ITHCWY. California Governor Primary · 2026
RAV compares your answers with public issue positions from each candidate. This page lists the candidate position text used by the quiz, organized by candidate and issue.
Take the RAV quizCandidate 01
Becerra’s cost-of-living message is consumer-protection heavy. He says he would use state power to fight price gouging and unjustified rate hikes, expand help with childcare and basic household costs, and make lower utility bills a central test of energy policy by tightening oversight and accountability for utilities.
Becerra’s housing plan is to treat the shortage itself as an emergency. He says he would declare a housing state of emergency on day one, push statewide fee reform, speed permitting, unlock modular construction, expand down-payment assistance, crack down on bulk investor distortions, enforce renter protections, and create a stable homelessness-prevention funding stream so fewer households fall into homelessness in the first place.
Becerra explicitly frames homelessness as not only a housing problem but also a mental-health crisis. He says he would fully implement Proposition 1, build thousands of treatment beds, cut red tape that slows treatment capacity, and pair that with homelessness-prevention funding so families can get help before they lose housing.
Becerra has not released a stand-alone business-recruitment platform comparable to his housing and health plans. In the materials reviewed, his growth story is indirect: build more housing, create union construction jobs, lower living costs that make hiring harder, and use AI and clean-energy investment in ways that broaden opportunity rather than simply offering tax-cut competition to businesses.
Becerra has not published a detailed dedicated fentanyl-and-retail-theft package in the main campaign materials reviewed for this report. The clearest adjacent commitments are his treatment-centered homelessness plan and his insistence that California should go harder after fraud and administrative abuse in public programs, so his visible public-safety posture is more system-repair-and-treatment than law-and-order branding.
A detailed K-12 governance platform was not prominent on Becerra’s campaign issue pages as of May 10. The clearest education-related commitments in his published platform are to expand AI literacy through public schools, libraries, and community colleges, and to support more housing in high-opportunity areas with access to strong schools, rather than to pursue a highly specific school-accountability overhaul.
Yes, Becerra has said he is open to higher taxes on very wealthy Californians, including passive investment income, while also saying the state will have to use both cuts and revenue, not just one or the other. His spending-reform message focuses on protecting direct services while cutting administrative waste, especially in healthcare billing, coding, prior authorization, and other bureaucratic overhead.
Becerra’s climate and resilience message is that climate policy has to stay affordable. He says he would invest heavily in wildfire prevention, flood control, retrofits, evacuation and warning systems, while also insisting that the clean-energy transition must lower bills, protect ratepayers, and require clearer accountability from utilities and large energy users such as data centers. A separate detailed drought-and-water-supply platform was not as visible in the reviewed materials as his wildfire-and-energy plans.
Healthcare is Becerra’s clearest political brand. He says California should move toward a universal single-payer system, defend coverage from federal cuts, protect Medi-Cal, and squeeze out costs by standardizing billing and reducing administrative fights between providers and insurers rather than cutting care itself.
Becerra’s AI platform tries to combine promotion with guardrails. He would require audits for AI used by state agencies, guarantee worker voice before automation decisions, track AI-driven labor displacement, expand transition and skills programs, strengthen transparency and human-review rules for high-stakes automated decisions, protect children, and require data centers to cover their own energy costs while meeting clean-energy and disclosure standards.
Candidate 02
Bianco’s answer is bluntly anti-tax and anti-regulation. He says California should cut taxes, reduce the gas tax, make the state more energy independent, and stabilize the insurance market through a fairer regulatory environment, home-hardening incentives, and a stronger last-resort insurance pool, all while opposing new taxes and arguing that excessive regulation is a major driver of high prices.
Bianco’s housing prescription is supply-side and deregulatory. He says he would expedite approvals, eliminate environmental-review litigation that he argues inflates home prices, reduce regulation on builders, incentivize development, and defend Proposition 13 rather than revisit property-tax limits.
