Politics
Villaraigosa, despite climate credentials, pivots toward oil industry in run for governor
As California positions itself as a leader on climate change, former Los Angeles mayor and gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa is pivoting away from his own track record as an environmental champion to defend the state’s struggling oil industry.
Villaraigosa’s work to expand mass transit, plant trees and reduce carbon emissions made him a favorite of the environmental movement, but the former state Assembly speaker also accepted more than $1 million in campaign contributions and other financial support from oil companies and other donors tied to the industry over more than three decades in public life, according to city and state fundraising disclosures reviewed by The Times.
Since entering the race last year to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, Villaraigosa has accepted more than $176,000 from donors with ties to the oil industry, including from a company that operates oil fields in the San Joaquin Valley and in Los Angeles County, the disclosures show.
The clash between Villaraigosa’s environmentalist credentials and oil-industry ties surfaced in the governor’s race after Valero announced in late April that its Bay Area refinery would close next year, not long after Phillips 66 said its Wilmington refinery would close in 2025.
Villaraigosa is now warning that California drivers could see gas prices soar, blasting as “absurd” policies that he said could have led to the refinery closures.
“I’m not fighting for refineries,” Villaraigosa said in an interview. “I’m fighting for the people who pay for gas in this state.”
The refineries are a sore spot for Newsom and for California Democrats, pitting their environmental goals against concerns about the rising cost of living and two of the state’s most powerful interest groups — organized labor and environmentalists — against each other.
Villaraigosa said Democrats are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in their approach to fighting climate change.
He said he hoped no more refineries would close until the state hits more electrification milestones, including building more transmission lines, green-energy storage systems and charging stations for electric cars. The only way for the state to reach “net zero” emissions, he said, is an “all-of-the-above” approach that includes solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear power and oil and gas.
“The notion that we’re not going to do that is poppycock,” Villaraigosa said.
Villaraigosa’s vocal support for the oil industry has upset some environmental groups that saw him as a longtime ally.
“I’m honestly shocked at just how bad it is,” said RL Miller, the president of Climate Hawks Vote and the chair of the California Democratic Party’s environmental caucus, of the contributions Villaraigosa has accepted since entering the race in July.
Miller said Villaraigosa signed a pledge during his unsuccessful run for governor in 2018 not to accept campaign contributions from oil companies and “named executives” at fossil-fuel entities. She said he took the pledge shortly after accepting the maximum allowable contributions from several oil donors in 2017.
Miller said that more than $100,000 in donations that Villaraigosa has accepted in this gubernatorial cycle were clear violations of the pledge.
That included contributions from the state’s largest oil and gas producer, California Resources Corp. and its subsidiaries, as well as the founder of Rocky Mountain Resources, a leader of the oil company Berry Corp., and Excalibur Well Services.
“This is bear-hugging the oil industry,” she said.
Environmental activists view the pledge as binding for future campaigns. Villaraigosa said he has not signed it for this campaign.
The economy is dramatically different than it was in 2018, Villaraigosa said, and working-class Americans are being hammered, which he said was a major factor in recent Democratic losses.
“We’re losing working people, particularly working people who don’t have a college education,” he said. “Why are we losing them? The cost of living, the cost of gas, the cost of utilities, the cost of groceries.”
Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego, said such statements are consistent with Villaraigosa’s messaging in recent years.
“Villaraigosa is squarely in the moderate lane in the governor’s race. That doomed him in 2018, when voters wanted to counterbalance President Trump and Villaraigosa was outflanked by Newsom,” Kousser said. “But today, even some Democrats may want to counterbalance the direction that they see Sacramento taking, especially when it comes to cost-of-living issues and the price of gas.”
He added that the fossil-fuel donations may not be the basis for Villaraigosa’s apparent embrace of oil and gas priorities.
