Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary under President Joe Biden, is joining the burgeoning field to be California’s next governor — regardless of whether Kamala Harris seeks the post.
The former California attorney general, who has been mulling a run for the state’s top job for at least a year, launched his bid in a brief video on Wednesday .
“I watched my parents — a construction worker and a clerical worker — achieve the California dream,” Becerra said in a bare-bones, direct-to-camera clip. “Can we do that today, with this affordability crisis? Very tough. But we’ve taken on these tough fights. … We can do that, but you need a leader who can be tough.”
Becerra’s entrance into the race injects new intrigue into a contest that for months had been stagnant as Democrats and their deep-pocketed funders wait to see if the former vice president will jump into the fray. But recently the campaign has seen stirrings; former Rep. Katie Porter launched her own bid last month and other contenders have taken increasingly pointed swipes at Harris and her drawn-out decision timeline.
Becerra’s campaign insists he would not drop out of the race even if Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2024, declares her candidacy for governor.
In his own bid, Becerra, 67, is not overtly carrying the progressive banner or pitching himself as a centrist Democrat. Instead, he seeks to make the race a referendum on experience, hoping to convince voters he has the most credibility to manage the gigantic state and take on President Donald Trump, whom he sued more than 120 times when he was California attorney general during the president’s first term.
In a happenstance twist of timing, his campaign launch dovetailed with the Trump administration’s mass firings at the Health and Human Services Department that Becerra once ran. He had been hitting the airwaves in recent days to blast the department’s gutting as a “man-made disaster.”
