Xavier Becerra wants Californians to know he takes affordable housing seriously. He says the state needs to speed up permitting and simplify access to affordable housing funds. What he won’t say is how many homes he’d actually get built if elected governor. Similarly, he’s intrigued by the idea of California taxpayers holding a stake in artificial intelligence companies as a hedge against growing inequality — but he stops well short of promising to pursue it.
For a candidate who polls show is the clear front-runner in November’s gubernatorial race, Becerra’s reluctance to commit to specifics traces back, he says, to a lesson learned more than three decades ago.
In 1993, as a freshman congressman representing the Los Angeles area, Becerra had campaigned against the North American Free Trade Agreement. He ultimately voted for it after being convinced that added labor protections and a domestic lending program would cushion American workers and small businesses from foreign competition. Within a few years, he watched American jobs disappear anyway.
That experience, he told CalMatters, became a defining lesson of his political career: never commit to something without being certain of its outcome.
“No one gets my vote unless I know what I’m voting for completely,” he said.
Becerra went on to serve 12 terms in Congress, rose into House Democratic leadership, became California’s first Latino attorney general, and later the first Latino U.S. secretary of health and human services. Now, as he seeks the governor’s office, that same instinct for caution is shaping his campaign — sometimes to the frustration of voters and reporters looking for concrete plans.
He rarely lays out detailed policy proposals and often deflects when pushed to commit to specific goals or numbers. Instead, he points to his long record in government as evidence that he can be trusted to lead, framing his candidacy around steady management rather than sweeping promises.
On the state’s public health programs, he says he’d target administrative waste, inefficiency and fraudulent billing to save money — but hasn’t specified how or how much. On housing, he has criticized fellow Democrats for promising unrealistic goals like 2 or 3 million new homes in a single term. Even though he’s weighing a more modest target, such as roughly doubling the state’s current annual output of about 106,000 units, he’s hesitant to make it official, worried it might turn into “an inflated promise.”
No incentive to take chances
The contrast with his rivals is notable. During the primary, Democratic opponents pitched specific ideas, and Republican nominee Steve Hilton has rolled out an aggressive platform that includes $3-a-gallon gas and slashed electricity bills through deregulation. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the term-limited Democrat Becerra hopes to succeed, campaigned in 2018 on ambitious goals — millions of new homes, universal preschool, single-payer healthcare and tougher climate rules — many of which remain unfulfilled.
While other candidates this cycle focused on curbing insurance regulations or reining in utility spending to address the state’s high cost of living, Becerra proposed declaring a state of emergency to study why electricity and insurance rates are so high — effectively putting off any decision on what to do about it.
He’s also been noncommittal about whether he would uphold California’s mandate to end sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
“If we invest in it, it absolutely is feasible,” he said during an appearance at a Politico event last week. “If we don’t invest in the infrastructure, then it’s not feasible.”
He suggested there’s “a lot of room to expand” California’s regulation of artificial intelligence and floated the idea of the state purchasing “some equity in AI to make sure that we all gain from having this new technology.” But when reporters followed up afterward, he backed away from endorsing it as policy, saying only that “if there’s something along those lines, it wouldn’t be totally far-fetched.”
Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College, said Becerra’s vagueness reflects a familiar campaign strategy.
Given California’s heavy Democratic registration advantage, Becerra is likely to defeat Hilton regardless of how detailed his platform is. His main task, Michelson said, is simply to keep Democratic voters engaged enough to turn out before Election Day — not to win over skeptics with bold policy pledges.
“He doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb” on policy, she said. “You don’t want to mess up, you don’t want to do anything crazy.”
Yet Becerra’s aversion to specifics appears to run deeper than campaign strategy. Pressed onstage last week to name a single concrete commitment voters could expect from him as governor, he declined.
“I would prefer not to run on inflated promises,” he said. “I will run on my record.”
A career built on deliberation
Becerra, 68, was born in Sacramento to working-class Mexican immigrant parents and later attended Stanford Law School. He emerged as a political figure during the surge of Latino political activism in the early 1990s, first winning an upset Assembly race in the eastern Los Angeles suburbs in 1990, then a safely Democratic congressional seat two years later that he’d hold until 2017. He and his wife, OB-GYN Carolina Reyes, raised three daughters while living in Washington, D.C., before eventually returning to Sacramento.