“When a politician takes campaign contributions from an industry and also takes positions that favor it, that raises the possibility of corruption, of money influencing votes,” Kousser said. “But it is also possible that it was the politician’s own approach to an issue that attracted the contributions, that their votes attracted money but were not in any way corrupted by it. That may be the case here, where Villaraigosa has held fairly consistent positions on this issue and consistently attracted support from an industry because of those positions.”
Other Democrats in the 2026 governor’s race, including Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, former state Controller Betty Yee and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, have signed the pledge not to accept contributions from oil industry interests, Miller said.
Former California Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and businessman Stephen Cloobeck have not. (Cloobeck has never run for office before and has not been asked to sign.)
Other gubernatorial candidates have also accepted fossil-fuel contributions, although in smaller numbers than Villaraigosa, state and federal filings show.
Becerra accepted contributions from Chevron and California Resources Corp., formerly Occidental Petroleum, while running for attorney general. Atkins took donations from Chevron, Occidental and a trade group for oil companies while running for state Assembly and state Senate. And while running for lieutenant governor, Kounalakis took contributions from executives at oil and mining companies.
Campaign representatives for the two main Republican candidates in the race, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton, said they welcomed oil-industry donations.
Villaraigosa is a fierce defender of his environmental record dating back to his first years as an elected official in the California Assembly.
As mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013, Villaraigosa set new goals to reduce emissions at the Port of Los Angeles, end the use of coal-burning power plants and shift the city’s energy generation toward solar, wind and geothermal sources.
The child of a woman who relied on Metro buses, he also branded himself the “transportation mayor.” Villaraigosa was a vocal champion for the 2008 sales tax increase that provided the first funding for the extension of the Wilshire Boulevard subway to the Westside.
But, he said, Democrats in 2025 have to be realistic that the refinery closures and their goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions could disproportionately affect low-income residents who are already struggling to make ends meet.
Villaraigosa’s comments underscore a broader divide among Democrats about how to fight climate change without making California even more expensive, or driving out more high-paying jobs that don’t require a college education.
Lorena Gonzalez, a former state lawmaker who became the leader of the California Labor Federation in 2022, said that while climate change is a real threat, so is shutting down refineries.
“That’s a threat to those workers’ jobs and lives, and it’s also a threat to the price of gas,” Gonzalez said.
California is not currently positioned to end its reliance on fossil fuels, she said. If the state reduces its refining capacity, she said, it will have to rely on exports from nations that have less environmental and labor safeguards.
“Anyone running for governor has to acknowledge that,” Gonzalez said.
Villaraigosa said that while the loss of union jobs at Valero’s Bay Area refinery worried him, his primary concern was over the cost of gasoline and household budgets.
His comments come as California prepares to square off yet again against the Trump administration over its environmental policies.
The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to revoke a federal waiver that allowed California to set its own vehicle emission standards, including a rule that would have ultimately banned the sale of new gas-fueled cars in 2035. Villaraigosa denounced the vote, but said that efforts to fight climate change can’t come at the expense of working-class Americans.
President Trump has also declared a national energy emergency, calling for increased fossil-fuel production, eliminating environmental reviews and the fast-tracking of projects in potentially sensitive ecosystems and habitats. The Trump administration is also targeting California’s environmental standards.
Villaraigosa, an Eastside native, started his career as a labor organizer and rose to speaker of the state Assembly before becoming the mayor of Los Angeles. Now 72, Villaraigosa has not held elected office for more than a decade; he finished a distant third in the 2018 gubernatorial primary.
Over the years, donors affiliated with the fossil-fuel industry have contributed more than $1 million to Villaraigosa’s political campaigns and his nonprofit causes, including an after-school program, the city’s sports and entertainment commission and an effort to reduce violence by providing programming at city parks during summer nights, according to city and state disclosures.
More than half of the contributions and support for Villaraigosa’s pet causes, over $582,000, came during his years at Los Angeles City Hall as a council member and mayor.
