candidacy

After winning his first race for Congress in 1992, 34-year-old Xavier Becerra credited a wave of community supporters in Los Angeles, many Latino, for backing his upstart campaign, saying he hoped his win was proof that grassroots politics was more valuable than “heavy dollars.”

More than 30 years later, Becerra, 68, is again an upstart candidate — this time for California governor. Again he is facing monied competition — including from chief Democratic rival Tom Steyer, a self-funded billionaire — and relying on Latino and other grassroots support.

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra speaks during a campaign event in Los Angeles on April 18.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

“You are the people power that it takes,” he told a crowd of supporters at a recent “Fighting for the California Dream” town hall in Los Angeles. “California wasn’t built by billionaires. It was built by your families. It was built by our families.”

That Becerra is still fighting in the race — and drawing new people to his events — reflects a remarkable and hard-to-explain turnaround for a campaign that appeared all but dead less than a month ago, then bounded back into contention after Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped from the race and resigned from Congress amid sexual assault allegations.

Before Swalwell’s collapse, Becerra’s biggest splash in the race came in March, when USC excluded him and other low-performing candidates from a planned debate. The criteria left every candidate of color out, and after Becerra and others complained, the forum was canceled.

A California Democratic Party tracking poll, released in early April before the Swalwell scandal broke, showed Becerra near the bottom of the field with 4% support among likely voters. In a party poll taken after it broke, Becerra’s support jumped to 13% — the biggest increase of any candidate.

Certainly some of Swalwell’s supporters shifted to Becerra, but political observers are still pondering why so many did — and not to Steyer, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter or other Democrats with single-digit support, such as former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San José Mayor Matt Mahan.

Whatever the answer, Becerra’s surge has sparked fresh interest in his candidacy. It also has raised questions about his time as California attorney general, when he sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times, and U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, when he backed the Biden administration’s strict COVID-19 rules and oversaw the agency’s response to a massive influx of unaccompanied minors at the southern border.

It has also put a growing target on Becerra’s back — including at Wednesday night’s gubernatorial debate, when rivals criticized him as a “D.C. insider” with poorly detailed plans for the state — and sparked hope among many Latinos that California will elect one of them as governor for the first time in state history, sending a strong message of resistance to the intensely anti-immigrant Trump administration.

Of course, Becerra faces hurdles. Steyer, a hedge fund founder who has donated more than $130 million to his own campaign, has been ahead of him in polling, as have two Republicans: Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, who has President Trump’s endorsement, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. Only the top two candidates in the June 2 primary advance to the November election.

Still, Becerra now has a path to victory, one that did not exist even a month ago, and new funding. Many Democratic voters remain undecided, and many — shocked by the Swalwell scandal — are looking for another Democratic front-runner to back.

In an interview with The Times, Becerra said he’s the man for the job, because “California needs a work horse, not a show horse.”

Xavier Becerra, left, gathers with other candidates for Los Angeles mayor in 2000.

(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

Rising wave of Latino political power

A Sacramento native and the son of a Mexican immigrant mother and a Mexican American father, Becerra graduated from Stanford Law School and served as a deputy to California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp before being elected in 1990 to the California Assembly.

In 1993, Becerra entered Congress on a rising wave of Latino political power and the heels of a fractious presidential election in which former White House aide Pat Buchanan challenged President George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary on a stridently anti-immigrant, “America First” message — one Trump repurposed in both 2016 and 2024.

It was a defining political moment for Latinos across the country, and for Becerra personally, said Fernando Guerra, founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

“He certainly has been and is part of the incorporation of Latinos into California history and California politics, and it really begins in the early ’90s,” Guerra said. “His rise and political career is really a reflection of the rise and political incorporation of Latinos.”

In 1994, Becerra helped oppose Proposition 187, a state initiative to deny undocumented immigrants access to public education and healthcare. In 1996, he sharply criticized the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which cut federal benefits for many legal immigrants. By 1997, Becerra — just 39 — was chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the first Latino member to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

By 2016, Becerra, 58, was the highest-ranking Latino in Congress when then-Gov. Jerry Brown tapped him to replace a Senate-bound Kamala Harris as California attorney general. There, Becerra played a key role in defending the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, against Republican attacks.

In early 2021, Becerra was confirmed to serve as President Biden’s health secretary, another first for a Latino and a critical post given the COVID-19 crisis, and remained in that role until Trump’s second inauguration.

Then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra arrives for a hearing to discuss reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.

