Steyer’s $38 million blitz shakes up early terrain in California governor’s race
The billionaire’s self-funded surge, including a fresh $9.3 million infusion, is testing whether saturation spending can define a wide-open contest with no clear frontrunner.
Billionaire Tom Steyer has rapidly become the dominant spender in California’s gubernatorial contest, injecting another $9.3 million into his bid earlier this month and pushing his total outlay to just over $38 million. The surge underscores a strategy built on scale in a state where campaigns are costly and name recognition can be elusive.
The field remains unsettled, with no candidate yet breaking decisively ahead. Into that vacuum, Steyer’s spending has outpaced many rivals combined, according to a public tally shared by Rob Pyers, a nonpartisan election researcher. “To put Steyer’s $38 million into perspective, by my math, Republicans Steve Hilton & Chad Bianco and Democrats Antonio Villaraigosa, Eric Swalwell, Katie Porter, Xavier Becerra, Betty Yee, and Tony Thurmond have raised a combined total of around $34.3 million,” Pyers wrote in a recent social media post.
Republican strategist John Thomas said the campaign’s theory of the case is straightforward: deploy money to build familiarity and drive a message in a state too large for traditional, retail-heavy politicking. “He [Steyer] believes in a state as large as California, where it’s very difficult to do retail politicking… his advantage will be his levels of spending, and being able to get his name ID up, and message out. We’ll see how valuable that is,” Thomas said in a recent radio interview. He added, “I would say having a lot of money in California is powerful in a contest like this. Tom is going to spend two, three hundred million dollars in this race.”
Steyer’s record from national politics looms over his big-bet approach. Steyer's past national political efforts, particularly his 2020 presidential primary bid, cast a shadow on his current strategy; despite spending $345 million, he failed to secure any delegates and withdrew from the race after the South Carolina primary. That experience sharpened questions about whether massive outlays alone can translate into durable support at the ballot box.
The California race is still taking shape, and the impact of Steyer’s early spending remains an open question. For now, his cash advantage is setting the pace and testing whether a saturation strategy can carve out a durable lead before the campaign fully hardens later in the year.