Politics
Dan Osborn is looking for 'working-class heroes' to shake up U.S. politics
Omaha, NE — Dan Osborn, a mechanic by trade, has been rebuilding a 1988 Pontiac Firebird in his garage. He plans to drop in a fuel-injected V-8 engine at some point, but these days Osborn, whose tattoos tend toward the nautical, is spending much of his time trying to convince working-class candidates to break into politics.
He looked at the car, covered in dust, upholstery torn.
“I’m working on it with my son,” he said. “It’ll get done one day.”
Osborn became a political surprise last year when he ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent in Nebraska and lost a close race to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer. If he had won, it could have narrowed the balance of power in Congress and complicated President Trump’s agenda.
His mechanic versus the well-monied career politician narrative inspired his new Working Class Heroes Fund, a political action committee that has raised about $500,000 in donations since November to train unions to recruit and support local and national candidates. They include an electrician running for the Wisconsin state legislature and a Marine combat veteran and mechanic challenging Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), whose vote was key in confirming Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.
Dan Osborn, center, speaks at an election night watch party on Nov. 5.
(Bonnie Ryan / Associated Press)
“We want to give working-class people a seat at the table,” said Osborn, 49, who in 2021 led hundreds of his fellow union members on a 77-day strike against the Kellogg cereal plant in Omaha. “We’re about to have our first trillionaire in this country. I was blown away: $50 trillion since 1980 has migrated from 90% of Americans to the top half of 1%. The super-uber wealthy class is taking advantage and they’re doing it through our elected officials.”
Osborn’s appeal is an everyman’s plainspokenness tuned into the anger and disenchantment not only of the Midwest factory worker and farmer but of the Silicon Valley gig worker, the Hollywood tradesperson and the Las Vegas waitress: “I don’t call it economic populism. I call it paycheck populism,” he said. “That’s what makes sense to me. The economy is a huge thing. I can’t pin what that means. But I know what a paycheck is. I live week to week on it. And it’s not stretching as far.”
The test his movement faces — he may run against wealthy Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts in 2026 — is winning over disgruntled Democrats and making deeper inroads into Trump’s base. Osborn favors workers’ rights and higher corporate taxes but leans conservative on immigration and China. He won 20% of Trump voters in his Senate race.
Support for his brand of politician could rise as the president moves to cut social programs and splits widen in the Republican Party between tech billionaire backers like Elon Musk and those like Vice President JD Vance, who has emphasized the concerns of the working class.
Dan Osborn sits in his garage beside the 1988 Pontiac Firebird that he and his son, Liam, have worked on together over the past year.
(Rebecca S. Gratz / For The Times)
“Dan was able to break through,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. “He can walk into a bar or a union hall in a Carhartt jacket because that’s who he is. He has a very authentic connection to Nebraskans. Voters want people like Dan to represent them, more teachers, union leaders and cops. He shook things up for both parties.”
Danny Begley met Osborn when he handed out sandwiches and firewood along picket lines during the Kellogg strike. A member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and an Omaha city councilman, Begley said Osborn “stood up to corporations and became a Rocky Balboa long shot against a powerful senator. He’s transformational. He’s not [programmed] to say what some think tank in Washington, D.C., says. He says what he believes in, and that matters in post-pandemic America.”
::
On a recent day, as a winter dusk settled over fields behind his house, Osborn sat in his living room, wearing jeans, a flannel shirt and work boots. His wife, Megan, and their daughters — Georgia and Eve — were in the kitchen making salad and lasagna.
“It’s boyfriend night,” said Osborn, nodding toward the young man dating Georgia, a dancer who had recently returned home from Los Angeles. He listened to the chatter and recalled an evening not too many years ago when he and Megan were doing their taxes and discovered the consequences of his working a lot of Sunday double-shifts at Kellogg.
“I know what a paycheck is,” Dan Osborn says. “I live week to week on it. And it’s not stretching as far.”
(Rebecca S. Gratz / For The Times)
“I paid $30,000 in taxes that year, but then we found we owed another $10,000 because the overtime kicked us into a higher bracket,” said Osborn, who now works as a steamfitter at a mechanical firm. “Megan was sitting there crying in the kitchen. I was so mad, so angry at my government. How are you supposed to get ahead?”