In 2008, billionaire oil and gas magnate T. Boone Pickens donated $150,000 to a city proposition backed by Villaraigosa that levied a new tax on phone and internet use.
Pickens made the donation as his company was vying for business at the port of Los Angeles, which is overseen by mayoral appointees and was seeking to reduce emissions by replacing diesel-powered trucks with vehicles fueled by liquid natural gas.
The rest of the contributions and other financial support flowed to Villaraigosa’s campaign accounts and affiliated committees while he served in the Assembly and during his two gubernatorial runs. These figures do not include donations to independent expenditure committees, since candidates cannot legally be involved in those efforts.
Villaraigosa said that while such voters don’t subscribe to Republicans’ “drill, baby, drill” ethos, he slammed the Democratic Party’s focus on such matters and Trump instead of kitchen-table issues.
“The cost of everything we’re doing is on the backs of the people who work the hardest and who make the least, and that’s why so many of them — even when we were saying Trump is a threat to democracy — they were saying, yeah, but what about my gas prices, grocery prices, the cost of eggs?” he said.
Times staff writer Sandra McDonald in Sacramento contributed to this report.
But while that is a new element in the talks, the cultural divide in how to negotiate is not.
That divide was evident 11 years ago, in the gilded halls of the 160-year-old Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from five other countries struggled to close a preliminary agreement with Iran. It was, perhaps, the closest analogue to what is unfolding now in Islamabad.
Every day the American delegation would speak about how many centrifuges had to be disassembled and how much uranium needed to be shipped out of country. Yet when Iranian officials — including Abbas Araghchi, now the Iranian foreign minister — stepped out of the elegant, chandeliered rooms to brief reporters, most of the questions about those details were waved away. The Iranians talked about preserving respect for their rights and Iran’s sovereignty.
“I remember we finally got the parameters agreed upon at the hotel,” Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator at the time, said on Monday. “And then a few days later the supreme leader came out and said, ‘Actually, some very different terms were required.’”
Ms. Sherman, who went on to become deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, would go into these negotiations with a large posse. She often had the C.I.A.’s top Iran expert in the room, or nearby. So was the energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, an expert in nuclear weapons design. Proposals floated by the Iranians would be sent back to the U.S. national laboratories, where weapons are designed and tested, for expert analysis of whether the agreements being discussed would keep Iran at least a year away from a bomb.
But Mr. Trump’s negotiating team travels light, with no entourage of experts and few briefings. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law and the special envoy, learned their negotiating skills in New York real estate and say a deal is a deal. They say they have immersed themselves in the details of the Iran program, and know it well.
Politics
Soros-linked dark money network fuels Virginia redistricting push backed by national Democrats
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Virginians for Fair Elections, a main group fighting to get Virginia voters to approve a ballot referendum that will allow the state to redraw its congressional maps, has been pumped with millions in cash from a web of George Soros-backed dark money groups and top Democratic Party officials.
The money the group has garnered ahead of Tuesday’s vote, which is poised to allow Democrats in the House of Representatives to potentially take four seats from Republicans going into the midterms, also comes from leading Democratic Party figures and organizations like Nancy Pelosi and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Other left-wing juggernauts pumping money into the Democratic Party’s redistricting effort in Virginia include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which once championed the adoption of “independent redistricting commissions,” national green energy group the League of Conservation Voters, and the U.S. House of Representatives campaign arm for the Democratic Party, according to a Fox News Digital review of state campaign finance records and records from the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), which tracks public spending in Virginia.
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“Dark money is flooding into Virginia,” GOP strategist Matt Gorman told Fox News Digital. “Democrats talked all about the cost of living during the campaign, but all they did once in office was raise taxes and rig elections. It’ll be the same elsewhere across the country in 2026 too.”
A woman casts her vote at a polling place in Burke, Fairfax County, Virginia, in 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg)
Fox News Digital reported in March that the left-wing group fighting to redraw Virginia’s maps raised more than $38 million, according to VPAP’s donation totals based on state campaign finance records. As of right before the mid-April referendum vote, just a handful of weeks later, that total ballooned to more than $64 million.
