Democrats were already fretting about the California governor’s race – a tangle of candidates with strong résumés but little star power vying to lead the country’s most populous state and the world’s fourth largest economy.
Then on Sunday, the closest claim the Democrats had to a frontrunner in the unsettled governor’s race, Eric Swalwell, suspended his campaign, amid allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, which the US representative forcefully denied and vowed to fight. On Tuesday, another woman came forward to accuse the congressman of raping her in a West Hollywood hotel in 2018. Hours later, facing the threat of an expulsion, he formally resigned his seat in Congress.
A lawyer representing Swalwell said in a statement to multiple media outlets that he “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him”.
The sudden – and shocking – downfall of the 45-year-old East Bay congressman has thrown an already fluid contest into complete disarray.
It is, according to the veteran Democratic strategist Garry South, who has worked on four California gubernatorial campaigns, the state’s “most curious” governor’s race in recent memory.
With the candidate filing deadline passed and ballots scheduled to land in voters’ mailboxes early next month in advance of the 2 June primary election, California Democrats are now left to sort through their options – and quickly.
“This really tosses the table over,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Sacramento State. “You’ll see some Democratic voters taking another look at candidates that maybe weren’t at the top of their list.”
Amid the upheaval, Swalwell’s seven Democratic rivals are scrambling to win over his former supporters. Early indicators suggest Katie Porter, a former US representative, and billionaire Tom Steyer, the leading Democrats in the race, are most likely to absorb the voters who favored Swalwell, though they have both faced skepticism from Democratic voters. Other lower-polling candidates, including the former US health and human services secretary Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San José mayor Matt Mahan, believe they, too, have an opening.
But the Democratic field is missing an obvious successor – and the shine of a big personality of the caliber that California voters have come to expect, South said: “It’s just really a morass.”
For much of the past year, the race to replace Gavin Newsom as governor has proceeded like an afterthought, overshadowed by Donald Trump’s turbulent return to the White House and last year’s all-encompassing redistricting campaign. And still, there was the expectation that a breakout star would emerge to capture Democrats’ imagination. This was California, after all.
Democrats spent months awaiting a decision by Kamala Harris, who had returned to California after her 2024 presidential loss to Trump. But she ultimately declined to throw her hat in the ring and is instead “thinking about” running again for president.
There was hope that Alex Padilla, the trailblazing Latino senator who is a leading opponent of the president’s immigration agenda, might jump in. But he, too, opted out. Amid the stasis, Rob Bonta, the state’s attorney general, reconsidered a potential bid but again decided against it.
At the party’s convention in San Francisco in February, support fractured and no Democrat won enough of the delegates to secure an endorsement for governor.
“There was such a vacuum in the race and there was no well-known candidate to fill it,” said Jessica Taylor, who analyzes governors’ races for the Cook Political Report. “No candidate has risen to meet the moment yet.”
In recent weeks, Swalwell had started to gain momentum, scooping up high-profile endorsements and edging ahead in polling. The seven-term congressman who had built a national profile sparring with Trump cast himself as the right choice to lead California – and the opposition to the president.
Then on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a female former staffer said the congressman had sexually assaulted her twice. CNN published a similar account hours later, as well as allegations from three other women of Swalwell sending them unwanted explicit photos or messages.
The reaction was immediate: prominent backers – elected officials, unions and donors – abandoned him, amid an exodus of campaign staff. In a statement announcing his resignation from Congress on Monday, Swalwell apologized for the “mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past” but vowed to “fight the serious, false allegations that have been made”.
The latest turmoil has only worsened the fear, gripping California Democrats for months, that a failure to consolidate the field might produce the once-unthinkable prospect of two Republicans advancing to the November general election in the country’s largest blue state.
Under California’s “jungle” primary system, all candidates run on the same ballot, with the top two vote-getters advancing to November regardless of party. In theory, a fractured Democratic field could allow the two Republican candidates to slip through. While everyone agrees a Democratic lockout is possible, most analysts say that outcome is highly unlikely thanks, in large part, to Trump.
After the allegations against Swalwell emerged, the Democratic state party chair, Rusty Hicks, repeated his plea for candidates to “honestly assess” their viability.
Last week, the president upset the calculus by endorsing Steve Hilton, the conservative commentator and former director of strategy to David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, over the Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco on the Republican side. If Republican voters follow Trump’s lead and coalesce around Hilton, many observers expect Bianco’s support to slide, with at least one Democrat able to surpass him.
“Donald Trump has all-but ensured that California will have a Democratic governor next year,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communication at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California and has worked on multiple governor’s races. “Eric Swalwell has just made it much more difficult to figure out who that Democrat is going to be.
“They’re back to square one,” he added.
Porter, once seen as a potential frontrunner, has been hampered by negative viral moments that renewed questions about her temperament. Steyer has leaned on his personal fortune, pumping roughly $120m of his own money into blanketing the airwaves across the enormously expensive media markets, enough to launch him toward the front of the pack, but not enough yet to break away.
On Sunday, Porter quoted a line from a San Francisco Chronicle opinion column that said Democrats could “pull victory from the jaws of defeat” by coalescing around her campaign. Steyer touted a new endorsement from Jared Huffman, a California congressman and one of the first House Democrats to call on Swalwell to resign from Congress.
Mahan has seen an increase of outside support over the weekend, with a Super Pac backing him reporting a flood of new donations, including a $1m contribution from the developer Rick Caruso, according to Politico.
A poll released in March by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies showed that Swalwell and Porter each drew 13% of California voters, the highest-polling Democrats. Steyer followed close behind with 10% support. But they were all edged out by the Republicans, with Hilton and Bianco notching 17% and 16% support, respectively.
Christian Grose, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, said Trump’s endorsement – far more than Swalwell’s exit – meant it was likely a Democrat and Republican will advance to the general election, with the Democrat holding the advantage in a state where they outnumber Republicans two to one.
He estimates the chances of a Republican-on-Republican general election contest are between 5% and 8% at best. As for which Democrat has the best odds of becoming California’s next governor, Grose said that is anyone’s guess.
“It’s a crazy election,” he said. “Who knows what comes next?”