A dog barked. Voices drifted in and out of the kitchen. Dinner was almost ready, and Eve, a high school junior, had to go upstairs soon to do homework. There was an empty place at the table for his son Liam, who was away at college studying aviation. Bread was cut and the scent of garlic and tomato lifted in the oven air.
The son of a railroad man and a seamstress, Osborn’s life is a portrait of a large swath of America: He played basketball in high school, bused tables and did a stint in the Navy, where he worked the flight deck on the USS Constellation (“she’s scrap metal now”). He joined the National Guard, enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, dropped out when Megan got pregnant, and went to work at Kellogg, where he carried a union card and wondered about what would come next.
While Osborn’s family grew, the nation’s politics shifted. Many Democrats embraced identity politics and Republicans fell in line with Donald Trump’s reinvention of the party with nationalist populism that spoke to working-class grievances against globalization and immigration. Osborn, like millions of others, including 300,000 independents in Nebraska, does not feel kinship with either camp, but his populist sentiments are not as extreme as those of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor who blames tech oligarchs for destroying America.
Osborn lost to Fischer by about seven percentage points, but his candidacy showed what a political outsider in a polarized nation could accomplish.
“It was rough early in the campaign with grassroots field operations,” said Evan Schmeits, who managed Osborn’s campaign last year. “We were independent. No party backing. We went into these forgotten rural areas. We were able to get a lot of Trump voters because we concentrated on economic issues. We did well in the suburbs too. We were bringing people together in this era of divisiveness.”
Fischer and Republicans paid little mind to Osborn in the early days of the campaign. That changed when polls showed a tightening race and Osborn raised more than $30 million, catching the attention not only of the working class but of organizations such as the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans seeking an equitable economy.
Hollywood also took notice. Producer Tom Ortenberg, whose company distibuted “The Apprentice” biopic about Trump, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played a fictional vice president in “Veep,” hosted fundraisers for him.
Fischer portrayed her rival as a politically naive disciple of Bernie Sanders, calling Osborn “a lifelong far-left Democrat now masquerading as a moderate ‘Independent.’”
Osborn countered with ads suggesting he was closer to Trump than liberals on a number of issues, although his calls for immigration reform were directed toward restricting U.S. corporations from recruiting and exploiting migrant labor at the expense of working-class Americans. “Companies are paying migrants low wages to enrich themselves,” he said.
Dan Osborn chats with patrons of a brewery in Beatrice, Neb., in July.
(Margery Beck / Associated Press)
In one ad, Osborn held a blowtorch and said: “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border. If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.” Republicans then attacked Osborn for leading the Kellogg strike, which they claimed led to the company’s announcement that the Omaha plant was set to close in 2026.
The strike was pivotal to Osborn’s political ascent, coming at a time when unions, including the United Auto Workers, were pushing harder against companies for higher wages and benefits. (Kellogg fired him after the strike, saying he was watching Netflix during work. He said the charge was trumped up and his dismissal was retaliation.) His pro-labor philosophy echoed Nebraska’s legacy of prairie populism, notably the founding of the People’s Party in the 1890s, which criticized Republicans and Democrats for failing to protect workers and farmers.
“It wasn’t until corporate greed came knocking at my doorstep that I really started to observe the world in a different way,” said Osborn, who studied up on labor history and worked with other union members to raise $200,000 in strike funds. “I enjoyed fighting for working-class people at a time when Kellogg’s had profited greatly after COVID while everyone was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day that whole year as essential workers, no time off.”
Widening class differences, he said, are reflected in Congress where many members, especially in the Senate, are rich. They wouldn’t relate, he said, to the fact that “debt collectors don’t care if you’re on strike.” Osborn, who mentioned during the campaign that he didn’t own a suit, alluded to the idea that Trump and the billionaires around him epitomize corporate America’s hold on politics.
“I don’t have a problem with the existence of billionaires,” he said. ”I have a problem with our elected officials being in that class. Somebody like me is going to approach a policy differently than Sen. Pete Ricketts, whose family founded TD Ameritrade and owns the Chicago Cubs. He’s not going to see the world like I do. The federal government should look more like its citizens.”
Osborn can sound like a factory man from a Bruce Springsteen song, a character whose youthful exuberance and restless sense of escape have been tempered by life’s hard awakenings. He made more than 200 campaign stops across the state last year. His stories of struggle resonated from farm fields to union halls: his dad riding the bus everyday to work, his mom hemming pants and cleaning houses to make extra money, and the way he felt before his Kellogg job when he temporarily relied on Medicaid after Megan became pregnant with Georgia.