Bianco’s homelessness platform is the most enforcement-forward in the field. He says he would use the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision to encourage encampment clearing, speed emergency shelters and supportive housing, allow forced treatment when necessary, add mental-health clinicians and first responders, audit every taxpayer-funded homelessness provider, and prioritize organizations that can show they actually move people into treatment and housing.
Bianco’s job-growth formula is lower taxes, less regulation, more domestic energy production, and less pressure on agriculture and insurance markets. He also says California should support the tech sector, protect farmers from burdensome groundwater and water rules, and stop policies that he argues are driving employers and workers out of the state.
Bianco’s crime message is classic law-and-order. His campaign argues that progressive criminal-justice reforms helped drive organized retail theft and broader property crime, and his public-safety materials and law-enforcement endorsements put fentanyl interdiction and giving police more tools near the center of his pitch. He has not, at least in the materials reviewed, rolled out a highly technical legislative package beyond that tougher-enforcement frame.
Bianco’s education platform is a “fundamentals first” agenda. He says schools should prioritize reading, writing, math and science, expand career-technical education, increase teacher recruitment and training, direct funding to classrooms rather than bureaucracy, expand access to high-performing charter schools, and ensure every campus has trained school resource officers along with counseling and student mental-health support.
Bianco says no to new taxes and has even floated eliminating the state income tax. He argues California has a spending and regulation problem, not a revenue problem, and says he would rely on spending cuts, audits, and economic growth from lower-cost energy and business expansion, though he has not yet published a detailed list of program cuts large enough to match the scale of those tax reductions.
Bianco’s approach emphasizes water infrastructure, farming, and insurance resilience more than emissions reduction. He says the state should protect farm water rights, reform groundwater rules, expand above-ground storage, speed the Sites Reservoir, modernize water infrastructure, encourage efficiency, and reduce wildfire-related insurance losses through home hardening and a more stable insurance framework.
A detailed healthcare affordability or coverage platform was not prominent in Bianco’s campaign materials reviewed for this report. His public-facing program is much more focused on taxes, energy, public safety, homelessness, housing, water and insurance than on expanding coverage, changing reimbursement, or pursuing single-payer or other large health-system reforms.
Bianco has not prominently published a dedicated AI-and-worker-displacement platform in the campaign materials reviewed here. The closest signal is his general pro-growth stance: lower taxes and regulation, support the tech sector, and a broader suspicion of Sacramento bureaucracy, but no detailed AI guardrail or worker-transition framework stands out yet.
Candidate 03
Hilton’s affordability agenda is built around tax relief and energy-cost rollback. He would eliminate state income tax on the first $100,000 of income, end taxes on tips, eliminate the small-business minimum tax, move to a 7.5% flat rate above $100,000, and pair that with plans to cut electricity costs by unwinding what he sees as expensive mandate-driven energy policy; on healthcare, he has also proposed ending full Medi-Cal coverage for undocumented immigrants and redirecting those savings to working Californians.
Hilton’s housing pitch is to bring back the single-family starter home. He says California should reduce or defer fees on entry-level homes, tie charges to home size rather than flat mandates, allow fee financing over time, and even eliminate state income tax on profits tied to qualifying starter-home construction, all while reducing environmental and permitting burdens that he argues priced smaller homes out of the market.
No prominent stand-alone homelessness, addiction, or untreated-mental-illness platform surfaced in Hilton’s main published policy materials reviewed for this report. The closest thematic signal is his argument that stronger families, less government dependence, and less bureaucratic dysfunction would ease downstream social disorder, which is a values frame more than a detailed treatment-and-shelter implementation plan.
This is one of Hilton’s clearest strengths as a candidate. He explicitly argues that high taxes, aggressive regulation, and legal uncertainty are driving growth out of California, and his remedy is a simpler tax code, lower costs for employers, a far friendlier climate for AI and entertainment production, and a broader “bureaucratic war on business” rollback.
A detailed written fentanyl-and-retail-theft policy paper was not prominent in the Hilton materials reviewed here. His broader pitch is that Californians deserve safe neighborhoods and that one-party governance has failed at basic public order, but his campaign’s visible issue architecture is much more developed on taxes, housing, AI, schools and energy than on a specific crime package.
