How California Politics Became So Blah

It’s Election Day in my home state, and it raises a meta-question that’s not before the voters as such, but that nonetheless depresses both them and their turnout: How did California politics become so lackluster?

My colleague David Dayen and I have both offered some partial answers. David pointed a finger at the once-vibrant Bay Area–based machine now run by spiritless consultants with no interest in addressing issues around which today’s movements could arise. I singled out the way the jungle primary compelled everyone to become a tactician rather than a values-driven voter. But there’s something more—a hollowness that’s descended over this year’s campaigns that amounts to a betrayal of California’s political traditions.

More from Harold Meyerson

At least as far back as 1910, when Progressives swept to power and remade the state, California politics have been movement politics and oppositional politics. At times, those movements have had definite crackpot aspects, emerging, as did the 1930s groundswell for governmental benefits for the aged, from furious transplanted Midwesterners who could have come straight out of Nathanael West’s lumpen mob in The Day of the Locust. Some of their rightward-moving children dominated Orange County, swelled the ranks of the John Birch Society, and took the Republican Party away from its Eisenhower establishment, with its resigned acceptance of much of the New Deal, and bestowed it on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who sought to remove such socialistic blots from American life.

Transforming national parties wasn’t exclusively a California Republican project; it defined California Democrats as well. During the Popular Front period of the 1930s, when lifelong Socialist Party member Upton Sinclair won the Democratic gubernatorial primary and California’s unusually savvy Communist Party members realized they had become the left flank of the New Deal, the state’s Democratic Party developed a social democratic tinge, with a social democratic wing, that persisted for the rest of the century.

The battles that the onetime Socialist Party and Communist Party members waged in the ’30s and ’40s were chiefly economic. But the huge buildup of industry in the state during World War II and the Cold War (from 1940 through 1990, the largest private-sector employers in the state were Lockheed, Douglas, North American Rockwell, and other aerospace companies), and the fact that those companies were all unionized, meant that the broadly shared prosperity of postwar America was particularly broad in California, as well as shinier and newer than it was in the rest of the nation.

As early as the 1950s, liberal California began to focus on issues other than wages and hours, just as conservative California did as well. Civil rights laws were enacted in advance of their federal counterparts. A confrontational New Left reached UC Berkeley in 1964, four years before it hit Eastern universities. Across the bay from Berkeley, the founder of California’s enduring Democratic machine, Rep. Phil Burton, managed to single-handedly abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. He also opposed the Vietnam War, and the state’s Young Democrats (led by two UCLA law students, Henry Waxman and Howard Berman, who were to found the SoCal branch of Burton’s machine) became the first official party organization in the country to go on record against the war. The 1968 anti-war, anti-LBJ presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy marked the first campaign involvement of a young Jerry Brown, whose anti-war sentiments, as well as his support for the fledgling United Farm Workers, were defining issues for the young Democrats who came to dominate the state party.

Postwar post-materialist social movements became the breeding grounds for generations of Democrats. The interests and causes of California Democrats—including civil rights, environmentalism, and immigrant rights—eventually became those of the national Democratic mainstream, but that sometimes took decades and sometimes required jousting with and ousting of old guards. (It was Burton—see above—who persuaded the House Democratic caucus to abolish its practice of awarding committee chairs solely and automatically on the basis of seniority.)

It was Los Angeles where ousting the leaders of the civic order most defined city politics. The victory of Black city councilmember Tom Bradley in the 1973 mayoral election was a victory over the city’s conservative white Protestant establishment, supplanting it in the halls of power with a liberal Black-Jewish coalition that dominated the city’s politics for the 20 years of Bradley’s five terms as mayor. After a decade’s interregnum, it was succeeded by a Latino-labor coalition that in this century played a major role in putting Antonio Villaraigosa, Eric Garcetti, and then Karen Bass, successively, in the mayor’s office.

But by 2026, the post-materialist movements that had suffused, informed, activated, and defined California Democrats for the preceding 65 years had largely lost the story line. The once-glowing home of the rising postwar middle class had become the least affordable of states, due more to the dearth of decent-paying working- and middle-class jobs than to a supply-side scarcity of affordable goods. The giant aerospace companies had hugely downsized at the end of the Cold War, taking hundreds of thousands of good jobs with them, while the jobs that California generated for the millions of immigrants who came to the state to escape Mexican poverty and Central American wars were low-paying service-sector work. Unions in California have worked steadily and innovatively to raise wages where they can—even pressuring Gov. Newsom and the legislature to establish a form of sectoral bargaining for fast-food workers—but fewer than 15 percent of California workers are even in unions.

The movement that California needs today would be something like the End Poverty in California movement that Upton Sinclair called forth when, a Bernie Sanders avant la lettre, he ran for office as an avowed socialist within the Democratic Party. I’m not arguing that merely running socialists for office in itself offers some new burst of relevancy to the day’s challenges. DSA member Nithya Raman’s campaign for L.A. mayor is powered not by her platform, but rather by the fact that she’s the one Democrat seriously challenging an unpopular Democratic incumbent in a very Democratic city.

Movements that plausibly analyze and address major challenges empower candidates as much as candidates build those movements. Bernie Sanders was such a candidate, and the movement he helped call into existence was key to the emergence of AOC and Zohran Mamdani. The kind of intensity of belief and support that powered their rise, and has historically powered the movements that once fed into and shaped California’s Democratic Party, has been absent from California politics this year, save in a number of hyperlocal races. If such a movement can cohere around the wealth tax proposal that will be on November’s ballot, that might provide the kind of boost it needs to begin to grapple with the state’s dysfunctional two-tier economy: taxing the very rich, for instance, to make colleges free and to create a trade-schools-to-unionized-jobs pipeline.

Absent that, California Democrats will have politics without passion (save when repelling ICE’s marauders) and without plausibly passionate candidates. In today’s election, I suspect the only truly passionate players are the giant corporations and billionaires who have been funding the campaign to keep Tom Steyer—the only candidate really addressing these issues—from advancing to the runoff (their passions being greed and loathing). That’s not the California I’ve known and loved.