“I didn’t like that,” said Osborn, who mowed yards and landscaped to support his wife and newborn. In a post on X during last year’s campaign, he wrote that he had to “kill my dream of hanging a diploma on the wall because my family needed health insurance, diapers, and food on the table.”
“I’m glad that program (Medicaid) was there,” he said in an interview, “or I would have started out life with huge medical debt.”
One of his favorite stories recalls the time actor Charlton Heston, who played Moses in the “Ten Commandments” and later was president of the National Rifle Assn., got him fired as a bus boy.
“I was in high school working in a restaurant in the old-money part of town,” he said. “Heston comes in by himself and starts reading a book. I knew him. My dad made me watch all his movies.” Heston didn’t want to talk, said Osborn, who found that rude. “I grabbed his glass and said, ‘Hey, Chuck, do you want your water regular or parted, like Moses.’”
Dan Osborn, second from right, helps serve lasagna as his family, including, from left, his daughters Georgia and Eve, Brad Walton, and his wife, Megan, sit down for dinner.
(Rebecca S. Gratz / For The Times)
Osborn, in the telling, smiled.
“I was putting dishes away later and the manager taps me on the shoulder,” he said. “He told me, ‘I gotta fire you because Charlton Heston wants you fired.’ I had to leave then and there. I got a job at Godfather’s Pizza.”
::
It was pushing toward 7 p.m. The moon shone over Osborn’s house and the workers on his street were home for the night. A bottle of wine was uncorked.
“Dinner,” someone yelled.
He sat at the table with Megan, his daughters and the boyfriend. They talked about school, homelessness, a vacation to Rome, the war in Ukraine, and how Megan felt uncomfortable when political ads attacking her husband flashed across the TV in the sports bar and grill she manages. Her way of seeing the world frames Osborn’s politics, that people are exhausted, overworked and often not heard, but most of them are good and only want what’s fair.
“There are so many amazing and gracious people out there,” she said.
The plates were cleared. Eve went to do her homework. Georgia and the boyfriend drove away. Osborn went to the garage. The big door was open to the cold sky. It was getting late. There would be no work on the car. The tools were stacked and put away neat.
Tucker Carlson, who was often at Donald J. Trump’s side during the 2024 presidential campaign, is now expressing remorse for that support, saying he will long be “tormented” by his role helping Mr. Trump return to the White House.
Mr. Carlson, a titan of conservative media who has broken sharply with Mr. Trump over the war with Iran, acknowledged that he was part of the “reason this is happening right now,” referring to the conflict.
“It’s not enough to say, well, I changed my mind — or like, oh, this is bad, I’m out,” Mr. Carlson said in an episode of his podcast released Monday.
“It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” Mr. Carlson said on the podcast, speaking with his brother, Buckley, a former speechwriter for Mr. Trump. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
Mr. Carlson, a former Fox News host and a longtime opponent of American foreign interventions, has feuded with Mr. Trump and his allies for weeks over the war, which most Americans oppose, according to opinion polls.
He appeared particularly appalled by a threat Mr. Trump made to Iran on social media on Easter Sunday that the country would be “living in hell” if it did not open the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route that has been clogged during the war. After the post, Mr. Carlson urged White House officials to stand up to the president, saying that Mr. Trump’s behavior was “evil.”
Mr. Trump fired back at Mr. Carlson and other conservative critics of the war in a lengthy Truth Social post two weeks ago, describing them as “Fools” and suggesting that Mr. Carlson should “see a good psychiatrist.” In the post, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Carlson, who was dismissed by Fox News in 2023, had “never been the same” after he left the network.
Asked for comment on Mr. Carlson’s remarks, the White House pointed to Mr. Trump’s social media commentary.
On Friday, Mr. Trump continued to lob insults at Mr. Carlson on social media, writing that “Tucker is a Low IQ person — Always easy to beat, and highly overrated.”
One of the president’s allies, the far-right activist Laura Loomer, wrote on social media on Monday that Mr. Carlson was “trying to hand our country over to the Democrats.”
Mr. Carlson, a right-wing brawler prone to spreading conspiratorial views, was once Fox News’s most popular prime-time host, and his TV program was all but mandatory for many conservatives during Mr. Trump’s first term.