Hilton’s education approach is explicit and accountability-heavy. He says schools should be judged by whether students master fundamentals, with a goal of universal English and math proficiency, more phonics-based reading instruction, stronger school accountability, and wider vocational and technical pathways so more students graduate with employable skills rather than just passing through the system.
No—Hilton’s platform is built on cutting taxes, not raising them. He says California has a spending problem rather than a revenue problem, wants the budget brought closer to pre-COVID levels, and pairs that with a “CAL DOGE” anti-fraud and anti-bureaucracy effort aimed at exposing waste, duplication and abuse across state government.
Hilton’s climate posture is mostly a critique of the current model. He argues California should replace mandate-heavy energy policy with affordability, reliability and consumer choice, including repealing wind and solar mandates and subsidies and restructuring the utility system; in the materials reviewed, comparably detailed wildfire and water strategies were less visible than his energy-cost agenda.
Hilton’s most concrete healthcare proposal is cost reduction rather than coverage expansion. He says California should use savings from ending full Medi-Cal coverage for undocumented immigrants to reduce wait times and make care more affordable for working Californians, which is a very different model from the single-payer approaches proposed by several Democrats.
Hilton wants California to stay the world capital of AI by avoiding sweeping, preemptive regulation. He would use targeted guardrails on child safety, fraud, impersonation and intellectual-property harms, while rejecting vague liability rules and new AI agencies; for workers, his answer is retraining, stronger vocational education, and a better business climate rather than strict limits on deployment.
Candidate 04
Mahan frames affordability as a “back to basics” performance problem. He says California should not ask residents to pay more until government delivers better results, and his public program emphasizes cutting taxes and fees on housing, pushing back on state policies that raise gas prices, and using a more accountable government approach to lower utility and insurance burdens for working families.
Housing is Mahan’s most developed platform. He would give new infill housing a two-year tax holiday, cap local fees and taxes, expand office-to-housing conversions, modernize building codes, support factory-built housing, reduce lawsuit exposure for new ownership housing, broaden state down-payment assistance through a shared-equity model, and scale home-sharing options that keep seniors housed while creating lower-cost rooms for workers and students.
Mahan’s homelessness message is that California spends too much on the least cost-effective interventions. He points to San Jose’s expansion of interim housing, says the state should restore local homelessness dollars and enforce a fair-share framework across cities, and proposes full implementation of Proposition 36 with more treatment capacity, tighter county accountability, and a model that combines shelter, case management and addiction treatment faster than the current system does.
Mahan’s growth pitch is that California can become pro-opportunity without abandoning Democratic social commitments. He talks about simplifying housing rules, lowering development costs, investing in infrastructure and workforce development, improving public-health and education systems, and using pragmatic governance to make California more attractive to employers rather than leaning mainly on ideological branding.
Mahan backed Proposition 36 and sells himself as a Democrat willing to combine compassion with accountability. His campaign says Sacramento has been too slow to implement the measure, and recent coverage notes his support for stronger consequences for theft and drug crimes, alongside a treatment-and-services model rather than a purely punitive one.
Mahan repeatedly lists public-school performance as one of the state’s core “back to basics” yardsticks, but his campaign materials are much more detailed on housing and homelessness than on K-12 reform. As of the sources reviewed here, his education message is more about accountability, opportunity, and making it easier for teachers and families to live in California than about a fleshed-out school-governance blueprint.
Mahan’s answer is essentially “not until government proves it can perform.” He says the state should take a hard look at wasteful programs, make goals and outcomes public, and use dashboards and performance management to drive line-by-line accountability before asking Californians for higher taxes.
Mahan’s climate posture in the non-PDF materials reviewed is practical and adaptation-oriented. He highlights home hardening against wildfires, lower insurance costs, and opposition to implementation choices that raise gas prices for working families; a more detailed water-and-drought platform was not as visible in the reviewed HTML sources as his housing and homelessness material.
