Steyer is “reviving a dead political culture” by “talking to voters about their concerns”

PALM SPRINGS — In case you missed it, The American Prospect profiled Democratic gubernatorial candidate and climate advocate Tom Steyer running as a “traitor to his class, someone who has turned against the billionaires and corporate interests he thinks are at fault in tarnishing the California dream, and who must be fought if Californians are to regain it.” The piece also captured Steyer connecting with voters in town halls across the state, including in Culver City and Palm Springs. The following are excerpts from the story.

Tom Steyer Is Trying Politics | The American Prospect 

By David Dayen

“I’m not saying we should run government like a business,” Tom Steyer told a questioner at the latest in a series of question-and-answer sessions he’s been holding around the state as he campaigns for governor of California. “There’s a big fight right now between working people and rich companies who want to control our government and rip people off.”

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He’s running for governor… as a traitor to his class, someone who has turned against the billionaires and corporate interests he thinks are at fault in tarnishing the California dream, and who must be fought if Californians are to regain it.

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Steyer’s challenge is to restore a sense of possibility to a state that has not been ill-governed, but governed in a sealed bubble, making it impossible for an already apathetic public to understand what anyone stands for or why governing matters. “If you don’t get out and talk to people face-to-face, then you know what you know? You know what the other people in Sacramento know,” he told me. “And you know what that means? You don’t know anything.”

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The conventional wisdom is that such trifles like “asking for people’s votes” is simply too parochial to work in a state with roughly the population of Canada. But as Steyer told me, that further isolates politics and keeps leaders in the dark about what voters actually want. He gave me a number of examples based on his travels across the state: staff at University of California campuses living in their cars, farmworkers struggling with no water in the fields, a 35-year-old working at Apple and living at home with his mom 90 minutes away in Salinas, health care workers running on fumes and still at it only because of their desire to heal people.

“If you’re not going around the state and meeting people and asking them, ‘What’s up dude,’ then you’re just making it up,” he said. “And don’t we have enough of a problem in Washington, D.C.? We have to import it to California?”

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If you drill down into all those campaigns and his campaign for governor, there is at least an undercurrent of solutions that try to address problems that actually affect Californians. 

Steyer says he’s the only candidate with an AI policy, rooted in protecting workers from being replaced by AI, rather than using it as a tool for productivity. He’s also endorsed a state sovereign wealth fund based on a fractional tax on Big Tech data, a big swing that makes sense in a state at the heart of a technology boom. 

On climate change, where he’s been a national leader, Steyer’s for increasing accessibility for renewables, including home batteries and plug-in solar, while making polluters pay for their externalities. He wants ICE agents to be prosecuted if they violate state law. He supports a single-payer health care system as essential to relieving families and businesses of the growing burden of medical expenses, though he thinks “it will take us at least three years” to get there. 

But he also recognizes that the affordability conversation is the primary concern for voters and has foregrounded measures to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis. For instance, he has vowed to break up electricity monopolies responsible for the second-highest power rates of any state, with prices up almost 50 percent since 2019. His version of “breaking up” involves decentralizing power lines and allowing lower-cost energy providers, including residents with rooftops and batteries, access. He also wants to stop approving rate hikes that allow oversized return on equity for investor-owned utilities.

Steyer’s lead policy is to build a million affordable homes in his first term, through a combination of increasing denser zoning, speeding up construction, and making construction cheaper by expanding manufactured homes that can be built in assembly-line fashion. He has floated state purchasing of building materials in bulk, using surplus state land to build on, streamlining housing finance options to fill the funding gap, modeling risk better to lower home insurance rates, and preventing additional housing loss through rent stabilization. It’s a smorgasbord of ideas across the ideological spectrum. “There’s no silver bullet, it's a silver buckshot,” he told the crowd in Palm Springs.

But he also set this in the context of how California actually operates, something that can only come from understanding the state. Proposition 13 in 1978 limited property taxes for residences and business properties, creating a structural revenue gap that devastated local revenues, forcing them to beg for funding from the state. “Cities and counties haven’t wanted housing since Prop 13,” Steyer explained at the Palm Springs town hall. “They see it as an unfunded mandate to provide services.” In addition, local permitting and transfer fees have risen to backfill that revenue well beyond other states, blocking the construction pipeline and increasing building costs passed on to homebuyers and renters. 

Steyer is proposing a reform known as “split roll,” which would assess business properties on their current value, rather than Disneyland paying a property tax rate based on its value in 1978. This would add $20 billion annually for local community and school budgets (Steyer points out that California is 31st in per-pupil K-12 spending), while pushing permitting and transfer fees lower. 

Split roll narrowly failed at the ballot a few years ago, amid fearmongering that it would lead to grandmothers paying higher tax rates for their homes. To subvert this, Steyer has come up with a clever reframing: He calls it the “Trump tax loophole,” because some of the properties that have benefited from low property taxes are owned by the Trump family.

By calling a high-profile special election to close the Trump tax loophole, Steyer is actually addressing a specific problem unique to the state. Other candidates have been reluctant to go there. He asked everyone to join him in taking on Prop 13, which has been seen as a third rail of California politics, and he says they all declined. I asked him why. He replied, “I guess people don’t like to take on moneyed interests, do they?”

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The town halls that Steyer has put on are quite unusual for California. He is introduced, sometimes by his wife Kat, sometimes by a local endorser like Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-CA). He gives very brief remarks and then just answers unscripted questions from the crowd (there were a couple hundred people at each stop I attended). At the end, there’s even a version of the “selfie line” Elizabeth Warren adopted in her 2020 presidential campaign. 

Steyer took questions on topics as diverse as sickle cell anemia, runaway film production, K-12 curriculum, the status of state mental hospitals, appointees for the University of California Board of Regents, and data center installations, to name a few. It was a sometimes idiosyncratic but mostly faithful cross section of issues that Californians care about. Most of all, it wasn’t polished, just someone trying to represent citizens hearing from citizens. “We’re here to look people in the eye and find out what they need,” he said. 

The cynics are right in one respect: With 200 voters at a time, Steyer would have to do town halls like this in rolling fashion for a couple of years to reach enough to make a dent. The sheer size of the state frustrates retail politics. But it may pay dividends beyond that.

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