In the 1990s, he turned exclusively to coaching boys’ and girls’ volleyball, winning a combined 15 City titles and making 28 finals appearances. The top-seeded Highlanders will try to deliver a seventh Open Division championship on Saturday when they face West Valley League rival Chatsworth in a 4 p.m. final at Birmingham.
The league rivals split their two West Valley matches, with each going five games. Chatsworth knocked off 17-time champion Palisades in the semifinals. MIT-bound Grant Chang is Chatsworth’s 6-foot-6 powerful outside hitter.
All-City volleyball player RJ Francisco of Granada Hills shows off his hitting skills against Chatsworth.
(Craig Weston)
Granada Hills has RJ Francisco, who had 19 kills in a win over Chatsworth.
The Southern Section Division 1 final is Friday night, with Mira Costa taking on Loyola in a 7:30 p.m. match at Cerritos College.
Regional and state playoffs begin next week.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.
When a friend asked if Tom Steyer could stop by my wife Delilah’s downtown Santa Ana restaurant, I had to explain to her who he was.
It’s not political apathy in my honey’s case. She’s just exhausted from running her small business, Alta Baja Market, in these inflationary times. She’s one of the 16% of undecided voters in a recent California Democratic Party poll — a group that may determine which two candidates for governor face each other in the general election.
Delilah agreed that Steyer could visit on Saturday after I told her that many of our friends support the billionaire’s progressive platform.
“Politics is your job, not mine,” she joked as we drove to Alta Baja and I named the other major candidates. The only ones she had heard of were Antonio Villaraigosa (“I liked him as mayor, but he needed to keep his pants on,” referring to his extramarital affairs) and Katie Porter (“Some of my workers like her, but I don’t know what she’s done”). She might be the last person left in the Golden State who hasn’t seen any of Steyer’s television and YouTube ads.
So a visit to Santa Ana, the heart of Latino Orange County, was a good move. At Alta Baja, he could talk to my Mexican American wife and other blue-collar Latinos.
When rival Xavier Becerra came to O.C. a few weeks ago, on the other hand, he appeared at a private fundraiser attended mostly by professional Latinos.
“I just want someone who tells us where our taxes are going and treats this country like a business, and we’re not wasting money,” Delilah said. She’s a socially liberal and fiscally conservative Democrat who has been especially angered by President Trump’s deportation deluge, which left the streets of downtown Santa Ana empty for months last summer. “Because right now, our government is a hot-ass mess.”
I asked what questions she had for Steyer.
“So insurance had to cover all the disasters that happened with the fires,” Delilah replied. “So why is everybody else having to pay for it? And what are you really gonna do to help the state?”
She paused. “Tom is a Democrat, right?”
Delilah prepared for Steyer’s noontime stop as if it were any other day. She has fed the likes of U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer and former Speaker of the Assembly Anthony Rendon. Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is a fan of Alta Baja’s blue cornbread; Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee held a meet-and-greet there when she ran for president two years ago.
“You know who should ask questions?” Delilah said after she set the till for the day. “Angela.”
That would be 19-year-old Alta Baja employee Angela Nino, who will be voting in her first election.
“She’ll always be telling me, ‘Did you see the debate? Did you see the debate?’ And I always say, ‘No, I’m too tired to watch.’”
Nino soon clocked in.
“Guess who’s coming, Angela?” Delilah said before looking at me. “Is his name Tim or Tom?”
“It’s like I agree with some of his things, but he’s a billionaire,” said the Orange Coast College student and Santa Ana resident when I asked about Steyer. “His answers at debates have been pretty broad so far.”
Delilah smiled.
“You’re the future, girl, so ask him anything.”
Almost everyone who came in as we waited for Steyer was a campaign worker or volunteer. Former state Controller Betty Yee, who ended her campaign for governor last month and endorsed Steyer, sat at a table with her husband. Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, who initiated Steyer’s Santa Ana visit, thanked Delilah for the opportunity. He has known her since the start of his political career on the Santa Ana City Council nearly 20 years ago,
“This is a city where our residents were criminalized because of ICE, our downtown suffered because of construction, and all this on the heels of a pandemic,” he told me. “These are the folks Tom needs to listen to.”
Sarmiento’s staffer got his attention. Steyer was here.
The candidate strolled in with a videographer and photographer. He wore his usual casual billionaire outfit — white-and-cardinal Nikes, jeans, checkered shirt with rolled-up sleeves and a colorful Southwestern-style fabric belt.
