California's top-two primary sends the two highest finishers on June 2 to the November ballot, regardless of party. Two Republicans are currently on track to take both slots. According to the Emerson poll released April 16, Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco lead the field; the four Democrats split the remaining vote, and none has broken through.
Steve Hilton has Donald Trump's endorsement. Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff, was exposed in 2021 as a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia whose members staged the January 6 attack on the Capitol; in April 2026 he ordered Riverside deputies to seize ballots from the 2025 Prop 50 (the 2025 ballot measure that redrew California's congressional districts) special election, citing 'election integrity.' He has spent years building his profile as a Trump loyalist. Either one, as governor, would preside over the federal rollbacks on Medicaid, reproductive care, immigration enforcement, and clean-energy policy that are already reshaping what California is permitted to do; and either one would do so as a political ally of the administration running those rollbacks, rather than as the state-level resistance the moment requires.
The question for Democratic voters on June 2: will we consolidate behind one candidate who can reach the top two, or will we split four ways and lose the state? The two Democrats with a plausible path are Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer. This tool helps you choose between them by the issues you care about most.
New to the candidates? Read their bios first ↓Born in Sacramento to working-class immigrant parents and the first in his family to graduate from college, Becerra earned his bachelor's degree and law degree at Stanford. His early legal career was spent representing people with mental illness at a legal-aid office in Massachusetts while his wife, Dr. Carolina Reyes, attended Harvard Medical School.
He returned to California, served a term in the state Assembly, and in 1992 was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he served twelve terms representing Los Angeles and became the first Latino to sit on the Ways and Means Committee, which writes federal tax law.
In 2017 he was appointed Attorney General of California, the first Latino to hold that office; during his term he filed 122 lawsuits against the first Trump administration. From 2021 to 2025 he served as US Secretary of Health and Human Services, the first Latino cabinet secretary at HHS, where he oversaw the Medicare drug-price negotiations that cut prices on ten high-cost medications by 38 to 79 percent starting in 2026.
He is married to Dr. Carolina Reyes, a physician, and they have three daughters. He describes himself on the campaign trail as "not the richest candidate and not the slickest."
Steyer grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer who had prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials and a remedial reading teacher who taught inside a Brooklyn jail. He was valedictorian at Phillips Exeter, graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an MBA at Stanford, then moved to San Francisco and in 1986 founded Farallon Capital, a hedge fund named for a chain of islands off the California coast.
Under his leadership Farallon grew from roughly $8 million to around $20 billion in assets under management (some reports put peak AUM higher) before he left in 2012 to focus on climate activism. His fortune from that era, and some of Farallon's investments during it, including the private-prison company whose facilities now hold ICE detainees and several coal operations, are the complications that follow him through the current campaign.
Since leaving Farallon, he has founded NextGen Climate, a political advocacy group; co-founded Galvanize Climate Solutions, a clean-energy investment firm; launched Need to Impeach, a 2017 anti-Trump campaign; and ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In 2024 he published Cheaper, Faster, Better, a New York Times bestseller on climate policy.
He and his wife Kat Taylor, whom he met at Stanford Business School, co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a community bank in Oakland that specializes in lending to low- and moderate-income borrowers, and have signed the Giving Pledge to donate at least half their wealth to charity. They live in San Francisco and have four children.
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Born in Sacramento to working-class immigrant parents and the first in his family to graduate from college, Becerra earned his bachelor's degree and law degree at Stanford. His early legal career was spent representing people with mental illness at a legal-aid office in Massachusetts while his wife, Dr. Carolina Reyes, attended Harvard Medical School.
He returned to California, served a term in the state Assembly, and in 1992 was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he served twelve terms representing Los Angeles and became the first Latino to sit on the Ways and Means Committee, which writes federal tax law.
In 2017 he was appointed Attorney General of California, the first Latino to hold that office; during his term he filed 122 lawsuits against the first Trump administration. From 2021 to 2025 he served as US Secretary of Health and Human Services, the first Latino cabinet secretary at HHS, where he oversaw the Medicare drug-price negotiations that cut prices on ten high-cost medications by 38 to 79 percent starting in 2026.
He is married to Dr. Carolina Reyes, a physician, and they have three daughters. He describes himself on the campaign trail as "not the richest candidate and not the slickest."
Steyer grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer who had prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials and a remedial reading teacher who taught inside a Brooklyn jail. He was valedictorian at Phillips Exeter, graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an MBA at Stanford, then moved to San Francisco and in 1986 founded Farallon Capital, a hedge fund named for a chain of islands off the California coast.
Under his leadership Farallon grew from roughly $8 million to around $20 billion in assets under management (some reports put peak AUM higher) before he left in 2012 to focus on climate activism. His fortune from that era, and some of Farallon's investments during it, including the private-prison company whose facilities now hold ICE detainees and several coal operations, are the complications that follow him through the current campaign.
Since leaving Farallon, he has founded NextGen Climate, a political advocacy group; co-founded Galvanize Climate Solutions, a clean-energy investment firm; launched Need to Impeach, a 2017 anti-Trump campaign; and ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In 2024 he published Cheaper, Faster, Better, a New York Times bestseller on climate policy.
He and his wife Kat Taylor, whom he met at Stanford Business School, co-founded Beneficial State Bank, a community bank in Oakland that specializes in lending to low- and moderate-income borrowers, and have signed the Giving Pledge to donate at least half their wealth to charity. They live in San Francisco and have four children.