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The candidates for California governor are a mystery

The candidates for California governor are a mystery

Gulf Today11-03-2025
Tribune News Service
Michael Duncan was adjusting the screen on his front door when he paused recently to consider what he wants from California's next governor. Duncan admittedly hadn't given the matter much thought. But when you get down to it, he said, the answer is fairly straightforward: Do the basics. Fight crime. Fix the state's washboard roads. Address the perennial homelessness problem. And do a better job, to the extent a governor can, preventing wildfires like the inferno that decimated wide swaths of Southern California. 'I just roll my eyes,' said Duncan, who logs about 120 miles round trip from his home in Fairfield to his environmental analyst job in Livermore — and who knows exactly where to swerve to avoid the worst potholes along the way. 'Why does it take so long to do simple things?' The answer is complicated, but that won't necessarily mollify a California electorate that seems anxious, aggrieved and out of sorts— especially as regards the state's current chief executive.
More than a half-dozen candidates are bidding to succeed Gavin Newsom. Some have pursued the job for well over a year now, eyeing the day, in January 2027, when term limits force the Democrat from office. You wouldn't know that, however, talking to a wide assortment of Californians — many of whom hadn't the slightest clue who's running. In conversations last week with nearly three dozen voters, from the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area through Sacramento to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, not a handful could name a single one of the declared candidates. 'That guy in Riverside, the sheriff,' said Zach House, 31, referring to Republican Chad Bianco. Outside his door, an 8-by-12-foot American flag snapped loudly in the wind whipping through his Dixon neighborhood, down streets named Songbird, Honeybee and Blossom. 'Right now,' House said, 'that's the only person I know that interests me.' 'The Mexican American gentleman,' Brenda Turley volunteered outside the post office in Rosemont, meaning Antonio Villaraigosa. 'Wasn't he the mayor of Los Angeles?' ( He was.) Admittedly, it's relatively early in the gubernatorial contest. And it's not as though events — the fiery apocalypse in Southern California, Hurricane Trump — haven't been fairly all-consuming. But if voters seem to be paying little attention to the race, most echoed Duncan's call for a focus on fundamentals, expressing a strong desire the next governor be wholly invested in the job and not view it as a mere placeholder or steppingstone to higher office.
'I feel like (Newsom) spent more time trying to campaign to be president for the next go-round than working on the state itself,' said Duncan, 37, who described himself as a moderate who tends to vote against whichever party holds the White House, to check their power. That all-in commitment is something Kamala Harris may wish to consider as she weighs a campaign for governor — and something she'll no doubt have to address, in the event she does run. The former vice president, now dividing her time between an apartment in New York City and her home in Brentwood, remains every bit as polarising as she was during her truncated White House campaign. Turley, a retired state worker, said she'll get behind Harris without question if she runs. 'Go for it,' the 80-something Democrat urged. 'Why not? She has the experience. Look at her political background. She was (California) attorney general. She worked in the Senate.'
Peter Kay, 75, a fellow Democrat, agreed. 'She's better qualified than about 90% of the people that run for any office in this country,' said Kay, who lives in Suisun City. (The retired insurance underwriter, just returned from the car wash, was buffing a few water spots off his black Tesla and had this to say about the company's CEO: 'If he wasn't Elon Musk, he would be in some institution, probably sharing a wing with Trump.') The conservative sentiment toward Harris was summed up by Lori Smith, 66, a dental hygienist in Gold River, who responded to the mention of her name with a combination wail and snort. 'Oh, God! Oh, my God!' Smith exclaimed, vowing to leave California if Harris is elected governor. 'I could never see her being president. We dodged a bullet there. I think she just needs to live her little life in some little town somewhere and go away.'
There is, of course, no pleasing everyone, even with the sky a brilliant blue and the hills a shimmering green, thanks to a blessedly wet Northern California winter. Some griped about overly stringent environmental regulations. Other said more needs to be done to protect fish and wildlife. Some said more water needs to go to farmers. Others said, no, city dwellers deserve a bigger share. Some complained about homeless people commandeering shared public spaces. Amanda Castillo, who lives in her car, called for greater compassion and understanding. The 26-year-old works full time at a retail job in Vacaville and still can't afford a place of her own, so she beds down in a silver GMC Yukon with her boyfriend and his mother, who were inside the public library charging their electronic devices. 'I consider myself to be lucky,' Castillo said, 'because if I wasn't sleeping in the car I'd either be on the street or in a cardboard box.'
Hanging over every conversation— like the big, puffy clouds above, but much less enchanting — was President Donald Trump. Most partisans differed, as one would expect, on how California should deal with the president and his battering-ram administration. 'Anybody who has a platform should be speaking out,' fighting Trump in the courts and resisting any way possible, said Eunice Kim, 42, a Sacramento physician and professed liberal, who paused outside the library in El Dorado Hills as her boys, 5 and 8, roughhoused on the front lawn. Tanya Pavlus, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom, disagreed. The Rancho Cordova Republican voted for Trump and cited a litany of ills plaguing the state, among them high gas prices and the steep cost of living. Anyone serving as California governor 'could use all the advice [they] can get from the president,' Pavlus said, 'because the situation speaks for itself.'
But not everyone retreated to the expected corners. Ray Charan, 39, a Sacramento Democrat who works for the state in information technology, said, like it or not, Trump is president,'so you have to come to some sort of professional arrangement. You may not agree with all the policies and everything, all the headlines and the personality stuff, but if you can somehow come together and work for the betterment of the state, then I'm all for it.' Sean Coley, a Trump voter, was similarly matter-of-fact.
'There's no fighting Trump. We've seen that,' said the 36-year-old Rancho Cordova Republican, a background investigator and part-time wedding photographer. 'If you want federal funding, if you want progress, you have to work with those who are on a different side of the table, especially when they're as aggressive as Trump is.
'I would get a Venn diagram. Figure out what he's for, what you're for,' Coley suggested. 'Figure out what's in the middle, and tackle that hard.' Pragmatism of that sort may not summon great political passions. But practicality seems to be what many Californians are looking for in their next governor.
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Forgotten godfather of Trump's immigration campaign