In 2026, the largest giver to Virginians for Fair Elections was House Majority Forward, the nonprofit counterpart of House Democrats’ House Majority PAC, which has donated over $38 million, records show.
Meanwhile, entities directly tied to Soros, or that obtained significant funding which can be traced back to the billionaire Democrat megadonor, come in second and third in terms of total giving to the group, per VPAP’s accounting of donation totals.
One of those groups, the Fund for Policy Reform Inc, was founded by Soros. The other, titled The Fairness Project, has been funded by groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund and the Tides Foundation, which Soros has given significant funding to.
George Soros pictured on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Another one of the top donors to the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections is American Opportunity Action, described as “a pure pass-through entity” by Parker Thayer, a dark money expert from the conservative Capital Research Center. The group is so new that it does not even appear to have any 990s filed with the IRS but is still one of Virginians for Fair Elections’ top donors, according to VPAP and state campaign finance records.
Top Democratic Party members of Congress from outside Virginia, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., and Katherine Clark, D-Mass., also donated tens-of-thousands of dollars, according to a review of state campaign finance records. Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s leadership PAC donated $100,000 as well, while the Democratic Party of Virginia put up just shy of a million dollars, per VPAP’s accounting.
Meanwhile, a group founded by Obama wingman Eric Holder, who previously championed “independent redistricting commissions,” provided a more than $10,000 in-kind contribution to the left-wing redistricting group, state election filings show. The League of Conservation Voters, and the Soros-backed MoveOn.org were also among Virginians for Fair Election’s top donors. In terms of labor union support, SEIU gave half-a-million, while AFT gave $100,000.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the other top donors pumping thousands or millions into the redistricting battle, but did not receive a response ahead of publication.
“No one wanted to take this action, but in a democracy, we can’t let entire states rig their congressional maps just to bend to the will of one person,” Alexis Magnan-Callaway, a spokesperson for The Fairness Project, told Fox News Digital in March.
“We have to respond. This amendment is a temporary, one-time exception that gives Virginia voters a voice and meets the needs of the current moment, while ensuring Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting process will resume after the 2030 census,” she continued. “This isn’t about favoring one party over another. This is about restoring fairness across the board by temporarily changing Virginia’s congressional districts.”
A main group in Virginia opposing the redistricting effort led by Democrats, Virginians For Fair Maps, raised a little over $3 million at the time of Fox News Digital’s late March report. However, the right-wing redistricting group in Virginia appears to have gained some ground since then as well, albeit still far behind the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections funding totals.
As of just before the referendum vote Tuesday, the anti-redistricting referendum group raised its fundraising total to nearly $20 million, with most of that money coming from a group by the same name that is also a significant donor to the Virginia Republican Party.
Other donations to the group come from a series of several much smaller donors, such as $50,000 from the National Shooting Sports Foundation and $100,000 from a wealthy D.C.-area real-estate investor, who donates primarily to GOP campaigns. That investor is the top individual donor at $100,000 out of just a handful of individual contributions, according to VPAP.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin speaks during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference at the Washington Hilton on June 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
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Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has reportedly given more than $500,000 in efforts against the redistricting measure, per reporting from the Virginia Scope. He also has been a leading voice in Virginia holding events to campaign against the measure despite no longer being in office.
Wealthy tech entrepreneur and Republican donor Peter Thiel has reportedly donated to Justice for Democracy PAC, which has been part of the anti-redistricting effort alongside Virginians for Fair Maps as well.
The most unpredictable California governor’s race in recent history took another set of dizzying turns on Monday, with former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra surging after former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out in the face of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, and former state Controller Betty Yee ending her bid.
