Xavier Becerra says California needs to build more housing by cutting permit red tape and easing access to affordable-housing financing — but he won’t say how many new units he’d actually deliver as governor. On the question of economic inequality, he’s floated the idea of the public holding stakes in artificial intelligence companies, but stops short of committing to it.
If the Democratic candidate’s promises sound vague to the California voters who polls show favor him heavily heading into November, he has an explanation rooted in a decision he made more than three decades ago.
As a freshman congressman from the Los Angeles area, Becerra campaigned against the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, only to be talked into voting for it after being assured that labor protections and a domestic loan program would shield American workers and small businesses from foreign competition. Within a few years, he recalled in an interview with CalMatters, American jobs disappeared anyway.
For the young lawmaker, it was a formative lesson that has stuck with him ever since: don’t back anything until you’re certain.
“Nobody gets my vote unless I know with absolute certainty who I’m voting for,” he said.
Becerra went on to serve twelve terms in Congress, rising into House Democratic leadership, before becoming California’s first Latino attorney general and later the nation’s first Latino secretary of health and human services. Now, as he closes in on the governor’s office, he’s bringing that same instinct for caution — along with a determined effort to avoid overpromising.
As a result, he has largely avoided laying out specific policy targets, resisting pressure to take firm positions or commit to measurable goals. Instead, he leans on his record, arguing that his best pitch to voters is a demonstrated ability to run government effectively.
To fund the state’s public health programs, he says he wants to cut administrative waste and fraudulent billing — without detailing how or how much that would actually save. On housing, he has criticized fellow Democrats for setting what he calls unrealistic targets, like building 2 or 3 million new homes in a four-year term. Yet even as he considers a more modest goal — perhaps doubling the state’s current housing production of roughly 106,000 units annually — he hesitates to commit, worried it “could end up being an overpromise.”
No Incentive to Take Risks
That caution stands in sharp contrast not only to the Democratic rivals Becerra defeated in the primary, but also to his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, who has rolled out a long list of specific policies and bold pledges — $3-a-gallon gas and halved electricity bills through a deregulation agenda chief among them. Outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fellow Democrat, won office in 2018 on a platform loaded with ambitious promises: millions of new homes, universal health care, aggressive climate rules, universal preschool and more. He didn’t deliver on all of them.
While this year’s other candidates zeroed in on proposals to rein in insurance regulations or utility spending as a way to address the state’s high cost of living, Becerra has instead proposed declaring a state of emergency so officials can study the root causes of high electricity and insurance rates — effectively putting off decisions on what to do about them until later.
He’s also been noncommittal about whether he’d keep California’s mandate phasing out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
“If we invest in it, it’s absolutely doable,” he said on stage at a Politico event last week. “If we don’t invest in the infrastructure, then it’s not doable.”
He also said there’s “a lot of room for improvement” in AI regulation and that the state “could acquire stakes in AI companies to make sure we all benefit from this new technology.” But speaking to reporters afterward, he backed away from endorsing such a policy outright, saying only that “if something like that existed, it wouldn’t be entirely far-fetched.”
Becerra’s vague positioning is “a classic example of political science,” said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College.
Given California’s heavy Democratic voter registration advantage, Becerra is likely to win his general election matchup against Hilton regardless. He doesn’t need to do much to win over fellow Democrats — just enough to motivate liberal voters to actually turn out in the final weeks before November, Michelson said.
“He has no incentive to take risks on policy,” she said. “He doesn’t want to mess up, he doesn’t want to do anything crazy.”
But Becerra’s risk aversion appears to run deeper than simply avoiding controversy. Asked on stage last week what voters could expect from him as governor, he declined to name a single concrete policy commitment.
“I’d rather not build my campaign on overblown promises,” he said. “I’ll run on my record.”
Weighing Things Carefully
Born in Sacramento to working-class Mexican immigrant parents and educated at Stanford Law School, the 68-year-old Becerra rose to political prominence during a wave of Latino political activism in the early 1990s.
In 1990, he won a State Assembly seat in a surprise victory representing suburbs east of Los Angeles. Two years later, he was elected to Congress in a reliably Democratic district, where he served until 2017. During those years, he and his wife, OB-GYN Carolina Reyes, relocated to Washington, D.C., and raised three daughters. The couple has since resettled in Sacramento.