Steyer went straight to the counter.
“Are you running for governor?” he cracked while shaking Delilah’s hand.
“I don’t want to,” she replied.
“I knew you were a smart woman!”
He listened with wide eyes and a stern face as Delilah complained about a years-long light-rail project in front of Alta Baja “that has been worse for businesses here than COVID.” Insurance rates have gone up 30% in the last year alone, she said.
“Well, look, that’s my whole thing,” Steyer responded in his low, gravelly voice. “I’m willing to take on the big corporations who are ripping off California. And they’re all spending a lot of money against me.”
It was the Steyer I’ve heard on too many commercials: pugnacious, compassionate but spouting a whole bunch of boilerplate. Delilah smiled weakly.
“I appreciate that,” she said. “And we need more of that.”
Then she waved Nino over. Usually shy, the architecture major now channeled her inner Lesley Stahl.
“Why do you have to be governor in order to do something while you have billions of dollars?” she said.
“So I’ve been able to do something, but what I see in California — and what Delilah and I were just talking about — is big corporations actually run the state,” he said.
“That’s true,” Nino conceded.
“You have to take on the big corporations that are screwing everybody. And you can really only do that as governor,” Steyer continued.
“You want to tax the billionaires, is that correct?” Nino asked next, as Steyer nodded. “How come on some [campaign disclosure] forms, it shows that your billions are in different [countries] besides in the U.S.?”
The candidate vigorously shook his head.
“I might have investments outside the United States, but there’s nothing I’m doing to not pay — I pay full California and American taxes on everything, promise. There’s a lot of ways I could avoid taxes, but I don’t. And so, anything that I’m doing overseas is not to avoid taxes. … I give you my word.”
One more from Nino!
“And how can the people trust billionaires when currently they have been very disappointing towards us?”
“I understand why people are skeptical,” Steyer replied. “They couldn’t be more skeptical than I am.”
He argued that other moguls “are supporting every other candidate. Those people hate me — like, they think I stand for something really bad, which is making them pay their fair share,” referring to a proposed November ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaires like Steyer (he supports the measure).
“And they’re right,” Steyer concluded. “And so it’s like, they hate me, and that’s fine.”
Nino stayed silent. Delilah thanked Steyer, who was off to visit other local businesses owned by friends of ours. He bought a bottle of rosé, posed for photos with Delilah and Sarmiento and went off — but not before a staffer adjusted the back of his collar.
Delilah and Nino went back to prepping lunch orders. What did they think about Steyer?
“To be honest, I’m so skeptical,” Nino said. “I don’t think he has enough experience as some of the other candidates, and I feel like he could have been more into detail about his policies.”
What about you, honey?
“Gracious, very kind and not pompous, which is what I would expect from most politicians,” Delilah said. “I like that he heard out Angela — that’s important [that] politicians listen to the next generation, and I think everybody should be doing that. But I wasn’t satisfied with my insurance question.”
“And we don’t know if this is a performance,” Nino added, drawing a playful gasp from Delilah. “We’ve seen, like, throughout the years, many political people go into, like, regular [businesses] to seem like, ‘Oh, we’re relatable to the people. We know your struggles.’”
“Do they really?” Delilah interjected.
Nino frowned.
They could just be putting on a show for the cameras, she said.
Tom Steyer is trying to sell himself to voters as an agent of change.
He has vowed to take on entrenched political and economic forces to create affordable housing, make the wealthy pay more in taxes, lower energy bills and protect the environment.
But perhaps the biggest change he is selling is his own.
The hedge-fund billionaire turned climate activist has faced criticism throughout his campaign for past investments in coal plants and private prisons, to name a few, that helped build his fortune and gave him the means to spend more than $150 million of his own money in his quest for the governor’s mansion.
Steyer’s prolific spending has blanketed the airwaves with television ads and helped propel him near the top of an unsettled gubernatorial field in the polls.
The 68-year-old San Franciscan has helped put many Democratic candidates in office as one of the party’s biggest political donors in the past two decades, but has never held public office himself.
He spent more than $340 million in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but dropped out after placing third in the primary in South Carolina, where he had invested heavily.
