The seven top candidates for California governor will face off one last time tonight at a 5:30pm televised debate in San Francisco.
The debate comes at a pivotal moment in the top-two primary campaign – as mail ballots are returned and new polls show the number of undecided voters are dwindling with less than three weeks until the official June 2 Election Day.
Former state attorney general Xavier Becerra will take the stage as the latest front-runner in a crowded field, according to one poll released this week.
Unlike previous debates, tonight’s format announced by sponsors CBS and the San Francisco Examiner will include opportunities for candidates to ask questions of each other.
Emerson College – whose survey of likely California voters May 9-10 was the only poll conducted wholly after the May 5 debate in Southern California – showed Becerra at 19%, followed by fellow Democrat Tom Steyer and Republican former Fox News host Steve Hilton at 17%. Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco slipped to 11% in the poll released this week, followed by former Congress member Katie Porter at 10% and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan at 8%. The poll's margin for error was +/- 3%.
The Emerson poll’s undecided numbers dropped 50% since mid-April, to 12%.
In the same period, following the departure of Rep. Eric Swalwell, Becerra’s poll popularity nearly doubled, Steyer and Mahan increased their numbers, while Hilton and Porter support numbers were stagnant and Bianco slumped three points.
The poll continued to show that voter support for the candidates could be fickle, with 40% of voters who have decided on a candidate in the gubernatorial primary saying they were open to changing their minds before voting – increasing the pressure on candidates to score in tonight’s debate.
Of the top three candidates, 48% of Becerra voters told Emerson pollsters they could change their minds, and 52% percent of Steyer voters say there is a chance they could change their mind – numbers that reflect the dogged optimism of the Mahan and Porter campaigns. In contrast, 73% of Hilton voters said they are most likely to not change their vote.
In an interview this week with ABC affiliate KGO, Mahan rejected the idea that time has run out for his long-shot campaign: “Not at all, people just got their ballots. We've grown faster in the polls in the last couple of weeks than anybody else… when voters get to know who I am, what I've done in San Jose and my vision for the state, we go up [in the polls].”
The slow pace of returned mail ballots – just 3% at mid-week – also may indicate that voters are holding off on sending in their ballots even as the June 2 final-count day draws closer. More than 22 million ballots were mailed to voters May 4. The top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the Nov. 4 General Election.
Most Californians cast ballots by mail, before the official Election Day, especially in primary elections, according to the California Secretary of State's Elections Division.
In the last gubernatorial primary, in 2022, mail ballots represented 91.2% of total ballots. In the general election, 88.6% of the votes were via mail ballots. In the 2024 legislative primaries, 88.6% of votes were mail ballots, with 80.8% of the votes were cast via mail ballots.
One pollster, Kevin Wen, CEO of Kreate Strategies, said this week that “the [California governor] race continues to develop without full consolidation. With multiple candidates remaining competitive and undecided voters still in play, the electorate remains fluid heading into the primary.”
The debate will be broadcast live beginning at 5:30pm on KPIX San Francisco, KION Monterey and on CBS affiliates in Los Angeles and Sacramento. It will also be live-streamed on CBS Bay Area, CBS News 24/7, CBS YouTube channels, Paramount +, Roku and Pluto TV.
“When voters get to know who I am”-Matt Mahan, they will learn he voted to fire hundreds of cops in an already severely understaffed police department. They will learn he voted to ban a third of the city from participating in civic life. They will learn he voted to give millions of dollars of taxpayer money to help felons evade federal law enforcement.
Mahan’s banking on voters not learning who he really is behind his milquetoast persona.