Former colleagues describe Becerra as meticulous — the kind of boss who would send back memos over spelling errors and treat even a few thousand dollars in costs as a potential “fiscal impact” worth scrutinizing when reviewing legislation affecting the attorney general’s office. On policy matters, they said, he consistently focused on how proposals would affect immigrants or lower- and middle-income Americans.
“I think he always kept people like his parents in mind,” said Sirat Attapit, who worked for Becerra in Congress and later served as his liaison to the California Legislature when he was attorney general. “You could tell from the kinds of questions he asked that it was always on his mind.”
Attapit said Becerra’s reputation for slow, careful decision-making reflected sound policymaking, allowing him to weigh multiple viewpoints “even if we had diametrically opposed positions.” In the early 2010s, Becerra was part of a bipartisan group of House members who met privately to hash out immigration reform.
“He was thoughtful and methodical, to the point where maybe some of his colleagues thought he overanalyzed things or took too long to decide,” Attapit said. “To make a decision, he needed to be well informed and hear from all the stakeholders. He wanted to hear from everyone who had an opinion.”
That approach was on full display in one of his more controversial decisions as attorney general. In 2019, he declined to release police misconduct investigation records as required under a new state transparency law. Police unions had challenged the law in court, arguing it could jeopardize officers’ privacy.
Becerra said he would wait for further guidance from judges on whether the law applied retroactively to older records sought by journalists — even after an appeals court ruled those records were public. Brian Marvel, president of the influential Peace Officers Research Association of California, said he appreciated the attorney general’s caution.
“He just wanted to make sure there was clear direction on what needed to be released,” Marvel said.
But David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said it was clear the law covered the records being requested and called Becerra’s stance “baffling.” A coalition of news organizations sued, and courts ultimately ordered Becerra’s office to turn over the documents and pay more than $1 million in attorneys’ fees.
“To be fair, I suppose it was a brand-new law,” Snyder said. “But I don’t recall another instance where an agency simply refused to interpret the law and said, ‘We don’t know what the law means until a court tells us.'”
Asked whether his deliberative style might work against him as a decisive leader, Becerra pointed to moments when he moved quickly — such as suing the Trump administration to preserve the DACA program for young immigrants, or intervening in a lawsuit with Texas to protect the Affordable Care Act.
A Pragmatic Progressive
If elected, the cautious Becerra would become the de facto leader of a state Democratic Party that has been drifting further left.
Supporters like Amanda Renteria, who worked in the U.S. Senate and helped draft portions of federal health care law alongside Becerra, say his understated style doesn’t reflect a lack of progressive ambition.
He was an early champion of LGBTQ+ rights and universal health coverage. From his earliest days in Congress, he took firm stands defending asylum seekers and immigrant access to public benefits — positions that sometimes put him at odds with fellow Democrats.
“He can operate between two worlds,” Renteria said, praising “his ability to be part of Democratic leadership while also being one of those members of Congress who pushed the progressive agenda wherever he saw an opening.”
Still, Becerra himself was reluctant to frame a potential governorship in those terms. He describes himself as a “pragmatic” progressive and suggests his agenda remains adaptable.
When President Joe Biden, in nominating him as health secretary, made clear he opposed a single-payer health system, Becerra — a longtime advocate of the idea — said he accepted the constraint and agreed to focus instead on expanding Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollment. During the primary campaign, Becerra reportedly told the state’s physician association he would not push for single-payer health care as governor.
“The fact that I haven’t achieved universal health care doesn’t mean I’m not progressive, and the fact that I haven’t fought for it in a certain way doesn’t mean I’m part of the establishment,” he said. “At this point in my life, I just want to get results.”
To that end, he has traded sweeping ambition for achievable wins.
Last week, he proposed an “energy hour” that would give low-income utility customers two hours of free electricity around midday, during the sunny-but-mild stretch when solar power often produces a surplus.
Asked by CalMatters whether that idea amounted to a campaign promise, he walked through his reasoning aloud: there are still stakeholders to consult, including utility companies and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electricity rates. On the other hand, he noted, low-income households are already enrolled in utility discount programs, making it relatively simple to extend them free electricity. And since it wouldn’t apply to all customers, it wouldn’t strain overall demand too much, he reasoned.
“I’d like to turn it into a promise, because it’s not pie in the sky,” he said. “Is it realistic? Can I turn it into a promise? Probably, yes, because I’ve limited its scope.”
Original source: CalMatters