But he was ousted by Fox News after it agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of 2020 election misinformation. The case exposed instances in which Mr. Carlson denigrated colleagues and privately attacked Mr. Trump. In a text from Jan. 4, 2021, that the case surfaced, Mr. Carlson wrote of Mr. Trump, “I hate him passionately.”
By 2024, Mr. Carlson had re-emerged as a popular podcaster and smoothed out tensions with Mr. Trump. Mr. Carlson was among those who lobbied Mr. Trump to choose JD Vance as his running mate.
When Mr. Trump made a dramatic appearance at the Republican National Convention in July 2024, days after he was shot in the ear at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Carlson was the first person to greet him.
Cameras later captured the two chuckling together in Mr. Trump’s box at the convention in Milwaukee. From the stage of the convention, Mr. Carlson described Mr. Trump as “the funniest person I have ever met in my life.”
“He’s a wonderful person,” Mr. Carlson said. “I know him well.”
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Democrats scored a major victory Tuesday when Virginia voters passed a congressional redistricting referendum that could give the party a significant boost in the battle for the U.S. House of Representatives majority in this year’s midterm elections, The Associated Press reported at 8:49 p.m. ET Tuesday.
The ballot measure gives the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature — rather than the state’s current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.
That would give the Democrats four additional left-leaning U.S. House seats ahead of the midterms as the party tries to win back control of the chamber from the GOP, which currently holds a razor-thin majority.
The standalone spring referendum capped months of political crossfire and court battles, sky-high early voting turnout and tons of national attention and money poured into the ballot box showdown.
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Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger speaks during a Virginians For Fair Elections canvassing event in Woodbridge, Va., on April 18, 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Even though a majority of voters gave the ballot initiative a thumbs-up, it still faces legal challenges.
The Supreme Court of Virginia allowed the referendum to move forward after a lower court struck it down. But legal challenges to the referendum remain unresolved and are still before Virginia’s highest court.
Republicans had railed against the Democrat-backed referendum.
“It’s the most partisan map in America,” former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin told supporters at his final campaign stop in northern Virginia on the eve of the election.
Pointing to the Democrats pushing new maps, Youngkin charged, “What they are doing is immoral.”
Teaming up with Youngkin to crisscross the state in leading the GOP opposition to the ballot initiative was former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who told the crowd the Democrats’ map is one that “you draw when you’re drunk with power.”
BATTLE FOR THE HOUSE RUNS THROUGH VIRGINIA AS COURT OKS HIGH-STAKES REDISTRICTING VOTE
Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, right, and former state Attorney General Jason Miyares lead a chant of “no” as they lead Republican efforts to defeat a Democrat-backed congressional redistricting referendum April 20, 2026, in Leesburg, Va. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
Speaking with Fox News Digital ahead of their final election eve rally, Miyares charged that “Democrats want to take away the voices of millions of Virginians and gerrymander the state.”
Youngkin, pointing to the duo’s relentless campaigning in recent weeks, said, “What we’re hearing over and over and over again is Virginians want fair maps. And what the yes vote represents are unfair maps.”
And the two Republicans reiterated their charge that the referendum was an “unconstitutional power grab” by Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democrats who control the state legislature.
As Youngkin and Miyares spoke in Leesburg, President Donald Trump took to the airwaves on a popular Virginia-based conservative talk show and later teamed up with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to urge voters to defeat the referendum.
Pointing to congressional Democrats, Trump warned that “if they get these additional seats, they’re going to be making changes at the federal level.”
SPANBERGER FACES ‘BAIT AND SWITCH’ BACKLASH AHEAD OF CRUCIAL ELECTION
President Donald Trump headlined a tele town hall on the eve of Virginia’s congressional redistricting referendum urging voters to cast a ballot against the initiative. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Democrats countered that the redrawing of the maps was a necessary step to balance partisan gerrymandering already implemented by Republicans in other states at Trump’s urging.
“By voting yes, you have the chance to do something important — not just for the commonwealth, but for our entire country,” former President Barack Obama said in a video released Friday on the eve of the final day of early voting. “By voting yes, you can push back against the Republicans trying to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterms.
“By voting yes, you can take a temporary step to level the playing field. And we’re counting on you.”