(Greg Nash / Associated Press)

Criticism and praise

In a rush of endorsements in recent days, Becerra’s supporters have lauded his executive experience, calling him a “proven leader” who, amid constant threats from the Trump administration, is “ready to fight back on day one.”

Becerra’s critics also have pointed to his leadership record, but to highlight what they contend are glaring failures.

Steyer spokesman Kevin Liao alleged Becerra was “absent, ineffective, or too late” in responding to COVID-19 and other public health crises as health secretary, and that California “cannot afford incompetence, or someone who disappears when things get hard.”

The remarks echoed others made during the pandemic, including by Eric Topol, who is executive vice president of Scripps Research in La Jolla, a professor of translational medicine and a cardiologist. During the pandemic, Topol accused Becerra of being “invisible” in the fight to control it. In a recent interview, he said he still believes that.

Topol said the Biden administration’s COVID response was defined by poor data collection and “infighting” among agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, including on vital issues such as when Americans should receive booster shots and how long they should isolate after infection.

Becerra “basically took a very absent, low profile — didn’t show up, didn’t harmonize the remarkable infighting,” Topol said. “The buck stops with him.”

Dr. David A. Kessler, the Biden administration’s top science official on COVID-19 and now a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at UC San Francisco, fiercely defended Becerra, crediting him with rolling out some 676 million vaccines and steering the nation out of a wildly unfamiliar health crisis with substantial success — what Kessler called a “historical achievement” that proved government “can do big things.”

Kessler said Becerra rightly assessed that the country needed to hear from medical experts, not politicians, and so deferred at times to the doctors, epidemiologists and vaccinologists he smartly surrounded himself with and trusted — but he was never absent. “He enabled us. He was there. Anything I needed, he helped deliver,” Kessler said.

Becerra said there were a lot of people involved with the COVID-19 fight, including a White House team launched before his confirmation as health secretary. Still, it was his agency that ultimately led the response, and helped bring the pandemic to an end, he said.

“At the end of four years, when we had put some 700 million COVID shots into the arms of Americans and pulled the country and our economy out of the COVID crisis, it was HHS — and I was the secretary of HHS,” he said.

Becerra’s rivals in the governor’s race also have attacked him for how he responded to an influx of unaccompanied immigrant minors during the pandemic. They allege Becerra rushed their release to relatives and other sponsors while ignoring concerns from career health staff that some of those placements weren’t safe — resulting in thousands of kids being lost to the system, forced into child labor or trafficked.

The criticism stems in part from a sweeping New York Times investigation that found the health department couldn’t find some 85,000 children it had released, that Becerra had relaxed screening processes for sponsors and that placement concerns from career health staff went ignored or were silenced.

The investigation by reporter Hannah Dreier found that thousands of the 250,000 or so migrant children who arrived in the U.S. between early 2021 and early 2023 had “ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws.”

Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra holds a news conference in Border Field State Park in San Diego in 2017.

(Francine Orr/ Los Angeles Times)

It found there were many signs of “the explosive growth of this labor force,” and that staff had repeatedly flagged concerns about it in reports that reached Becerra’s desk. It also reported that, during a staff meeting in the summer of 2022, Becerra had pressed staff to move children even more quickly through the process, comparing them to factory parts.

“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line,” Becerra said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the newspaper.

Danni Wang, another Steyer spokesperson, said children “were handed to gang members, traffickers, and abusers because [Becerra] stripped the background checks that had protected them for years.”

Becerra said the controversy is one he has addressed publicly for years, including in multiple congressional hearings. He said his team worked diligently to properly vet sponsors and do right by the thousands of children in their care, despite Congress failing to provide the budget needed to restore a system of licensed care facilities that the first Trump administration had dismantled.

“It was a wreck. They had closed facilities, they had fired the licensed caregivers. And remember, this was during COVID, [when] you didn’t want anyone to be near each other,” he said. “How do you take care of thousands of kids in a center that could house maybe 50 kids?”

He said he led an aggressive push to stand up temporary facilities — including in places like the San Diego Convention Center — while rebuilding the licensed care facilities Trump had dismantled and working to place kids into the community as quickly and safely as possible.

Ron Klain, who served as Biden’s chief of staff for the first two years of the administration, said Becerra helped lead the administration out of the crisis by being “an outspoken advocate” for the children in its care.

“Xavier was very, very insistent in meetings and very outspoken on the risk that some of these people [the kids] were being placed with were not the proper people to place them with, and pushed hard for more rigor in the process,” Klain said.

