades. The cause of this is California’s construction defect liability law, a 2002 law that “opened the door for lawsuits against builders of condominiums,” per Mahan’s campaign website. Estimates say 80-85% of new condos have faced lawsuits under defect liability laws, and developers spend $6,720-$8,400 on liability insurance per condo unit, compared with only $1,700-$2,650 for similar rental buildings.
Condos are on average 2.7x cheaper than single-family homes. Repealing the defect liability law would allow Californians to buy a starter home and build credit, allowing them to eventually buy a house, something that has become increasingly hard in California. Mahan is the only candidate in the race calling for this. His campaign slogan, “Back to Basics,” is his approach to governing. “Matt Mahan is a new kind of Democrat running for Governor to get California Back to Basics—and there’s nothing more basic than making housing in California truly affordable,” reads the housing section of his website.
(Mahan is, regrettably, still trailing in the polls. I’ll vote Steyer if I have to, but never Becerra, the corporate Democrat in the race.)
I think of his back-to-basics approach as something similar to Daniel Lurie’s leadership in tackling quality of life issues in San Francisco. Homelessness, crime, and the fentanyl crisis have all hit San Francisco—and California as a whole—quite hard. But in the past year, San Francisco has gotten noticeably better. I often notice signs in store windows reading “Vacant to Vibrant,” a program led by Lurie to bring small businesses to vacant retail space. The city feels safer and livelier than it did a year ago. Mahan has taken a very similar approach in San Jose, and in 2025, it topped the list of the safest big cities in America. His strong record carries to homelessness, where the number of unsheltered residents dropped 23% under his leadership. And though it’s not perfect— the homeless population still increased by 237 people— San Jose has made meaningful change in getting people off the streets and into beds.
Mahan isn’t perfect by any means. Some of his donors, including Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, have backed Trump-aligned candidates. But Mahan is making a claim that I’ve only ever seen made among leftists. “We’ve given a lot of oxygen to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement by not fixing our problems here in California,” Mahan said in an interview with VICE News. To take on Donald Trump, we need to counter Donald Trump.
“I share the party’s core values, but I’m not afraid to take on the interests and the establishment within my own party if I think they’ve got it wrong,” Mahan said in the same interview. This reflects a claim I strongly agree with. Establishment politicians are very often ineffective. A majority of Americans agree. That’s why we elected Donald Trump over an establishment candidate, twice. The extremes of each party dominate the anti-establishment rhetoric. But Mahan believes in a different kind of anti-establishmentarianism. One that takes on do-nothing leaders in favor of delivering results for Californians.
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