The video by Obama was the former president’s latest effort for the referendum. He had previously appeared in ads released by Virginians for Fair Elections, the Democrat-aligned group working to pass the ballot initiative.
OBAMA GOES ALL IN ON HIGH-STAKES REFERENDUM THAT MAY IMPACT MIDTERM ELECTIONS
But Virginians for Fair Maps, the leading Republican-aligned group opposing redistricting, used past comments by Obama against political gerrymandering in its ads opposing the referendum.
“Because of things like political gerrymandering, our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” the former president said in an old clip showcased in the spot.
Republicans pointed to comments from Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a former Virginia governor and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who acknowledged over the weekend in a “Fox News Sunday” interview that the new maps don’t represent Virginia’s partisan breakdown.
“Ninety percent of Virginians are not Democrats, that’s true,” Kaine said.
But Kaine added that “about 100% of Virginians want election results to be respected.”
SOROS-BACKED GROUP AMONG LIBERAL ORGS PUMPING EYE-POPPING CASH INTO VIRGINIA GERRYMANDERING EFFORT
And Republicans took aim at Spanberger, who won November’s gubernatorial election by over 15 points as Democrats also captured the lieutenant governor and attorney general offices.
“Abigail Spanberger told everybody last summer that she had no interest in redistricting, and then the first bill she signs is a bill to enable the gerrymandering of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginians don’t like this and that’s why independents and a lot of Democrats are voting no too,” Youngkin told Fox News Digital.
Minutes later, Youngkin told the crowd that Spanberger is “trying to disenfranchise millions, millions of Virginians.”
Republicans trained their redistricting firepower on Spanberger since a poll two weeks ago by The Washington Post indicated that the new governor’s approval rating was barely above water, with the highest unfavorable rating for a new Virginia governor in two decades.
“She’s an unpopular governor with an unpopular agenda, and she lied to the voters,” Miyares charged.
Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, left, and former state Attorney General Jason Miyares, speak with Fox News Digital on the eve of Virginia’s congressional redistricting referendum in Leesburg, Va., April 20, 2026 (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
And Miyares and other top Republicans accused Spanberger of pulling a “bait and switch.”
Spanberger, in an ad in support of the referendum, said she was backing the measure because “it’s directly in response to what other states decide to do and a president who says he’s quote entitled to more Republican seats before this year’s midterms. Our approach is different. It’s temporary. It preserves Virginia’s fair redistricting process into the future.”
Supporters of redistricting dramatically outraised and outspent groups opposed to the referendum, with Virginians for Fair Elections outraising Virginians for Fair Maps by a roughly three-to-one margin. Much of the funding raised by both sides came from so-called “dark money” from nonprofit public policy groups known as 501(c)(4) organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.
Despite the Democrats’ funding advantage, recent polling suggested support for the ballot initiative was only slightly ahead of opposition amid a surge in early voting, which ended on Saturday.
“They have outspent us three to one. They’ve raised over $70 million. And yet this is a close vote,” Youngkin said.
Pointing to the ads in support of the referendum, Youngkin said Virginians “aren’t believing the mistruths. They aren’t believing the lies on TV. They’re actually doing the work themselves and understanding that a no vote is for fair maps and a yes vote is for the most gerrymandered maps in America.”
And Miyares emphasized that Democrats “outspent us, but we have the truth.”
Virginia is the latest battleground in the high-stakes fight between Trump and the GOP and Democrats over congressional redistricting.
Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.
The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.
But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during an election night news conference at a California Democratic Party office in Sacramento Nov. 4, 2025. (Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo)
California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.
The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.
Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.
In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.
Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House. The showdown in the Indiana statehouse grabbed plenty of national attention.
Florida is next up.
Two-term Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers in the GOP-dominated legislature are hoping to pick up an additional three to five right-leaning seats through a redistricting push during a special legislative session that kicks off April 28.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., July 22, 2025. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel/Tribune News Service)
Hovering over the redistricting wars is the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in Louisiana v. Callais, a crucial case that may lead to the overturning of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act.
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If the ruling goes the way of the conservatives on the high court, it could lead to the redrawing of a slew of majority-minority districts across the county, which would greatly favor Republicans.
But it is very much up in the air when the court will rule and what it will actually decide.
Xavier Becerra, a former Cabinet secretary in President Biden’s administration, appears to be surging in the wildly unsettled California governor’s race.