There is a long tradition of wealthy, self-funding candidates, and the results are mixed at best. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent more than $260 million to win three terms as New York City mayor. But he spent more than $1 billion on a 2020 presidential bid and lasted only four days longer in the race than Steyer. Two years later, real estate developer Rick Caruso spent more than $100 million in an effort to become Los Angeles mayor but lost handily to Karen Bass.
Hoping for a better result in his current race, Steyer has staked out a position as the most progressive candidate in the field — touting an endorsement from the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution. He’s picked up other key endorsements, too, from the California Teachers Assn., California Nurses Assn. and numerous environmental groups.
But he faces the challenge of convincing enough liberal voters to support a billionaire with controversial past investments the same year a tax on billionaires, currently enjoying strong support, is poised to be on the November ballot.
“This election is about who you can trust to fight for you,” former Rep. Katie Porter said during an April 22 gubernatorial debate in San Francisco. “One candidate is a billionaire who got rich off polluters and ICE prisons and is now using that money to fund his election.”
Steyer said he understands the broad concerns about his wealth and is willing to vote for the billionaires’ tax in November.
“I know that people are skeptical of billionaires, and I’m skeptical of billionaires,” Steyer said Tuesday in an interview with The Times. “But if you look at this race, I’m the only progressive in the race. I’m the person who’s taking on the corporate special interests.”
He pointed to the millions spent by a super PAC supported by the real estate industry and Pacific Gas & Electric — which Steyer has pledged to break up to bring down utility costs — as evidence that he is the candidate most feared by moneyed interests in the state.
“The companies that are running up the costs are fighting like hell, because that’s how they make their money,” he said. “But somebody’s got to stand up to them.”
The departure of former Rep. Eric Swalwell from the race last month after sexual assault allegations doesn’t appear to have resulted in a major surge of support for Steyer. Rather, it is Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary, who seems to have gained momentum.
But veteran California pollster Mark Baldassare said that he hasn’t counted out Steyer yet.
Tom Steyer, in 2013, as he was campaigning against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
(David Paul Morris / Bloomberg)
“It would be easy to say that he’s reached his peak, except for the fact that there are so many undecideds and Steyer has so many resources at his disposal,” said Baldassare, the statewide survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California.
Steyer has poured at least $875 million into federal and state political committees since 2010, according to an analysis conducted for The Times by OpenSecrets, and federal and state campaign finance records. That total includes the nearly half a billion dollars he has spent on his two races.
In 2013, Steyer left his investment firm and launched NextGen Climate, a progressive political action group geared toward addressing climate change. He has given nearly $270 million to a super PAC affiliated with the group, which was later renamed NextGen America.
The committee has spent tens of millions of dollars on campaigns opposing fossil fuel interests and supporting progressive candidates, though Steyer’s financial support for the group has decreased as he has run for office.
The billionaire also established his climate bona fides by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline during the Obama administration, which became a national proxy fight over climate policy, and by backing environmental ballot measures in California.
Among them was a $5-million investment in 2010’s “No on Prop. 23” campaign, which defeated a conservative effort to overturn California’s greenhouse gas emission reduction law.
Two years later, Steyer invested about $29.5 million in Proposition 39, a winning measure to recoup money from corporate tax breaks to help pay for clean energy projects.
Privileged upbringing and a ‘desire to compete’
Steyer’s unconventional path to politics began with a privileged upbringing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He studied at the elite Buckley School and Philips Exeter Academy before attending college at Yale University, where he captained the men’s soccer team and graduated in 1979.
After a brief stint on Wall Street, he got a master’s degree in business administration at Stanford University, where he met his future wife, Kat Taylor. They wed on the Stanford campus in 1986.
Steyer worked hard — very hard — at making money.
He was one of several “Wall Street Prodigies” featured in a Wall Street Journal profile from the same year he was married.
Steyer’s work began at 5 a.m. in the office and he seldom took days off — he fretted he wouldn’t have time for a honeymoon.
He eschewed the trappings of wealth — driving an eight-year-old Honda — motivated instead by a “desire to compete, excel and keep struggling to do better.”
Steyer began cutting political checks soon after, but his real emergence as a major political donor came during the 2004 presidential campaign, when he pledged to raise more than $100,000 for John Kerry’s campaign and was talked about as a potential political appointee at the U.S. Treasury Department in a Kerry administration.
Steyer hired Kerry to join his sustainable investment company Galvanize in 2024. Steyer stepped down from the company before entering the governor’s race.
The year 2004 was pivotal for another reason.