Mahan’s healthcare message is about efficiency and access, not single payer. In interviews he has argued that better software and AI can cut administrative and billing overhead, help clinicians spot problems earlier, and expand access, but he also says healthcare professionals must remain “in the loop” so AI does not make unsupervised life-and-death decisions.
Mahan treats AI as a tool to be harnessed, not feared, but he does not want fully autonomous decision-making in high-stakes areas. He argues for enough regulation to keep people safe, continued human oversight in healthcare and similar settings, and more workforce development and upskilling so workers can adjust as technology changes the labor market.
Candidate 05
Porter’s cost-of-living agenda is built around consumer relief for households, not business tax cuts. She talks about childcare, groceries, healthcare and housing as the real pain points, supports eliminating state income tax for Californians making under $100,000, wants tighter rules on insurers and drug pricing, and uses her political brand as a corporate watchdog to argue she would directly challenge price and profit abuses.
Porter’s housing plan is to make building faster and ownership easier. She says she can cut building timelines by nearly two years, reduce apartment costs by about 20% by stopping local delays and speeding occupancy, support newer construction methods and state land/infrastructure support, and she has endorsed a down-payment assistance bond to lower the upfront barrier for first-time buyers.
Porter’s visible homelessness message starts with prevention. She points to her foreclosure-crisis work and argues that keeping people housed through emergency rental help and anti-eviction intervention is one of the smartest ways to reduce homelessness before it becomes more expensive and destabilizing. In the materials reviewed here, she does not foreground coercive treatment or a law-enforcement-first approach.
Porter’s theory of growth is bottom-up and pro-worker. She emphasizes stronger labor rights, more affordable childcare and housing, lower taxes for households under $100,000, and more educational opportunity, which together are meant to strengthen the workforce and consumer demand rather than compete primarily through deregulation and low business taxes.
A detailed fentanyl-and-retail-theft platform did not stand out in the published Porter priorities reviewed for this report. Her campaign’s visible emphasis is overwhelmingly on affordability, housing, healthcare, childcare, labor and climate, so public safety has not been one of her most elaborated issue areas in the main materials we reviewed.
Porter has not yet published a highly specific K-12 accountability platform in the materials reviewed here. Her education-related focus is more on affordability and access: making it easier for teachers to live near the communities they serve, tying school questions back to housing, and covering two years of in-state public-university tuition for Californians.
Yes, Porter supports higher taxes on high-earning corporations in order to finance tax relief for lower- and middle-income households and broader public investment. Her clearest spending message is to protect healthcare and invest in working families, though KQED noted she had not yet laid out a detailed backfill strategy for federal healthcare cuts.
Porter’s climate profile is strongly anti-polluter and environmental-justice oriented. She stresses that she has not taken money from polluters, points to oversight work against environmental abuse, and says the next governor must lead on disaster readiness, wildfire resilience, and the insurance fallout from climate-fueled disasters; a more detailed drought-and-water infrastructure plan was not prominent in the reviewed materials.
Porter says the next governor must be a healthcare governor. She would fight federal cuts that harm Medi-Cal and reproductive care, fortify California’s health system at the state level, curb wrongful insurance denials and drug costs, and continue pushing toward a state single-payer system.
Porter has taken one of the more explicitly regulation-forward positions on AI. At a recent town hall, she warned that California is only a year or two away from major AI-driven job disruption, argued the state cannot wait for Congress to act, and floated restrictions on autonomous semitrucks and school buses as examples of where California should regulate now to protect workers and the public.
Candidate 06
Steyer’s affordability case is that markets dominated by large corporations are overcharging Californians. He says he would lower electric bills, confront oil and gas price manipulation by major refiners, build more affordable housing, and pair cost relief with expanded public services such as universal healthcare and free education from pre-K through college.
Steyer’s central housing promise is scale: one million homes over four years. He says he would make construction cheaper, faster and better, and KQED reports that his approach includes easier building on surplus public land, more prefabricated housing, and renter protections rather than a purely market-only model.
