Eric

With the symbolic passing of a golden bear pin, Democratic businessman Stephen Cloobeck announced Monday evening that he was bowing out of the governor’s race and throwing his support behind noted Trump critic and close friend Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Cloobeck shared this news while appearing alongside Swallwell on CNN, saying that the San Francisco Bay Area Democrat will be the “greatest leader of this great state California.”

“I’m happy to say tonight that I’m going to merge my campaign into his and give him all the hard work that I’ve worked on,” said Cloobeck.

The announcement puts an end to the entrepreneur and philanthropist’s first-ever political campaign, which he funded through a fortune amassed in the real estate industry. In a recent UC Berkeley poll co-sponsored by The Times, Cloobeck received less than half of 1% of the support of registered voters polled.

Cloobeck said he had launched his run because he could not find a single qualified candidate — that was until Swalwell tossed his hat into the ring last week, sending an infusion of energy into the relatively sleepy race.

Pin now affixed to the lapel of his navy blue suit, Swalwell thanked his pal for the support and said he was looking forward to drawing on Cloobeck’s expertise as he worked to bring more housing and small business to the Golden State.

Swalwell, a former Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has said he is seeking the governorship to combat the threats President Trump poses to the state and to increase housing affordability and homeownership for Californians.

During his Monday evening interview, Swalwell doubled down on his proposal to implement a vote-by-phone system, despite the sharp criticism it invoked from the White House and two of his Republican challengers for governor, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative political commentator Steve Hilton.

Swalwell said the proposal would make democracy more accessible, contending that if phones are secure enough to access finances and healthcare records, then they can be made secure enough to cast a ballot.

The backing of Cloobeck, a major Democratic donor, is good news for the congressman, who seeks to make a splash in an unusually wide open race to lead the world’s fourth-largest economy and the country’s most populous state.

About 44% of registered voters said in late October they did not have a preferred candidate for governor. The recent decisions of former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla to opt out of the running further solidified that the state’s top job is anyone’s to win.

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

San Francisco Bay Area Democrat Eric Swalwell, a nettlesome foil and frequent target of President Trump and Republicans, on Thursday announced his bid for California governor.

The congressman declared his bid during an appearance on the ABC late-night show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, adding a little Hollywood flourish to a crowded, somewhat sleepy race filled with candidates looking for ways to catch fire in the 2026 election.

Voter interest in the race remains relatively moribund, especially after two of California’s most prominent Democrats — former Vice President Kamala Harris and current U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla — opted to skip the race after months of speculation. About 44% of registered voters said in late October that they had not picked a preferred candidate to lead California, which is the most populous state in the union and has the fourth-largest economy in the world.

The lack of a blockbuster candidate in the race, however, continues to entice others to jump in. Earlier this week, billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer announced his bid, and other well-known Democrats are exploring a possible run.

Swalwell, a 45-year-old former Republican and former prosecutor who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020, said his decision was driven by the serious problems facing California and the threats posed to the state and nation with Trump in the White House.

“People are scared and prices are high, and I see the next governor of California having two jobs — one to keep the worst president ever out of our homes, streets and lives,” Swalwell said in an interview with The Times. “The second job is to bring what I call a new California, and that’s especially and most poignantly on housing and affordability in a state where we have the highest unemployment rate in the country, and the average age for a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old, and so we need to bring that down.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom cannot run for reelection because of term limits, and he is currently weighing a 2028 presidential bid.

None of the candidates in the race, including Swalwell, possess the statewide notoriety, success or fundraising prowess of California’s most recent governors: Newsom, California political icon Jerry Brown and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“If you look at the past three governors, they’ve all had personalities,” said Jim DeBoo, Newsom’s former chief of staff, at a political conference at USC on Tuesday. “When you’re looking at the field right now, most people don’t know” much about the candidates in the crowded race despite their political bona fides.

Nearly a dozen prominent Democrats and Republicans are running for governor next year, including: former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa: Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond; former Controller Betty Yee and conservative commentator Steve Hilton. And speculation continues to swirl about billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta possibly entering the race.

On Thursday, Thurmond proposed a tax on the wealthy to fund education, healthcare, firefighting and construction. The proposal was seen in part as a subtle dig at Steyer and Caruso, both of whom have used their wealth to fund previous runs for office.

