Is Tom Steyer California’s Change Candidate?
May 29, 2026
Tom Steyer is pitching his gubernatorial campaign as an existential fight between working Californians and corporate power, running on a platform including single-payer health care, taxing oil company windfall profits and slashing electric utility rates by a quarter.
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Tom Steyer is pitching his gubernatorial campaign as an existential fight between working Californians and corporate power, running on a platform including single-payer health care, taxing oil company windfall profits and slashing electric utility rates by a quarter
‘Judge me by my enemies’
“I am the only billionaire running for governor, but I am very far from the only billionaire in this race,” the 68-year-old climate activist and businessman told reporters at a May 26 American Community Media briefing.
“Judge me by my enemies,” he has said in one campaign video: Steyer, who previously ran for president in 2020, has self-funded much of his campaign and faces a record nearly $50 million spent against him by corporations including Chevron, Meta, PG&E, realtor groups, Airbnb, the California Medical Association (CMA) — the most powerful anti-single payer lobby group.
He explained that his leading “corporate Democrat” opponent, Xavier Becerra, received the maximum legal contribution through CMA’s political action committee, $500,000 from Chevron and $950,000 from Meta a day before firing 10% of its workforce.
When Becerra was asked, on television last week what he would do differently as governor, Steyer noted his response was little more than satisfaction with the status quo, describing his statement as “‘We seem to be doing pretty well,’ kind of ‘steady as she goes.’”
“If you want no change, if you want the corporations to continue to drive up our costs, there’s a candidate for that,” said Steyer. “I’m the person who is unequivocally, with no conflicts, working for working people, that’s my only interest. That’s going to be my measuring stick of success.”
‘I’m for shared prosperity’
“Californians can’t afford to live in California anymore,” Steyer said, arguing that the state’s affordability crisis is an extraction operation by unchecked corporate interests.
He pledged to build a million homes Californians can afford, pointing to an Oakland-based nonprofit community bank he and his wife founded that has already financed 17,000 low-income housing units as proof he can deliver.
Steyer also led the School Meals for All initiative making California the first state in history to guarantee free breakfast and lunch to all public school students, founded a nonprofit that has registered over 1.3 million young voters nationwide and spearheaded Proposition 39, which directed $1 billion annually to school energy upgrades and clean energy jobs by closing an out-of-state corporate tax loophole.
He proposed closing another corporate property tax loophole known as the “Trump Tax Loophole” to reclaim $20 billion for schools and healthcare.
“I’m for shared prosperity. We are not sharing the prosperity. We have the highest poverty rate in the United States of America. Our school systems need to get much better. We need to deliver health care as a right, we need to make this a state where people can think they can buy a house again and can afford rent,” he said.
Californians pay nearly twice the national average for electric utilities.
Steyer pledged to cut rates by at least 25% by restructuring how the Public Utilities Commission operates and enabling local competition to break the monopolies’ grip.
“You don’t have to take my word for it,” he said: PG&E alone has spent $13.5 million against Steyer — $17 million including other utility companies like SoCal Edison and Sempra.
On gasoline, he called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies — with revenue to go directly back to Californians hurt by rising prices, not into the general fund — arguing that the Iran conflict has added roughly $1.50 per gallon at the pump without costing Chevron a cent.
“They are gouging us,” he said. “The head of the Western States Petroleum Association has said they have a duty to gouge us.”
He pushed renewable energy as a savings mechanism: “Clean energy is cheaper. We need to deploy it, and we need to put money in the pockets of Californians.”
Single-payer healthcare
“Healthcare is a right for every Californian,” said Steyer, who supports single-payer healthcare. “The idea that the system we have is sustainable is not true, because what we’re seeing every year is the state taking away healthcare in one way or another from Californians.”
Health care costs have generally risen at twice the rate of inflation for 50 years, while recent federal Medi-Cal cuts under the “One Big Beautiful Bill” have blown an estimated $9 billion hole in California’s budget met with just over $100 million in the May budget revision.
Steyer acknowledged that moving to a full state single-payer system would require a federal waiver and a more cooperative administration in Washington, but he pledged to begin efforts on day one, and cited nurses unions’ endorsement as evidence of his seriousness.
He added that he was ready to take on pharmaceutical drug companies in order to lower health care costs: “I know where they’re taking advantage, rigging the system and screwing Californians … I’m on Team California, and I want Team California to win every time.”
Immigration and criminal justice
On immigration, Steyer has staked out arguably the most aggressive position in the field.
He called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “a criminal organization that breaks the laws in California” — “We need immigration services, but we don’t need a criminal organization” — and supported abolishing the agency, while acknowledging a governor can’t do that unilaterally.
What a governor can do is prosecute.
“I will prosecute ICE agents for racially profiling Californians. That is illegal here. I will prosecute ICE agents for using violence against Californians,” he said, adding that he would pursue accountability “up the chain as far as Stephen Miller.”
He also pledged to demand inspections of California’s federal immigration detention facilities and to fund a state legal defense fund for people facing deportation, modeled on a private fund he and his wife launched in 2018.
President Trump responded to his immigration policies by attacking him online; so did ICE.
“I considered both of those validations that I am doing the right thing,” Steyer said. “The job of the governor of California is to stand between violence, between terror, between racial profiling and the people of California. I’m going to do that for immigrants in this state every single time.”
Steyer faced a question from the media on his hedge fund investment in the private prison company CoreCivic 22 years ago.
He described the stake as a mistake that he recognized and sold within a year: “I made a mistake, I admitted it, but I also did a U-turn … I spent years trying to make sure that I was more than making up for it.”
What followed was two decades of work to dismantle the for-profit system: Steyer backed a successful bill to replace cash bail with pre-trial risk assessments, worked to end automatic sentence enhancements and backed a successful bill phasing out private prisons statewide.
Steyer noted that as a result, he is the only candidate endorsed by Smart Justice California, one of the state’s largest rehabilitative justice advocacy organizations.
“The special interests are spending record money against me, but working people and labor unions are lined up behind me,” Steyer said. “I will take on the corporate special interests and fight for working Californians every single day … I thought there would be a lot of people trying to do what I’m doing, but it turns out I’m the only one, and that’s why I’m asking people for their vote.”
Election Day is June 2, 2026.
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