A stand-alone homelessness-and-addiction plan was not prominent in the reviewed Steyer materials. The clearest available through-lines are large-scale housing production and universal healthcare, which suggest that he sees homelessness more as a housing-and-services failure than primarily as a criminal-justice problem.
Steyer’s growth model is green-industrial and public-investment oriented. He wants to preserve California’s film and entertainment dominance, expand clean-energy and housing work, and make corporations and the wealthy contribute more, arguing that a stronger middle class and major public investment are better growth engines than race-to-the-bottom tax competition.
A detailed fentanyl-and-retail-theft platform did not surface in the main Steyer issue pages or recent coverage reviewed for this report. His campaign communications are much more developed on affordability, housing, taxation, climate, healthcare, immigration and AI than on a granular public-safety agenda.
Steyer’s education promise is broad access rather than managerial school reform. His issue menu promises free education from pre-K through college, which suggests a public-investment strategy to widen opportunity, but the reviewed materials do not show the same level of detail on K-12 accountability or curriculum as some other candidates’ school platforms.
Yes. Steyer’s tax stance is openly progressive: he says corporations and billionaires should pay more, KQED says he supports higher commercial property taxes and closing the “water’s edge” corporate-tax loophole, and recent coverage adds support for an AI-related revenue stream. At the same time, KQED notes he has been less specific about how he would offset large federal healthcare losses.
Climate is Steyer’s signature issue. His campaign argues that good climate policy can also make life cheaper and healthier, and recent coverage says he backs more clean-energy investment and stronger action against oil profits; in the sources reviewed here, though, a detailed drought-and-water infrastructure plan was less visible than his broader climate-and-energy case.
Steyer supports healthcare for all and backs a single-payer direction for California. He presents cost relief as part of a larger anti-corporate platform, though nonpartisan coverage notes that he has not fully specified how he would maintain that ambition under reduced federal support.
Steyer has the most aggressive visible worker-protection proposal on AI in the field. He has proposed taxing AI data processing to seed a sovereign wealth fund, guaranteeing good-paying jobs for workers displaced by AI, expanding unemployment insurance and training, and creating a dedicated worker-protection body to manage the transition.
Candidate 07
Thurmond’s affordability platform is direct cash-and-services relief. He proposes a tax credit to give Californians more money each month for gas, groceries and housing, a universal childcare program, a pilot for a free four-year degree at the state’s public universities, low-cost small-business loans, and a pause in the gas tax.
Thurmond’s housing plan is sweeping and public-sector driven. He says California should build 2 million affordable homes using surplus school-district land, provide down-payment grants to first-time buyers, revive redevelopment agencies as an ongoing housing-finance tool, charge fees to large speculators sitting on housing stock, and seek a $10 billion housing bond.
Thurmond does not foreground a separate homelessness platform on his priorities page. The clearest signals are his emphasis on affordable-housing construction, universal healthcare, affordability supports, and high public investment, which suggest he views homelessness more through a housing-and-services lens than through an encampment-clearing or punishment-first framework.
Thurmond’s jobs message centers on job quality and public investment rather than tax-cut competition. He proposes low-cost loans for small businesses, says California should help residents get into good-paying jobs, and recent interview coverage presents him as pairing labor-friendly politics with broad education, broadband and literacy investments to expand opportunity.
Thurmond’s campaign priorities page is comparatively thin on crime specifics, but in a recent interview he proposed adding 2,000 state police officers. Beyond that, a detailed fentanyl or retail-theft package was not one of the most visible elements of the core campaign materials reviewed for this report.
Education is Thurmond’s most developed issue by far. He promises a five-year plan to ensure every California student can read by third grade, and recent coverage says he wants more dyslexia screening and tutoring, more education funding, and a shift from attendance-based funding toward enrollment-based funding, while building on work he touts such as transitional kindergarten and broadband expansion.
Yes. Thurmond supports a new tax on billionaires and centimillionaires, and recent reporting says he also supports a national wealth tax to complement a California-level version. In the materials reviewed, that revenue agenda is much more visible than any significant spending-cut platform.
