More Big Tech money pours in to California governor candidates in race’s final weeks

The primary election for California governor is 12 days away, and millions of dollars are still being dumped into the race.

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This battle to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom has shaped up to be an expensive one. Eight candidates, six Democrats and two Republicans, are battling it out, and spending the big bucks on TV ads and mailers to get their messages across until the bitter end. There has been a combination of funding sources for the Democrats: Billionaire Tom Steyer is funding his own campaign, former Rep. Katie Porter refuses to take corporate PAC money, San Jose Matt Mahan is raking in millions from Silicon Valley.

Longtime Democratic strategist Garry South, who has worked on four governor’s races dating back to former Gov. Gray Davis’ campaign, told SFGATE in a call Wednesday that any money coming into the race in the final weeks is unlikely to sway voters much.

“Early money is always more important than late money in campaigns,” said South. “The reason is that by the last month or few weeks voters are inundated and start tuning it out.”

Still, donations are flooding in from some notable donors from the Bay Area’s biggest industry: tech. 

Meta, parent company of Facebook, recently gave nearly $1 million to Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary and, unexpectedly, now the Democratic front-runner. The company laid off 8,000 employees this week and has a prominent lobbying presence in California and across the country. 

Steyer, who is close behind Becerra in recent polling, seized on the $950,000 donation from Meta to try to knock out his opponent. “Mark Zuckerberg wants a friend in Sacramento,” Steyer wrote on X, with a screenshot of the donation record. “I won’t be.” 

“Becerra’s rise has been kind of astounding to me because it’s come in absence of any financial advantage,” South said. Becerra has raised under $10 million. That is a fraction compared with his opponents’ deeper war chests. 

Candidates in the race are calling out Becerra for his unclear position on single-payer health care, something that has been unsuccessfully attempted for years. They claim that he has changed his position on single-payer after receiving big-dollar donations from the California Medical Association, the state’s most powerful physician group, which gave him $500,000 earlier this month. Another labor group representing construction workers gave an independent expenditure committee supporting him $2 million.

Chris Larsen, a big Silicon Valley crypto investor, has given money to Porter and Republican Steve Hilton’s campaigns. Hilton has also received money from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Porter is largely receiving money from unions, auto workers and law firms, while Becerra has been backed by the auto and oil industries. Republican candidate Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff, has mostly received money from law enforcement associations. 

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Nearly $40 million has gone toward Mahan’s candidacy, coming from various accounts, largely from big-time tech and venture capital executives.

Mahan was the last major candidate to join the race, in late January and has barely inched up in the polls since; the most recent polls are finding he has between 4% and 10% likely voter support.

That hasn’t seemed to matter to the tech elite. 

Last month alone, Mahan received $1 million from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, $1 million from Louis John Doerr, a San Francisco venture capitalist and the chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and $1 million from Vinod Khosla, also a venture capitalist. Also in the million-dollar donation club is Michael Moritz, co-founder of the San Francisco Standard and former partner at legendary Bay Area firm Sequoia Capital. Also among Mahan’s supporters are Rick Caruso, a billionaire Los Angeles real estate developer and former mayoral candidate, who gave $1.5 million over March and April, and Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe Inc., who gave almost $1.5 million. San Francisco-based venture capitalist Neil Mehta gave almost $1 million over February and March, and Gmail founder Paul Buchheit also gave $1 million to him this spring.

Steyer has largely been self-funding his candidacy, with the exception of a few thousand-dollar donations here and there. Recent disclosures show he has put a whopping $192 million into his own campaign. 

South, the consultant, is skeptical that Steyer’s self-funding capabilities will get him to the general election. He said the last time someone massively self-funded their governor’s campaign was Al Checchi in 1998. Checchi put in $40 million of his own wealth in the race (at the time the most put into a governor’s campaign in California) and only got 12.49% of the vote. 

“Because they have unlimited money and don’t have to consider how they spend their money, they tend to overwhelm the voters,” South said. “… People get sick and tired of seeing their ads and run out their welcome.”

Steyer, however, is still polling as Becerra’s closest Democratic rival. Recent results are showing him only a few percentage points behind Becerra, which could signal his media blitz is working.