Is L.A. Finally Wresting Political Power Back from the Bay Area?

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IN CALIFORNIA POLITICS, at least of modern vintage, has held that the road to the governor’s mansion — and, ultimately, national prominence — runs through Northern California.

The political hothouse of San Francisco (the Golden State’s fourth-largest city by population, but its premier seedbed for germinating stars) launched the careers of the state’s recent headliners: Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom. Californians last voted in an Angeleno for governor more than two decades ago, when they first elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he was an internationally famous action star who had never held public office — not exactly a product of the L.A. ballot cycle.

Newsom remains ascendant. But Feinstein is dead, Pelosi is finishing her last term in office and Harris is licking her wounds in Malibu. Meanwhile, as the state’s clown car of a gubernatorial race lurches toward the finish line, voters appear to have shrugged Xavier Becerra into presumptive frontrunner status. 

Becerra has been embraced by Newsom’s orbit with stunning swiftness — and his fellow would-be guvs have piled on the attacks. But one aspect of Becerra’s candidacy has been largely overlooked: Should he win, he would be the first Angeleno to lead the state in a generation. Sort of. 

The internet is littered with recent reports examining Becerra’s record, his relationship with the press and his front runner status, so we’ll steer clear of that well-trodden ground.

This is a story about a different topic entirely: the contested matter of Becerra’s Angeleno-ness, and the broader question of why the Bay Area has held political dominance of late — and whether that’s changing. 

“Given the fact that Los Angeles County is by far the most populous county in the state and is the most populous county in the nation, you would think that it would have a very strong role in selection of top leaders in California, including Governor,” said top California pollster Mark Baldassare. “And the reality is that there has been a pathway to governor and other statewide offices that has gone through the Bay Area more recently.”

Baldassare, who serves as survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, cited the connection between San Francisco politics and the state capitol in Sacramento, the difficulty of building name ID across regions in California, and the Bay Area tech industry’s financial influence on state politics. 

With its intensely passionate electorate and tapped-in civic elite, local politics in San Francisco has long been a brass-knuckled blood sport — a natural proving ground. No wonder the city-county apparatus has functioned as such a successful undercard circuit, forging future heavyweight champs. 

Feinstein and Newsom both began their careers on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (in 1970 and 1997, respectively), before ascending to the mayoralty. Harris was first elected as San Francisco district attorney in 2003. And many of the same society names who cut them campaign checks in early races helped cosset their national careers.

L.A.’s untidy sprawl and largely checked-out civic culture have provided little of the same testing apparatus, or donor allegiance. (To be clear, the region remains an obvious ATM for national political campaigns. But the Brentwood bigwigs, Hollywood heavyweights and potentates of North Beverly Park have historically been far more interested in opening their wallets for presidential hopefuls or purple-state House candidates than local pols.) 

“Maybe geography is destiny. A compact city has intensely concentrated politics, intensely concentrated money, intensely concentrated social ties. A spread out city doesn’t,” posited former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. 

Still, Garcetti and other political insiders sense a shift in the state’s power geography: After nearly three decades in which both California senators – Feinstein and Barbara Boxer – came out of the Bay Area machine, the state is now represented by two men of Los Angeles, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla. 

A little background: Padilla is the son of Mexican immigrants in the northeast San Fernando Valley. He came up through L.A. City Hall before winning statewide office in 2014 and being appointed to the Senate by Newsom in 2021. Schiff was born in Boston and bar mitzvah-ed in Northern California, but he represented the L.A. area in the state Legislature and House for nearly three decades before being elected to the Senate in 2024. (And, in an exception to the general maxim of L.A. machers being less than riveted by their own political backyards, it was none other than David Geffen who helped usher the then-state senator into his longtime House seat.) 

“I think it slowly shifted,” Garcetti said, citing the long list of Southern California state Assembly speakers over the last two decades, and characterizing Schiff and Padilla holding office together as a “sea change.”

Baldassare also noted that Harris — who commuted from Brentwood to the Vice President’s Residence and recently bought in Point Dume — is “really more of a Los Angeles than San Francisco resident at this point.”

To say nothing of the fact that the presumptive frontrunner in the 2026 gubernatorial race once ran for mayor of Los Angeles.

Is Xavier Becerra even an Angeleno?

All of which brings us back to Becerra, who was born in Sacramento but represented Los Angeles County in the U.S. House for 12 terms and the statehouse for a single, two-year term before that.

He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Los Angeles back in 2001 — a race that blew up his long friendship with fellow L.A. gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, who was also on the primary ballot. At the time, Villaraigosa billed himself as the only real Angeleno of the pair, highlighting his own East L.A. roots against Becerra’s Sacramento Valley origin story.

Becerra, meanwhile, has a certain geographic mutability.

When he arrived in the Southland, he moved first to Monterey Park then Eagle Rock — where he lived throughout his decades in Congress. He now resides in Sacramento, but still owns his house in Eagle Rock. His time in the Biden administration has given him a national profile and he’s held statewide office. Angelenos outside his former congressional district don’t necessarily think of him as a local, if they think of him at all.  

Becerra can certainly take advantage of his L.A. credentials while campaigning in the region, but he’s not “seen as an L.A. candidate” in the same way that Villaraigosa is, said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy.

“Xavier can kind of go back and forth, right? … He’s not tied to L.A.,” she explained. 

All efforts at explaining the geography of California political power are, of course, a vast oversimplification. 

The Golden State is less state than behemoth, home to nearly 40 million people, over a dozen media markets and no less than three regional burrito specialties. It is a land so vast that the highest and lowest daily temperatures in the contiguous United States are often both recorded within its borders, and the very same grocery chain is known as Safeway or Vons, depending whether you’re north or south of Fresno.

Over the course of the 20th century, California transfigured from a Republican stronghold (with progressive tendencies) to a two-party state, to a Democratic bastion. Southern California was once the more conservative counter to the more liberal Northern half; the state’s partisan political divide is now coastal vs. inland California.

And the Bay’s potentially-fading political primacy is itself a relatively recent invention.

Back in 1986, the late, great California historian Kevin Starr wrote a column about the “old argument” that Northern California was politically finished. At the time, two Southern Californians were once again battling for governor and, as Starr noted, two-thirds of the state’s 20th-century governors to date had been from Southern California. (In another show of how much things have changed, all but one of those Southern California governors were Republicans, save for the single-termer Culbert Olson — a Utah Mormon turned atheist who fled west to L.A. in 1920 and was elected California’s first “godless” governor roughly two decades later. But we digress.) 

The Bay Area’s well of donors and political power networks have certainly helped Newsom, Harris and others, but ultimately each candidate rises or falls on their personal bona fides, Romero explained. 

“I don’t think anything is predetermined,” Romero said.