State’s history works against most candidates for governor
Sometimes the best way to gaze into the future is to look back at the past. The 2018 governor’s election may be one of those times.
With California’s vote less than a year away, many of the early polls seem closely divided between “Who are those guys?” and “Do we really have an election next year?”
But somebody has to replace termed-out Gov. Jerry Brown, so a visit to the state’s history may give a hint about who the state’s next governor may, or may not, be.
Democrat Delaine Eastin, for example, faces an uphill battle. California has had 39 governors — if you count Jerry Brown twice — and about the only characteristic they share is that every one has been a man. Not only that, but Dianne Feinstein (1990), Kathleen Brown (1994) and Meg Whitman (2010) are the only female candidates from major parties to make it past the primary.
It gets worse. Four former attorneys general have become governor, along with 10 lieutenant governors, a couple of state treasurers and even a secretary of state — that was Jerry Brown, age 32 — but no superintendent of public instruction, the statewide office Eastin held for eight years, has made it to California’s top office.
History also is working against Democratic state Treasurer John Chiang, since California has never had an Asian American governor,
“Based on the past 80 years of California elections, it’s pretty clear that there are only four routes to becoming governor.” Alex Vassar, legislative historian
either. But as a Latino, Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa escapes the “first ever” onus, thanks to Romualdo Pacheco, a Santa Barbara-born Californio who served as governor for about 10 months in 1875.
But as both Eastin and Chiang would argue, “Someone has to be first.”
Really, though, California’s history shows that just about every gubernatorial hopeful has something working against him or her.
Villaraigosa, for example, is the former mayor of Los Angeles, which is historically bad news in a governor’s race. Although mayors of San Diego (Pete Wilson), San Francisco (Washington Bartlett and James “Sunny Jim” Rolph) and Oakland (George Pardee and Jerry Brown) have become governor, the closest an elected L.A. mayor got to Sacramento was Democrat Tom Bradley’s close loss to Republican George Deukmejian in 1982 and his not-so-close loss in a rematch four years later.
There is an asterisk of hope for Villaraigosa, though. William Stephens, a lieutenant governor who became governor in 1917 after Gov. Hiram Johnson resigned to become U.S. senator, was acting mayor of Los Angeles for less than two weeks in 1909.
While that seems to be encouraging news for Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, he might want to be careful what he wishes for. Bartlett and Rolph, the San Francisco mayors turned governor, both died in office.
The state’s 39 governors have surprisingly little in common, said Alex Vassar, a legislative historian.
“Based on the past 80 years of California elections, it’s pretty clear that there are only four routes to becoming governor,” he said. “You can be a former Republican legislator, a Republican actor, a Democrat named for a color, or Culbert Olson.”
Although it might be hard for Donald Trump to believe, California wasn’t always a deep blue, Hillary Clinton- and Bernie Sanders-loving state. In fact, Olson, who was elected in 1938, was California’s first Democratic governor of the 20th century and one of only four since 1898.
Those others would be the three Democrats named for a color: Brown, Brown ( Jerry and his father, Edmund) and Gray (Davis).
And while the proclivity California voters have shown for choosing GOP legislators for the state’s top office may sound like good news for Assemblyman Travis Allen, RHuntington Beach (Orange County), it’s really been former Republican legislators like Pete Wilson, Deukmejian and Frank Merriam whom they preferred.
California hasn’t elected a sitting assemblyman as governor since J. Neely Johnson in 1856. Olson, a state senator from Los Angeles who also served in the Utah legislature, was the last state legislator to move up directly.
None of the current candidates for governor are challenging one of the state’s longest-running political taboos. Since California became a state in 1850, there have only been two governors ( J. Neely Johnson of Sacramento and Stockton’s James Budd) from a county that doesn’t touch either the Pacific Ocean or San Francisco Bay, and both of them were in the 1800s. That pretty much eliminates anyone from the Central Valley, the Inland Empire and the Sierra.
Earl Warren, for example, grew up in Bakersfield but was Alameda County’s district attorney before he was elected attorney general and then governor in 1942. And while Hiram Johnson was born in Sacramento and practiced law there, he was an assistant district attorney in San Francisco when he was elected governor in 1910.
California voters also have shown an unwillingness to back wealthy outsiders with backgrounds in business rather than elective office, which could be a roadblock for John Cox, a GOP businessman from San Diego County. But Cox, who was born in Illinois, and Chiang, who hails from New York via Chicago, both get a historical boost by coming from outside California.
Only seven of California’s governors were actually born in the state: both Browns, Warren, Hiram Johnson, Rolph, Pardee and Pacheco. That number actually could be six, since Pacheco was born in Santa Barbara in 1831, when it was part of Alta California.
That’s not really a surprise, said Vassar, who has studied the state’s political past.
“California has always been a state that’s drawn people to it,” he said, a wide and varied range of travelers looking to share in the California dream, politicians included.
But if the state’s political history takes away, it also gives some hope. Of those seven California natives who became governor, four were born in San Francisco.
Point, Gavin Newsom.