The race to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom is the first in a quarter of a century with no clear front-runner and a sprawling field of candidates who have been jockeying for the attention of Californians, who are just beginning to pay attention to the campaign two weeks before ballots arrive in their mailboxes.
“I certainly could not have imagined the twists and the disturbing turns that this race has taken,” Yee said as she announced she was dropping out. “But through it all, my values and my vision for California has never wavered.”
A poll released Monday by the state Democratic Party — its first since Swalwell (D-Dublin) dropped out — showed Becerra’s support jumped nine points to 13%, placing him in a tie with Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior. Former Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County saw a slight bump to 10% from 7%, while the remaining Democrats in the contest were mired in the low single digits.
The party began the surveys out of concern that Democrats could be shut out of the governor’s race because of California’s unique primary system, where the top two vote-getters in the June 2 primary move on to the November general election regardless of political party.
“I continue to believe there are too many Democrats in the field,” California Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks told reporters Monday. “My call for candidates to honestly assess the viability of their candidacy and campaigns still stands, especially if you are stalled in the single digits, seeing financial resources dry up and/or are failing to pick up additional support.”
Hicks and other party leaders and allies had unsuccessfully urged low-polling candidates to reconsider their candidacies before the filing deadline in an attempt to cull the field and avoid splintering the Democratic vote. Though most did not name candidates who they thought should think about their viability, Yee was widely believed to be among them.
Yee became emotional as she said on Monday that she decided to withdraw from the race because she wasn’t able to raise the resources necessary to compete in the state. She also said her message of competency and experience wasn’t resonating among voters who were seeking a fiery foil to President Trump, not “Boring Betty,” as she dubbed herself. Yee said she would assess the field before making an announcement on whether she would endorse one of her fellow Democrats.
Becerra was another candidate believed to be a target of party leaders’ efforts to shrink the field. But he held on and apparently benefited from Swalwell’s downfall.
“I’m not the richest candidate, I’m not the slickest candidate, but I am the guy that’s got you,” Becerra said, rallying supporters in Los Angeles on Saturday.
The audience was filled with members of labor groups backing the longtime politician, and Becerra told them he’d serve as a “union man” in the governor’s office.
Pro- and anti-Becerra forces tussled outside the town hall after two people, who declined to identify whom they were working for, passed out fliers highlighting critical media investigations of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the migrant crisis when the agency was led by Becerra.
Pro-Becerra attendees grabbed the fliers and told the men to go away, prompting a security guard to intervene.
The question is whether Becerra, who also served as state attorney general, a member of Congress and a state Assembly member, can raise the funds necessary to compete in a state with some of the nation’s most expensive media markets. And he was tied in the state party poll with a billionaire who dumped an additional $12.1 million of his own money into his campaign last week.
Steyer’s total investment in his bid reached $133 million, according to the California secretary of state’s office. He also received the endorsement of Our Revolution, a progressive political organization founded by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“We’ve never endorsed a billionaire — but Tom Steyer is using his position to upset the system,” the group posted on X on Monday. “As Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese told @theintercept, ‘He’s been a partner in the movement. Most billionaires have used their wealth and privilege to lock in the status quo. Tom is doing the opposite.’”
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who is also running for governor, accused Steyer of hypocrisy for the hedge fund he founded profiting from investments in private prisons being used to house ICE detainees, and Steyer calling for the abolishment of ICE.
Steyer got “rich investing off the ICE infrastructure he now wants to abolish,” Mahan posted on Instagram.
Steyer, who sold his stake in the hedge fund in 2012, has said he ordered the company to divest from the private prison company and has repeatedly expressed remorse about his former firm’s ties with the detention company.
Mahan also appeared Monday at a Hollywood production lot to announce his proposal for a special fund to lure sporting events, concerts and other productions to California as part of his plan to help the struggling film and television industry.
An independent effort supporting Mahan has also raised roughly $11 million since Swalwell left the race.
Mehta reported from Los Angeles and Nixon from Sacramento. Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.
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