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Gustavo Arellano, Tribune News Service He inveighs against illegal immigration in terms more appropriate for a vermin infestation. He wants all people without papers deported immediately, damn the cost. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the United States is an act of insurrection. He uses the internet mostly to share crude videos and photos depicting Latinos as subhuman. Stephen Miller? Absolutely. But every time I hear the chief architect of President Donald Trump's scorched earth immigration policies rail in uglier and uglier terms, I recall another xenophobe I hadn't thought of in awhile. For nearly 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought illegal immigration in Los Angeles and beyond with a singular obsession. The former Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his campaign, he told The Times in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting during the 1992 LA riots and thinking, "Oh, my God, there are so many of them and they are so out of control." Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive that a federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer before that became commonplace, Spencer hosted a local radio show, produced videos that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an "invasion" and turned his vitriolic newsletter into a website, American Patrol, that helped connect nativist groups across the country. American Patrol's home page was a collection of links to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have committed crimes. While Spencer regularly trashed Muslims and other immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans. A "Family Values" button on the website, in the colors of the Mexican flag, highlighted sex crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a hole in California with the caption "Sink-hole de Mayo." Long before conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked physical fights at protests and published reams of digital nonsense against Latino politicians, once superimposing a giant sombrero on an image of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, "Viva Mexico!" On the morning Villaraigosa, the future LA mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the assembly in 1998, every seat in the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and leader of the supposed Mexican takeover of California. "I don't remember if his name was on it, but it was all his terminology," said Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his college membership in the Chicano student group MEChA an issue in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. "But he never had the balls to talk to me in person." Spencer became the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing movement, lecturing to groups of middle-aged gringos about his work — first across the San Fernando Valley, then in small towns where Latinos were migrating in large numbers for the first time. "California (it) has often been said is America's future. Let me tell you about your future," he told the Council of Conservative Citizens in Virginia in 1999. Spencer is the person most responsible for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko idea that Mexicans came to the U.S. not for economic reasons but because of a plot concocted by the Mexican government to take back the lands lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War. He wrote screeds like "Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?" and threatened libel lawsuits against anyone — myself included — who dared point out that he was a racist. He was a favorite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Times wrote in 2001 that Spencer "foresaw millions of converts" to his anti-immigrant campaign, "only to see his temple founder." Moving to southern Arizona in 2002, the better to monitor the US-Mexico border, Spencer spent the rest of his life trying to sell state and federal authorities on border-monitoring technology he developed that involved planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His move inspired other conservatives to monitor the US-Mexico border on their own. By the Obama era, he was isolated even from other anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that every person who came to this country illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn't bring Spencer and his work back into the limelight. He was so forgotten that I didn't even realise he was dead until Googling his name recently, after enduring another Miller rant. Spencer's hometown Sierra Vista's Herald Review was the only publication I found that made any note of his death from cancer in 2022 at age 85, describing his life's work as bringing "the crisis of illegal immigration to the forefront of the American public's consciousness." That's a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer's picket fence. We live in Glenn Spencer's world, a place where the nastier the rhetoric against illegal immigration and the crueler the government's efforts against all migrants, the better. Every time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading force, every time someone posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws another tantrum on Fox News, Glenn Spencer gets his evil wings. Spencer "stood out among a vile swamp of racists and crackpots like a tornado supercell on radar," said Brian Levin, chair of the California Civil Rights Department's Commission on the State of Hate and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, who monitored American Patrol for years. "What's frightening now is that hate like his used to be well-segregated from the mainstream. Now, the guardrails are off, and what Spencer advocated for is federal policy." I first found out about Spencer in 1999 as a student activist at Chapman University. Spencer applauded the Anaheim Union High School District's decision to sue Mexico for the cost of educating undocumented immigrants' children, describing those of us who opposed it as communists — when he was being nice. His American Patrol described MEChA, which I, like Villaraigosa, belonged to, as a "scourge" and a "sickness." His website was disgusting, but it became a must-read of mine. I knew even then that ignoring hate allows it to fester, and I wanted to figure out why people like Spencer despised people like me, my family and my friends. So I regularly covered him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists said my work was a waste of time — that people like Spencer were wheezing artifacts who would eventually disappear as the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants. And here we are. Spencer usually sent me legal threats whenever I wrote about his ugly ways — threats that went nowhere. That's why I was surprised at how relatively polite he was the last time we communicated, in 2019. I reached out via email asking for an interview for a Times podcast I hosted about the 25th anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was openly criticizing Trump's planned border wall, which he found a waste of money and not nearly as efficient as his own system. Spencer initially said he would consider my request, while sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187's demise on then-California Gov. Gray Davis and Mexico's president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo. When I followed up a few months later, Spencer bragged about the legacy of his website, which he hadn't regularly updated since 2013 due to declining health. The American Patrol archives "would convince the casual observer that The Times did what it could do (to) defeat my efforts and advance the cause of illegal immigration," Spencer wrote. "Do I think The Times has changed its spots? No. Will I agree to an interview? No." Levin hadn't heard about Spencer's death until we talked. "I thought he went into irrelevance," he admitted with a chuckle that he quickly cut off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer's legacy in the era of Trump. "We ignored that cough, that speck in the X-ray," Levin concluded, now somber. "And now, we have cancer."

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