“The naysayers say California’s ultra wealthy already pay enough, and that taxing billionaires will stifle innovation and force companies to leave our state,” he said in an online video. “I don’t buy it.”

Steyer painted his decision to leave the hedge fund he created in California as an example of his desire to give back to the state’s residents in an ad that will begin airing on Friday.

“It’s really goddamn simple. Tackle the cost-of-living crises or get the hell out of the way. Californians are the hardest-working people in the country. But the question is who’s getting the benefit of this,” he says in the ad, arguing that he took on corporations that refused to pay state taxes as well as oil and tobacco companies. “Let’s get down to brass tacks: It’s too expensive to live here.”

Porter also went after Steyer, another sign that the intensity of the race is heating up as the June primary fast approaches.

“A new billionaire in our race claims he’ll fight the very industries he got rich helping grow — fossil fuel companies, tobacco and private immigration detention facilities — at great cost to Californians,” she wrote on X on Wednesday.

The former congresswoman was the subject of recent attacks from Democratic rivals in the governor’s race after videos emerged of her scolding a reporter and swearing at an aide. Yee said she should drop out of the race and Villaraigosa blistered her in ads.

Villaraigosa also attacked Becerra for his connection to the scandal that rocked Sacramento last week, involving money from one of his campaign accounts being funneled to his former chief of staff while Becerra served in the Biden administration.

“We don’t have a strong or robust opposition party in California, so you end up like seeing a lot of this action on the dance floor in the primary, obviously, between Democrats, which is going to be interesting,” said Elizabeth Ashford, who worked for Schwarzenegger, Brown and Harris and currently advises Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas. “There’s obviously a lot of longtime relationships and longtime loyalties and interactions between these folks. And so what’s going to happen? Big question mark.”

The ability to protect California from Trump’s policies and political vindictiveness and deal with the state’s affordability, housing and homelessness crisis will be pivotal to Swalwell’s potential path to the governor’s mansion. His choice to announce his decision on Kimmel’s show was telling — the host’s show was briefly suspended by Walt Disney-owned ABC under pressure from Trump after Kimmel made comments about the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Kimmel thanked Swalwell for his support during that period, which included the congressman handing out pro-Kimmel merchandise to his colleagues in Washington, D.C., before the two discussed the future of the state.

“I love California, it’s the greatest country in the world. Country,” Swalwell said. “But that’s why it pisses me off to see Californians running through the fields where they work from ICE agents or troops in our streets. It’s horrifying. Cancer research being canceled. It’s awful to look at. And our state, this great state, needs a fighter and a protector, someone who will bring prices down, lift wages up.”

There is a history of Californians announcing campaigns on late-night television. Schwarzenegger launched his 2003 gubernatorial bid on “The Tonight Show,” hosted by Jay Leno; Swalwell announced his unsuccessful presidential bid on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Swalwell said, he traveled to nearly 40 countries, and he would try to leverage the relationships he formed by creating an ambassador program to find global research money for California given the cuts the Trump administration has made to cancer research and other programs.

The congressman is perhaps best known for criticizing Trump on cable news programs. But he’s faced ample attacks as well.

In 2020, Swalwell came under scrutiny because of his association with Chinese spy Fang Fang, who raised money for his congressional campaign. He cut off ties with her in 2015 after intelligence officials briefed him and other members of Congress about Chinese efforts to infiltrate the legislative body. He was not accused of impropriety.

He is also being investigated by the Department of Justice over mortgage fraud allegations, which he dismissed as retribution for him being a full-throated critic of Trump.

Swalwell served on the City Council of the East Bay city of Dublin before being elected to Congress in 2012 by defeating Rep. Pete Stark, a fellow Democrat.

An Iowa native, Swalwell grew up in Dublin, which he said was “a town of low-income expectations” that was smeared as “Scrublin” at the time. He said that after graduating from law school, he served on the local planning commission that helped transform Dublin. The town increased housing, attracted Fortune 500 employers, exponentially improved the number of students going to college and leveraged developers to improve schools, resources for senior citizens, and police and fire services.

“We have a Whole Foods, which no one can afford to shop at,” he said.

Eric Preven, one of L.A. County’s most prominent citizen watchdogs, has died at 63, according to his family.