Climate, wildfire and water policy are not among the most fleshed-out parts of Thurmond’s public platform in the materials reviewed for this report. The clearest concrete environment-adjacent pledge is tighter regulation of data-center development for environmental and occupational safety, but no major wildfire-resilience or water-supply blueprint was prominent on his priorities page.
Thurmond is explicit that he supports a single-payer healthcare system. His healthcare stance fits his broader campaign theme of universal public provision and a willingness to tax the very wealthiest Californians to fund major social programs.
Thurmond’s AI posture is regulatory and worker-protective. He says California should impose “tough, effective” guidelines on AI companies to protect workers and consumers, regulate data-center development for environmental and workplace safety, and recent interview coverage says he wants tighter AI controls specifically to protect jobs and public safety.
Candidate 08
Villaraigosa is running heavily on affordability. His campaign proposes down-payment loans for newly constructed homes that are repaid by buyers rather than taxpayers, links apprenticeship and homeownership, and pairs that with a gas-price plan aimed at retaining California refinery capacity and reducing the price shock from refinery closures. He also says he will not raise taxes on working- and middle-class families.
Villaraigosa’s housing plan combines streamlining with targeted assistance. He would widen fast-track approval rules, create single-window permitting, enforce production accountability on cities that keep missing housing targets, expand permanently affordable models such as community land trusts, and offer homebuyer assistance that specifically encourages newly built housing and middle-class ownership.
A fully developed stand-alone homelessness or treatment platform was not as visible in the reviewed Villaraigosa campaign materials as his affordability and gas plans. In recent interviews he has leaned on his executive record in Los Angeles, argued that the crisis worsened under later leadership, and presented himself as a practical manager, but the concrete 2026 homelessness actions surfaced less clearly than his housing and affordability proposals.
Villaraigosa’s case is that California needs a coalition-building executive who can actually deliver projects, jobs and growth. His campaign points to his budget-balancing and economic-recovery record, and his affordability plan includes a building-trades workforce initiative that would dramatically expand apprenticeships and tie workforce development to homeownership, while his gas plan openly argues for preserving major industrial jobs.
Villaraigosa leans more on record than on a newly published issue paper. His campaign says he hired nearly 1,000 police officers as Los Angeles mayor, invested in crime prevention and gang intervention, and took illegal guns off the streets, contributing to a large drop in violent crime during his tenure. A comparably detailed 2026-specific fentanyl or retail-theft package was not prominent in the reviewed materials.
Again, Villaraigosa’s strongest education argument is retrospective. His campaign highlights a rise in graduation rates during his Los Angeles leadership, and his affordability agenda links expanded construction apprenticeships to economic mobility, but a detailed new K-12 platform was less visible in the reviewed materials than his housing and affordability message.
Villaraigosa says California must “hold the line” on taxes for working- and middle-class families. He promises to veto large middle-class tax hikes, require audits and transparency before any tax increase goes to voters, identify wasteful spending, and push “smarter spending” and responsible budgeting instead of trying to solve deficits by taxing households harder.
Villaraigosa’s position is an “all of the above” energy and climate mix. In interviews he has argued for more in-state oil and refinery stability to lower gas prices while also backing renewables, hydrogen, small nuclear, and carbon-sequestration technologies; his gas plan likewise includes refinery-retention incentives and expedited low-emission upgrades. A separate detailed wildfire or statewide water platform was less prominent in the HTML materials reviewed.
Healthcare is not one of the most fully developed pieces of Villaraigosa’s visible campaign platform in the sources reviewed for this report. His public case for governor is much more concentrated on affordability, housing, gas prices, jobs, immigration-related enforcement limits, and executive competence than on a comprehensive healthcare financing or coverage overhaul.
Villaraigosa’s AI position is more cautious than celebratory. Recent interview coverage says he wants the AI rollout slowed so workers are not displaced too quickly, and he pairs that with stronger workforce-development efforts rather than a pure laissez-faire approach.