A group of students at his two alma maters, Yale and Stanford, along with those at a handful of other elite universities, began a campaign to pressure the endowments at their institutions to stop investing with Steyer’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management.
They cited concerns about some of the firm’s investments, including a coal burning plant in Indonesia and a joint venture between Farallon and Yale to pump out water from an aquifer in Colorado adjacent to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
“Stated simply, we do not want our universities to profit from investments that harm other communities,” the students wrote in an open letter to Steyer. “We are concerned about the impact some of Farallon’s recent investments have had.”
Steyer told the students he appreciated “the importance of the issues that you raise,” but defended his firm’s work, saying that it acted “responsibly and ethically.”
Looking back on that time now, Steyer said it was a turning point.
“I think that experience really was a wake-up call to me,” he said. “It’s when I started to very seriously consider leaving Farallon. I really felt like if I was going to be the person with my values, I was going to have to leave and be independent and do what was right.”
Three years later, Steyer and his wife began their initial pivot to public service, opening a bank in Oakland that would cater to low-income customers
Tom Steyer, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, greets people at an event in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2019.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
But this initial venture highlighted the inevitable collision course between Steyer’s burgeoning activism and his firm’s investments.
At an event that year with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Steyer and Taylor pledged $1 million in loans to support vulnerable people in Oakland facing foreclosure in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Left unsaid was the fact that Steyer’s firm had extensive financial ties to San Diego’s Accredited Home Lenders, one of the biggest subprime mortgage lenders in the country.
The transformation to climate activist
Steyer and his wife began writing bigger philanthropic checks and in 2010 took the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least half of their wealth before they died.
In 2009, they gave $40 million to endow the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford, the first of several multimillion-dollar gifts to Stanford and Yale to support climate-focused ventures. They pledged $7 million to create the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, also at Stanford, in 2010. It closed last year after its endowment came to an end.
And in 2011, the couple donated $25 million to Yale to help establish an Energy Sciences Institute focused on developing sustainable energy solutions.
But even as Steyer undertook his public transformation from investor to climate activist, his firm continued to make decisions out of step with his newfound commitment.
In 2011, for example, the firm purchased 1.8 million shares of BP, a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which a BP-operated project dumped nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Steyer resigned from the firm at the end of 2012, though he still has millions of dollars invested in the firm .
Environmentalists have largely been willing to forgive Steyer’s past investments.
“There’s no question he’d be the most knowledgeable and committed climate advocate that’s ever held really high office in America,” climate activist and author Bill McKibben recently toldPolitico.
While the nonprofit California Environmental Voters hasendorsed both Katie Porter and Tom Steyer in the race, Steyer, in particular, has “taken on Big Oil dollar for dollar, toe to toe, and beaten them,” said Mary Creasman, the group’s chief executive.
“He has made this his career and his investment and his passion, so it’s authentic, and voters see that,” she said.
Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, said she’s impressed by Steyer’s climate track record and progressive campaign platform, noting that he’s been an active presence in California’s climate movement for more than 15 years.
That includes not only his work on ballot initiatives and clean energy technology, but also his focus on biodiversity loss and carbon sequestration at his 1,800-acre TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, where researchers are studying regenerative agriculture.
But Steyer has also played a role in elevating climate into a national political issue — including in the early 2010s when it wasn’t a “politically hot topic,” Stokes said.
“He has been willing to spend an enormous amount of his personal money on elections on climate — whether it’s propositions, whether it’s himself running for president on basically a climate platform, whether it’s the Next Gen giant voter turnout campaign,” she said. “I think he has recognized … that politics is where we have to invest our time if we want to make a difference on the climate crisis.”
Despite concerns raised about Steyer’s early investments into fossil fuels through Farallon, Stokes said she’s more apt to criticize candidates who are taking money from oil companies today, such as Becerra, who accepted a $39,200 donation from Chevron for his gubernatorial campaign.
She was also heartened by the fact that Pacific Gas & Electric has funded a $10-million PAC opposing Steyer, because she said it indicates that he aims to hold utility companies accountable for skyrocketing electricity prices amid soaring profits.
“We could actually have a shot here at having somebody who cares about climate change, who wants to hold utilities accountable, who wants to hold big polluters accountable,” Stokes said. “That would just be transformative.”
Energy costs weigh heavily on voters
Steyer’s focus on climate issues and energy affordability could also be a strategic boon in the governor’s race.
