The PUBLIC COMMENT 2026 California Voter Guide — Part 1

Before we get to the main thrust of this week’s post, an announcement: the first official event for my Build or Die book tour is scheduled for December 9, 7 p.m., at Clio’s Books in Oakland, California. I’ll be discussing the book with Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. We’ll also be joined by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, one of California’s foremost housing champions.

If you’re based in the Bay Area, come by! Tickets are $10, but for $33.80 you get both a ticket and a copy of Build or Die. Book your seat here. And if you can’t make it, remember that the book is now available for preorder from Bookshop.org.

Also, if you’re in the Santa Fe area, I will be giving a talk as part of the Livability Speaker Series on October 8! Tickets to this one are free, and you can reserve your spot here.

And now on to today’s subject.

California makes it simultaneously very easy and very difficult to vote. It’s easy to vote in California because the state makes it exceptionally easy to register and has universal vote by mail. But it’s difficult to vote in California because there are so many damn things to vote for.

It’s not so unusual for a state to have the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor on separate ballot lines. Nor is it uncommon for states to separately elect the state attorney general and secretary of state, even though the equivalent federal offices are part of the president’s Cabinet. Where things get weird in California is the sheer number of other statewide elected offices: state superintendent (the head of the state Department of Education until 2027, when the department will finally move under the governor), state treasurer, state controller, and insurance commissioner. And that’s before we get to some of the local offices that people need to vote for, such as seats on the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board.

Then there are the statewide ballot measures. This year, the voters are being asked to weigh in on 14 propositions, eight of which would amend the state constitution. These cover such abstruse topics as deposits into the state’s rainy day fund and changes to the California Environmental Quality Act. You know, the types of questions that we ostensibly have a state legislature for.

In the interest of making things a little less confusing for people, I thought I would provide some brief thoughts on all the statewide races and propositions, including how I plan to cast my vote in each case. Think of these less as formal endorsements and more as one man’s opinion. I’m not telling you how to vote; my hope is that by reconstructing my own thought process, I can at least make it slightly easier for other voters to decide for themselves.

This post is Part 1 of the voter guide, where I focus on races for statewide office. In Part 2, I’ll cover the ballot measures.

This is a rather depressing, uninspiring race. I wasn’t particularly impressed with any of the primary candidates, and I remain unimpressed with the somnolent and largely invisible campaign of former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. Yes, his campaign’s housing platform is pretty good, but I still haven’t seen any evidence that the candidate has actually read it. Once in office, would he spend the political capital necessary to put a dent in California’s housing crisis? Would he spend the political capital necessary to do anything? Because he seems fairly content to let the state run in self-driving mode, even if that means hurtling off a cliff.

That said, I’m a “vote blue no matter who” guy, and Trump-endorsed candidate Steve Hilton would be a disaster for the state. His platform—which includes plans for building more suburban sprawl, rolling back green energy rules, cutting the gas tax, boosting oil drilling, and turning California into “the crypto capital of the world”—is that of a climate arsonist. So Becerra it is.

How I’m voting: Xavier Becerra

As I said, vote blue no matter who. However much individual Republican candidates may attempt to distance themselves from Trump, they’re still members of the party that Trump and his coterie have turned into a vehicle for their authoritarian, nakedly fascist ambitions. As such, there’s not really much to think through for any of these races. (The state superintendent race is officially nonpartisan, but Richard Barrera has the endorsement of the California Democratic Party and Sonja Shaw is affiliated with the “parents’ rights” movement. Accordingly, she opposes vaccine mandates and is leaning hard into transphobia.)

How I’m voting: Fiona Ma, Shirley Weber, Malia Cohen, Eleni Kounalakis, Rob Bonta, Richard Barrera

Okay, so here’s a genuinely interesting one. Thanks to California’s jungle primary system, the two candidates who made it to the general election are both Democrats, so “vote blue no matter who” doesn’t apply. And it’s a high-stakes race, because the winner will be charged with regulating home insurance markets at a time when they are very much in crisis.

I sometimes like to say that “home insurance crisis” is a bit of a misnomer: it’s really just the climate crisis but refracted through the home insurance industry and various aspects of state law. The real problem is that California environmental regulations and land use rules have, for decades, penalized attempts to build multifamily housing in already urbanized areas; this helped to shift the locus of development toward greenfield areas in what is now called the wildland-urban interface. As climate change has made wildfires both more frequent and much more destructive—particularly in the WUI—this has made insuring California homeowners into an increasingly risky proposition. And it has been made riskier by the fact that state law constrains the ability of insurers to accurately price the sudden increase in risk; as a result, some of them have simply decided to stop writing new policies.

To the extent there’s any sort of solution to this, it involves building more multifamily housing in areas removed from the WUI, curbing suburban sprawl, letting insurers incorporate climate modeling into their rate-setting processes, and doing what can realistically be done to fire-proof existing WUI-based communities. Anything else is magical thinking.

One of the candidates for insurance commissioner is State Senator Ben Allen, who has long been focused on disaster insurance, environmental resilience, and related issues. He hasn’t been great on housing issues in the past, which makes sense given that his district covers Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice, and other affluent, NIMBY-heavy environs. He did, to his credit, abstain from the vote on SB 79 instead of actively voting against it. His campaign platform includes a fairly sensible mix of ideas: incorporating climate modeling into rate-setting, incentivizing resilience infrastructure development in frontline jurisdictions, and so on.

Allen’s opponent is former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who proudly touts the endorsement of Bernie Sanders on her campaign website. She goes big on the magical thinking: her marquee proposal is for single-payer public disaster insurance. Such a proposal makes sense if you think the main cause of the insurance crisis is that greedy insurers are trying to bleed California homeowners dry. But if you think the real problem is climate risk, then I’m not sure what’s gained by socializing that risk and potentially making the state liable for claims from, say, wealthy Malibu homeowners.

Kim says “a public system would address climate disaster instead of avoiding it.” But ask yourself this: are you confident that a public agency would set premiums that accurately reflect the dangers of new construction in the WUI? Or would it succumb to political pressure and hold rates down, effectively forcing taxpayers to further subsidize suburban development in high-risk areas?

Granted, Kim can’t impose single-payer home insurance all by herself; she would need the legislature to go along, and it probably wouldn’t. But as a signal of her likely priorities in office, the proposal suggests that Kim would be a reckless presence in a very delicate role.

How I’m voting: Ben Allen

Stay tuned next week for Part 2: Ballot measures