Former staff members describe Becerra as meticulous — someone who would flag typos in memos and insist on tracking even minor costs as potential “fiscal impacts” when reviewing legislation. They say he consistently weighed how policies would affect immigrants and working- and middle-class families.
“I think he always kept people like his parents in mind,” said Sirat Attapit, who worked in Becerra’s congressional office and later served as his legislative liaison when he was attorney general. “You always knew based on the kinds of questions he asked, that was always in the back of his mind.”
Attapit said his reputation for taking his time on decisions reflected careful, inclusive policymaking, even when it meant hearing out people who strongly disagreed with him. In the early 2010s, Becerra was part of a bipartisan group of House members who met privately to work on immigration reform.
“He was thoughtful and methodical to the point where perhaps some of his colleagues thought he mulled things over or took too long to make a decision,” Attapit said. “Whenever he made a decision, you had to get to a point where he had educated himself and heard from all of the stakeholders. Everybody who had a perspective, he wanted to hear from.”
That same instinct shaped one of the more controversial episodes of his tenure as attorney general. In 2019, he declined to release police misconduct records despite a new state transparency law requiring it, as local police unions challenged the law in court over officer privacy concerns.
Becerra opted to wait for further court guidance on whether the law applied retroactively — even after an appellate court had already ruled the records were public. Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, said he appreciated Becerra’s caution.
“He just wanted to make sure that it was a clear direction on what needed to be released,” Marvel said.
But David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, called the delay “baffling,” saying the law’s requirements were clear. News organizations sued, and courts ultimately ordered Becerra’s office to release the records and pay more than $1 million in attorneys’ fees.
“In fairness, I suppose, it was a brand-new law,” Snyder said. “But I can’t recall a time where an agency simply refused to interpret the law itself and said, ‘We don’t know what the law means until a court tells us.'”
Asked whether his cautious style might work against him as a decisive executive, Becerra pointed to moments when he acted swiftly — such as suing the Trump administration to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or intervening in litigation to defend the Affordable Care Act.
A pragmatic brand of progressivism
Should he win in November, Becerra would take charge of a state Democratic Party trending further left — even as he positions himself as its most cautious standard-bearer.
Supporters like Amanda Renteria, who worked with Becerra in the U.S. Senate and helped draft portions of the federal health care law, argue his understated approach masks genuinely progressive instincts. He was an early advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and universal health care, and throughout his time in Congress he consistently defended asylum seekers and immigrants’ access to public benefits — sometimes putting him at odds with fellow Democrats.
“He can work between two worlds,” Renteria said, describing his knack for operating within Democratic leadership while still “pushing the progressive agenda where he sees it’s possible.”
Becerra himself resists that framing when it comes to his gubernatorial platform, describing himself instead as a “pragmatic” progressive with a deliberately flexible agenda.
When President Joe Biden nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he made clear he opposed single-payer health care — and Becerra, despite being a longtime supporter of the idea, accepted the constraint and focused instead on boosting enrollment in Medicaid and ACA marketplaces. During the primary, he reportedly told the California Medical Association he would not push for single-payer health care as governor.
“Just because I didn’t get single-payer, doesn’t mean I’m not a progressive, and just because I didn’t fight for single-payer doesn’t mean I am establishment,” he said. “At this stage of my life, at this stage of my career, I just want to get things done.”
That philosophy — favoring what’s achievable over what’s ambitious — extends to smaller proposals as well.
Last week, Becerra floated a “power hour” concept that would give low-income utility customers two hours of free electricity each day during peak solar production hours, when supply often exceeds demand.
Asked by CalMatters whether that idea rises to the level of a campaign promise, he walked through his reasoning in real time: he’d still need to consult stakeholders including utility companies and the California Public Utilities Commission. But because low-income households are already enrolled in existing discount programs, delivering the benefit would be relatively simple — and since it wouldn’t apply to all ratepayers, it likely wouldn’t strain the grid.
“I’d like to make it a promise, because it’s not pie-in-the-sky,” he said. “Is it realistic? Can I make it into a promise? I probably can, because I’ve limited it.”
Original source: CalMatters