Preven, a well-known government transparency advocate, garnered a reputation as an eagle-eyed observer of local meetings, a savvy wielder of the state’s public records act, and a reliable thorn in the sides of his government.

Relatives said Preven died Saturday in his Studio City home of a suspected heart attack.

The term “gadfly” often is bandied about local government to describe those who never miss a public meeting. But politicians and his family say the term doesn’t quite do Preven justice.

“You may not agree with him, but it wasn’t just like [he was] shooting from the hip. He would do his research,” said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who watched Preven testify for more than a decade. “He would let the facts speak for themselves.”

In 2016, Preven and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California took a lawsuit all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, finding the public had a right to know how much the county was paying outside lawyers in closed cases. Three years later he successfully forced the city to expand its rules around public testimony after he argued he’d been unlawfully barred from weighing in on a Studio City development.

Many attendees of local public meetings tend to drift into offensive diatribes that have little to do with the matter at hand. Preven never did.

Instead he fine-tuned the art of presenting minute-long, logical arguments on everything from budget shortfalls to seemingly excessive settlements. He could be cutting but he always had a point to make.

And he never missed a meeting.

“Thank you for this exhausting dressing down of the probation department,” Preven said last Tuesday after the supervisors wrapped up rebuking officials for paltry programming inside juvenile halls. “The idea that we’re paying for these programs, these programs are scheduled, and nothing is happening is terrible.”

A New York native, Preven moved to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood, landing TV writing gigs on shows including “Popular” and “Reba.” His path into local activism began 15 years ago after his mother’s two chocolate labs were removed by the county’s animal control department following a fight with an off-leash dog, according to his family.

Preven, a canine lover known to throw parties with members of his local dog park, found the removal of the labs unjustifiable. He went to the Board of Supervisors meeting to tell them so. Then he went again. And again. And again.

Long after the dogs were returned, Preven kept going back.

“He started listening to the meeting and looking at the agenda, and he became just appalled at so many things that he saw,” said his brother, Joshua Preven. “He became so incensed by it.”

Preven became a fierce advocate for the public’s right to know what was happening in local meetings and kept close track of staff changes at City Hall. He was known to text local government reporters early on weekend mornings to ask why someone had stepped down from a city agency, or self-deprecatingly share his latest blog post on CityWatch, a local news site.

“My latest deep dive into my own navel,” he texted two weeks ago with his new article on the famed architect behind his historic home in Studio City’s foothills.

He often sent Times editors and reporters weekly emails on successes and shortcomings in their coverage. The county’s politicians and officials received similar messages about their governance.

“He could be irascible,” his brother said. “When he came and encountered the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, it became a really good use of that stubbornness.”

Preven was a dogged user of the California Public Records Act, finding gems of records buried in seldom-scrutinized agencies. He filed so many record requests to the Animal Care and Control department that the county assigned an attorney just to deal with them, according to Dawyn Harrison, the county’s top lawyer.

“Eric was the epitome of an engaged constituent and critic of local government, persistently questioning and challenging government officials,” Harrison said. “As his interest in County government grew, so did the range of his requests; so, my office decentralized the handling of his requests because no one person could cover all the subjects he looked into. He was a true watchdog.”

Supervisor Janice Hahn said Preven had been scrutinizing her and her colleagues ever since she was a councilmember at City Hall.

“Eric Preven never let those with power in government forget who we work for. … He pushed us, he challenged us, and he had an opinion on everything — from the biggest issue of the day to the more routine contract votes that too often go overlooked,” she said. “While some people wrote him off, I thought there was always truth in what he had to say.”

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes parts of Studio City, said he “took seriously the role of citizen, religiously participating in County meetings.”

In addition to his brother, Preven is survived by his sister, Anne Preven, his mother, Ruth Preven, his father, David Preven, and two children, 28-year-old Isaac Rooks Preven and 26-year-old Reva Jay Preven.

Preven ran several times for public office, launching idiosyncratic campaigns for mayor, city council and county supervisor. He barely fundraised and wasn’t allowed in many of the debates, said his brother, who helped out as his campaign manager.

“We didn’t know what the hell we were doing at all,” Joshua Preven said. “But he kept showing up.”

Times reporters Dakota Smith and David Zahniser contributed to this report.