A ‘tax-the-rich’ billionaire candidate? Democrats are intrigued | California

Tom Steyer built his campaign for California governor around affordability – and taxing the richest.

This is perhaps an unusual message for a candidate whose net worth is estimated at $2.4 billion. But the hedge fund founder, turned climate activist and liberal mega-donor, presents himself as a different kind of billionaire: one who wants people like him to pay a lot more taxes.

As early voting ballots arrive for the June 2 primary, Steyer, the leading candidate in this volatile race, is fighting to convince Californians that his “elect the rich to eat the rich” candidacy is not a contradiction.

“People are very skeptical of billionaires,” Steyer, wearing a beige baseball cap embroidered with the words “class traitor,” told a small group of reporters at a campaign event in East Los Angeles on Wednesday. “I’m skeptical of billionaires because we’ve seen so many billionaires be selfish and arrogant.”

Steyer’s campaign comes at a particularly hot political moment in the United States, marked by a rise in anti-elite populism, widening income inequality and growing suspicion of billionaire power in both parties.

A Harris Poll survey last year found that the share of Americans who believe billionaires threaten American democracy stood at 53 percent, up 7 points from 2024. At the same time, nearly eight in 10 respondents said they were more likely to support a billionaire who “challenges unjust systems.”

Since Donald Trump’s return to power, millions have flocked to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders condemn the 1 percent as he tours the country to fight the oligarchy. In New York, the city’s new Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated Tax Day by filming a video outside billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse to promote a tax proposal on luxury second homes. Earlier this month, protests erupted over Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ involvement in this year’s Met Gala.

“You can’t make a billion dollars,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a podcast interview earlier this month, sparking a heated debate.

Anti-rich sentiment is particularly pronounced in the Golden State, which has the world’s fourth-largest economy and more billionaires than any other U.S. state. Yet California faces a deep price crisis, forcing many voters to seek a governor who will do more than take on the billionaire in the White House.

They want someone who will “shake up the system,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the powerful California Federation of Labor Unions.

A decade after billionaire real estate mogul Trump proved he could exploit working-class discontent, Democrats see an opportunity to rebuild their frayed coalition and win back voters squeezed by the rising costs of rent, utilities and groceries.. As the November midterm elections approach, Democrats are criticizing Trump for his intimacy with Silicon Valley billionaires and his preoccupation with building a White House ballroom, evidence, they say, that the president’s party has abandoned working-class voters in favor of a new Gilded Age oligarchy.

“There’s no question that we believe workers best represent workers,” said Gonzalez, whose union has released multi-candidate support for Steyer, former Assemblywoman Katie Porter and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. But, she continued, “if there’s a billionaire who says, ‘I’m going to take on this whole system, hell, okay, let’s see.’

STeyer is not the only Democrat testing the party’s appetite for a populist from the 1%. In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker, a scion of the Pritzker family that founded the Hyatt hotel chain, is running for a third term — and is widely believed to be considering a presidential bid in 2028.

Other wealthy progressives include Saikat Chakrabarti, a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur and former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez, who is self-funding her anti-establishment bid to succeed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.

Rich Democrats are not a new phenomenon. From the patrician roots of Franklin Roosevelt to the immense family fortune of John F. Kennedy, the party has always nurtured wealthy political leaders who defined their privilege as a responsibility to serve the public. As Cas Mudde, a leading scholar of populism, has noted, “Socialists have long been led by ‘class traitors’ (e.g. Friedrich Engels) or supported wealthy politicians and intellectuals (e.g. Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky).”

In progressive San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, governs with a technocratic style reminiscent of Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire who served three terms as mayor of New York — and the residents love him. A recent survey showed that 74% of respondents agreed with his job performance.

However, across the country, Democrats are facing a growing anti-establishment backlash, with the party’s base still seething after the party’s defeats to Trump in 2024, embracing the economic populism of candidates like oyster farmer Graham Platner in Maine and seminarian James Talarico in Texas.

In a volatile job market and rising inflation, voters want leaders who understand their economic woes. In California, where the cost of living is the highest in the country and the price of gasoline exceeds $6 a gallon in the midst of the war in Iran, this demand is particularly urgent.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, then, that if Steyer advances to the November general election, Californians will likely have the chance to elect a billionaire as governor and impose a first-of-its-kind wealth tax on the state’s wealthiest residents. Steyer said he would vote for the so-called “billionaire” tax that has angered some of the state’s wealthiest tech executives.

That in part helped Steyer consolidate support among the state’s progressives, including Rep. Ro Khanna, whose Silicon Valley-based district is the wealthiest in the country. He also gained somewhat reluctant support from the California Democratic Socialists (DSA) of America, who wrote that Steyer was “somehow” the most progressive candidate in the race “despite being a billionaire” who earned his wealth through “exploitation of the working class.”

In the gubernatorial race, Democrats briefly feared a lockout scenario, in which two Republicans would advance to the general election — a quirk of the state’s nonpartisan primary system. Looking at the field of Democratic candidates, many on the left don’t see better options.

“We fundamentally think billionaires are a political failure,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, founded by Bernie Sanders, whose support helped cement Steyer as the race’s leading progressive. “But in this case, he’s the person most aligned with our values.”

STeyer’s spending eclipsed those of his rivals. Since launching his campaign seven months ago, he has spent more than $132 million — and counting — of his own money to saturate California airwaves and pay social media influencers, some of whom have not disclosed the payments.

His opponents tried to make his accumulation of wealth a vulnerability. In a debate last month, Porter, one of Steyer’s Democratic rivals for governor, attacked him over investments made by the hedge fund he founded and exited from in 2012. Steyer, she said, was a “billionaire who got rich off polluters and ICE prisons and is now using that money to finance this election.”

By funding his own campaign, Steyer counters that he “can’t be bought” — an echo of Trump’s call in 2016, when he cast his Republican rivals as beholden to a corrupt political system. On the campaign trail, Steyer reminds voters that while he is the only billionaire on the state ballot, he is “not the only billionaire in this race,” highlighting spending by corporations and tech executives against his campaign.

“If the teachers, the nurses, the cafeteria workers, the hotel workers and the people who work in the schools stand up for me, then that’s my team,” Steyer said in East Los Angeles. “If the workers of this state understand that I am 100% for them, then I have done my job.”

Self-funders have a long history of losing, as Steyer knows personally after an unsuccessful White House campaign in 2020. Bloomberg also ran for president that year, spending $1 billion and winning only one primary: the American Samoa Democratic caucus.

“If you have a lot of personal wealth, you’ve overcome one of the biggest hurdles that candidates often worry about, which is: How am I going to finance my campaign? said Michael Beckel, director of monetary and policy reform at Issue One, a nonpartisan political advocacy group. “But at the end of the day… voters also have to like a politician’s agenda and ideas.”

At Steyer’s campaign event Wednesday night — a stop on his “A California You Can Afford” tour, complete with “free” tacos and face painting — there were signs his “tax me more” speech was resonating.

“Honestly, if it takes a billionaire who wants to be taxed more and wants to use that money to help people, then at this point, he’s our guy,” said Duane Paul Murphy, a 30-year-old who lives in the San Fernando Valley.

Carla Ramirez, 66, who is from the Antelope Valley with her husband, really liked what she heard Steyer say. Deeply alarmed by the concentration of wealth in America, she wants the state’s next governor to enact bold changes, like the one she sees Mamdani implementing as mayor of New York.

“Right now our country is run by billionaires,” sighs Ramirez. At the end of the evening, she still wasn’t sure – at least not yet – if California were also to be ruled by one.