Becerra also has faced criticism and questions related to the federal indictment of his former chief of staff Sean McCluskie, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after authorities accused him of stealing some $225,000 from Becerra’s dormant state political campaign account.

Becerra was not implicated in the scandal — which he’s previously described as a “gut punch” — and said he did everything he could to ensure McCluskie and others were held accountable once it came to light, including by providing “testimony and documents” to the FBI and federal prosecutors.

Hilton has said the scandal, which also implicated a former aide to Gov. Gavin Newsom, showed that “corruption has become totally ingrained and systemic” under Democratic rule in California.

Looking ahead

Experts said Becerra’s long resume will help him stand out in a race with less experienced competitors and no household names — and that Californians electing a Latino for the first time, as the Trump administration conducts one of the largest ever deportation campaigns, dismantles immigrant rights and targets people on the street based largely on their looking and sounding Latino, would be a major political moment.

Becerra said his extensive experience should matter to voters, because such experience will be necessary in the pivotal and no doubt chaotic Trump years ahead, when “pizzazz and dazzle” will matter less than steady competence from “someone who’s actually been in the midst of that hurricane” before.

“It helps to have gone through these things. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’ve done it successfully,” he said. “I’ve proven that, whether it was taking on Donald Trump toe to toe as the [attorney general], whether it was getting us out of COVID working closely with the White House to deploy the resources and get that done, we made it happen.”

NEW YORK — Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton acknowledged Sunday that he had experimented with marijuana while a 22-year-old student in England in the late 1960s, an admission that could raise doubts about his past candor in answering questions about his personal conduct.

For five years, the 45-year-old Clinton has answered questions about whether he had ever used drugs by saying he had never broken a U.S. law. During a televised debate here with Democratic presidential rival Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., a questioner for the first time asked Clinton explicitly whether he had ever broken either a state, federal or a foreign drug law.

“When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two,” he answered on the WCBS-TV broadcast, “and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale and never tried it again.”

Asked the same series of questions, Brown answered bluntly: “No.”

Clinton’s disclosure, which overshadowed one of the most substantive exchanges of the political season between the two rivals, is hardly unusual for a person of Clinton’s generation. Two of the Democratic presidential candidates in 1988 acknowledged similar behavior. And nothing Clinton said about his use of marijuana contradicted what he had said before.

But his decision until now to fend off drug-use queries with a narrow response, which could mislead voters into thinking he had never used drugs of any kind, was likely to add to concerns of those who regard him as less than straightforward.

Clinton said he did not believe the episode would hurt his candidacy, noting that other politicians had admitted to using marijuana and had suffered no apparent electoral consequences. He defended his previous denials by saying he had seen no need to volunteer a reply to something he had not been directly asked.

“Nobody’s ever asked me that question point blank,” he said, adding: “I said I’ve never broken the drug laws of my country, and that’s the absolute truth.”

It was the second time in a week that Clinton found it necessary to clarify previous statements on drugs.

On Thursday, a Clinton campaign aide, Betsey Wright, volunteered to the Los Angeles Times that the governor had never used cocaine or knowingly been around it.

The Times had contacted Wright to ask about a state police drug investigation in the mid-1980s of Clinton’s half-brother and a political contributor. After answering the questions, Wright said: “I assume from the questions that you were implying guilt by association in a state where everybody is associated. For that reason, when I verified with Gov. Clinton the answers to some of the questions, I asked him the following questions:

“ ‘Bill, have you ever used cocaine?’

“He replied, ‘No.’

“I said, ‘Bill, have you ever been in a room where you were aware there was cocaine?’

“He replied, ‘No.’ ”

When asked Friday why she had posed questions never asked by The Times, Wright said she had heard “rumors” that reporters were trying to place Clinton at parties where cocaine had been used. “I decided it was best to go ahead and put the issue on the table,” she said. (Interviews by The Times with some people said to have been in attendance at those parties have produced no evidence linking Clinton to the drug.)

Later Friday, Clinton called The Times to say that the campaign had not intended to provoke a story quoting him as denying cocaine use. Senior Clinton campaign officials said they feared such a story might be seen by the public as raising yet another question about his personal life.

Clinton’s Sunday acknowledgement of marijuana use while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford came only three days after Clinton was asked by a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News whether he had been asked previously about his drug use.

Clinton said that he had been asked such questions, and that his answer had always been that he had never violated a U.S. law.

Clinton campaign officials later described the new admission as an “elaboration” of Clinton’s previous comments and suggested that it and the earlier, narrow denials were merely two ways of looking at the same issue.