Until recently, the former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary had been mired in the single digits in polling to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom and lead the nation’s most populous state.
But after former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) dropped out of the race earlier this month amid accusations of sexual assault and other misconduct, Becerra has seen a boost in polls, fundraising and endorsements.
On Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas endorsed Becerra alongside 14 Democratic members of the legislative body.
Arguing that Californians are under constant threat from President Trump’s policies, Rivas cited Becerra’s decades-long record in public office, including defending Obamacare and young immigrants, or “Dreamers,” to argue that Becerra is best positioned to lead the state.
“There’s no time to learn on the job — we need a governor who’s ready to fight back on day one,” Rivas said in a statement, noting that Becerra sued the Trump administration 122 times while he was California’s attorney general. “We have a strong Democratic field for governor. But right now, we need someone ready on day one. Xavier Becerra is that leader.”
Becerra said he was honored to receive the legislators’ backing.
“I look forward to working with the Speaker and legislators on Day One to tackle the problems Californians care about most — from the skyrocketing cost of groceries and housing to our unyielding fight against the Trump Administration’s disastrous policies,” he said in a prepared statement. “Californians need an experienced and trusted leader who doesn’t need on-the-job training.”
The endorsements come at a critical moment in the governor’s race — just two weeks before ballots begin arriving in Californians’ mailboxes. In addition to Swalwell dropping out, former state Controller Betty Yee ended her bid on Monday because of a lack of resources. On Tuesday, Yee endorsed hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior Tom Steyer.
She said in a video that she was backing Steyer because of his “standing up our democracy and getting young people involved, certainly with respect to our climate and the climate crisis we’re facing.”
Becerra and Steyer are now the Democratic front-runners in the race.
Despite Becerra’s long tenure in state and federal office, the unflashy politician is not well-known among California voters. He was among the underdogs in the 2026 gubernatorial race. Swalwell, by contrast, was among the leading Democratic candidates.
Amy Thoma, a former Republican strategist who is no longer affiliated with a political party, noted that Becerra’s surge comes at a critical moment in the election, shortly before ballots land in Californians’ mailboxes.
“Voters are starting to tune into the race. Yes, they want someone who will stand up to Trump, but it also seems they want someone with experience who can address the very real issues facing the state,” Thoma said.
She added that Becerra’s life story is “incredibly compelling.”
“The word authentic is overused, but every time he talks about his love for this state, for his family and wanting to make California work for everyone, it comes across incredibly sincere,” Thoma said. “Voters can see through candidates who fake it.”
Becerra was respected by colleagues across the aisle, including former GOP legislative leader and state Republican party chairman Jim Brulte. Both men were elected to the state Assembly in 1990 and though their politics often sharply differed. However, they had a warm relationship.
“He was progressive and I am a conservative,” Brulte said. “We never agreed much on policy, but he is a good man with a great heart.”
The 2026 governor’s race has been unlike any in recent memory, with no clear front-runner in a crowded field of candidates and voters just beginning to pay attention to the contest shortly before the June 2 primary.
There were two prominent Republicans and eight prominent Democrats in the race, leading to fears among Democratic leaders in the state that their party’s candidates could be shut out in the general election because of California’s unique primary system. The two candidates who win the most votes in the June 2 primary will move on to the November general election, regardless of party affiliation.
Democratic leaders remain concerned that despite California’s sapphire-blue tilt, the number of their party’s candidates in the race could lead to a splintering of Democratic voters that results in two Republicans advancing to the November ballot.
Six prominent Democrats remain in the race, after Swalwell and Yee dropped out.
The race — lacking a global superstar such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or the scion of a storied political family and former governor like Jerry Brown — is ephemeral. Anything can happen before the June 2 primary.
But Becerra is having a moment. In addition to the new endorsements, he has seen notable movement in polls, most recently in a survey released Monday by the state Democratic Party. Becerra jumped nine points from the party’s last poll, tying Steyer at 13%.
While Becerra will never be able to match Steyer’s deep pockets, he raised more than $1 million on ActBlue, the top Democratic fundraising platform, in the week ending Saturday, making him the biggest fundraiser on the site in the nation.
“Ninety-seven percent were first-time donors,” Becerra’s campaign said in a statement. “This is not a donor base being recycled. It is a movement being born.”
Times staff writer Nicole Nixon contributed to this report from Sacramento.
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