“Bill Clinton told the truth at every step of the way,” his chief strategist, James Carville, said. “It’s like the old saying about the guy who’s being sworn into office and he’s asked, ‘Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?’ and he answers, ‘Which one do you want?’ ”

Carville and other senior Clinton aides nevertheless expressed concern that the issue would be given undue prominence and further tar their candidate at a time when polls show that a large number of Democratic voters still harbor questions about Clinton’s personal record.

For his part, however, Brown chose not to make an immediate issue either of Clinton’s marijuana use or his handling of questions about it.

After denying that he had violated any drug laws, Brown demanded of a questioner: “Why don’t you lay off this stuff? What you did 10 or 20 years ago is not really relevant.”

But Brown himself was forced during the debate to respond to a new suggestion of impropriety in a Washington Post story detailing his ties to a company that paid a $400,000 settlement to the federal government after being accused of making exaggerated claims about a product said to help treat AIDS.

Brown, who served on the board of directors of a subsidiary to the company, Costa Mesa-based ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc., until he began his presidential campaign, said he had had “nothing to do” with the episode. He said his position gave him “no responsibility and no contact” with the parent firm.

Clinton did not press the issue during the debate, saying his own experience made him wary of “piling on.” But he suggested later in the day that justice was being done as he told a Bronx audience that “the press is finally starting to look at” a rival he believes has been treated too gently.

Clinton framed his response to the drug question during an era when the issue rose to political prominence.

In 1987, Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg was forced to withdraw his name from nomination after it was learned that he had used marijuana when he was a law-school professor.

But other politicians, including Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee and Gov. Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, both 1988 Democratic presidential candidates, acknowledged using marijuana while in college and suffered no apparent political consequences.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has also admitted to having used marijuana, but the issue was given only passing attention during his confirmation hearings.

Clinton, by contrast, has steadfastly refused to answer “have you ever” questions about drug use, adultery or other matters of personal conduct on grounds that they are not legitimate subjects of inquiry.

He has said it is legitimate, however, for an officeholder or a candidate to be questioned about violations of law, and has always responded to questions about his drug use by stating that he had adhered to U.S. drug laws.

Earlier in the morning, Clinton delivered what amounted to an impassioned political sermon to the enthusiastic congregation of an African Methodist church in a mostly black neighborhood in Queens.

But faced with continued criticism of his periodic use of an all-white country club to play golf–conduct that Clinton has said was a mistake–his message Sunday was in part a plea for redemption from a black community from which he has so far drawn deep support.

“I have seen myself turned into a cartoon character of an old Southern deal-maker by the tabloids and television in a total denial of my life’s work,” he said.

He told the congregation he had made “a foolish mistake.” And as he cited Scripture later, the congregation joined him in a sympathetic chorus to murmur “those who are without sin should cast the first stone.”

The hourlong debate here between Clinton and Brown, who participated via satellite from Wisconsin, was one of the better illuminations of the differences between the Arkansas moderate and the California populist-liberal.

Again and again, the two candidates clashed on issues ranging from economic policy to capital punishment to labor issues to Middle East strategy.

On economic issues, Brown advanced his proposal to overhaul the current tax systems and replace them with a 13% flat-tax as a “progressive tax” whose simplicity would “jump-start the economy.”

But Clinton, who favors a more conventional middle-class tax cut and an increase on taxes for the wealthy, again derided Brown’s idea as a plan that would benefit only the wealthy and would “triple taxes on the poor and raise taxes on the middle class.”

In answer to a question, Clinton said he favored capital punishment as well as a proposal to accelerate what is now the time-consuming process under which a death-row inmate may appeal his sentence.

But Brown described Clinton’s decision earlier this year to order the execution of a man whose lawyer claimed he was retarded as a “moral abomination.” He contended that the proposal to limit death-penalty appeals was part of a “systematic erosion of civil liberties” and said: “I would oppose it with every ounce that I have.”

Brown said he would favor a five-year moratorium on the manufacture of handguns. But Clinton, while describing himself as an advocate of gun control, said he was unsure whether he could embrace such an approach.

On Israel, Clinton defended what he described as a longstanding U.S. willingness to “wink” at Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank and criticized the Bush Administration’s recent get-tough policy. But Brown bluntly said he regarded the settlements as “a problem.”

Asked about an issue important to labor unions, the two candidates made clear that their allegiance pulled them in different directions.

Clinton said he would favor placing young people in jobs of all kinds as part of a civilian corps to give them training for the future.

But Brown warned that the low wages paid to such employees would undermine working people and suggested that any such corps be limited to outdoor conservation efforts.