Sixty percent of voters in the state see climate change as a major threat to the country and believe that the government is not doing enough to address it, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Californians connect the dots between what’s going on with extreme climate and wildfires and climate,” said Baldassare, the institute’s survey director.
Recent polling has also shown that voters are very concerned about energy affordability and rising utility costs, with 13% of Americans naming it as the most important financial problem facing their family — a 10-point increase from last year, according to an AprilGallup poll.
Overall, energy costs tied housing costs as the second-biggest concern following the high cost of living, the poll found.
In November, Democrats who campaigned heavily around energy affordabilityswept the field in key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia. Residential electric prices increased nearly 11% between January 2025 and this February, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“Voters are supporting candidates who are leaning into these issues,” Creasman said.
Wieder reported from Washington and Smith from Los Angeles.
Environmentalists had something in their arsenal for Tuesday’s election they never did before: a billionaire benefactor willing to empty his pockets of tens of millions of dollars to bring climate change to the forefront of political debate and elect candidates committed to fighting global warming.
But California hedge fund titan Tom Steyer’s $74-million bet — most of it from his own wallet — yielded little payoff. On Tuesday, voters elected the most hostile Congress environmentalists have faced in years.
The Republicans who won control are already making plans to roll back President Obama’s signature emission reduction efforts, green-light the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would transport Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and cancel subsidies for renewable energy.
Steyer says he has no regrets.
“I feel great,” he said by phone from his organization’s San Francisco office. “We set out to put climate on the ballot in a bunch of states, to build an organization and to build a relationship with a bunch of voters.”
He argued that all of that happened, pointing to hundreds of thousands of climate-minded voters newly enlisted in his organization, NextGen Climate, the emergence of global warming in the debate in several races, and the retreat by various GOP candidates from a platform of outright denial of climate science.
He chalked up Tuesday’s results to “that part of the world we don’t control.” Steyer said there was no approach that would have overcome the Republican tide that gave the party control of Congress and defeated several of the candidates NextGen backed.
But the election results raise new questions about the approach deep-pocketed, green-minded donors are taking toward electoral politics. Despite their best efforts, and the huge amount of money invested, they are failing to get voters to set aside other concerns and cast their ballots on environmental issues. This time out, the president’s record and the economy were the forefront issues, with all others receding.
“The take-away here is this was not a successful strategy,” said Josh Freed, vice president for clean energy at Third Way, a group that seeks a middle path between the two warring parties. “Candidate positions on climate do not move the overwhelming majority of voters to pull the lever for or against them. I hope these organizations take a step back and come up with a different approach.”
Steyer’s group saw its candidates victorious in U.S. Senate races in Michigan and New Hampshire, and in state legislative races, including in Oregon. But candidates they backed lost in hotly contested Senate races in Colorado and Iowa. NextGen also failed to unseat the governors of Florida and Maine, targeted by the organization for their outspoken skepticism of climate science.
The unpopular GOP governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, which Steyer’s group campaigned against, lost. But even in that race — won by NextGen’s candidate, Democrat Tom Wolf — global warming hardly was a factor, according to G. Terry Madonna, who directs the Franklin & Marshall College Poll in Lancaster.
Steyer’s impact was “Zero. None. Zero,” he said. Climate change “was not an issue at all. It has literally no salience with voters. It didn’t ever come up.”
University of New Hampshire pollster Andrew Smith said much the same with regard to the Senate race in his state, which Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen won. “I don’t think anybody paid any attention to global warming this election,” he said.
In part that is because much of Steyer’s money was spent airing ads on issues his organization thought were more likely to turn out the Democratic faithful. But that too sometimes backfired.
In Colorado, independent pollster Floyd Ciruli suggested Steyer’s heavy TV advertising, which seized on a Democratic theme emphasizing abortion rights, may have actually hurt Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who lost to GOP Rep. Cory Gardner.
“It was probably a net negative,” Ciruli said. “It turned out to be one of those things that threw Udall on the defensive. He was being parodied and mocked for it and criticized for it.”
Even Steyer’s strategists acknowledge that climate change is not a top-tier issue now. The question is whether it ever will be. Advocates such as Freed say the push seems to be futile, and well-funded green political groups should shift their strategy to more narrowly focused efforts with bipartisan appeal. They might start, he said, by being more open to such GOP-favored options as nuclear energy.
The green campaign efforts instead focus on getting Congress back to where it was in 2010, when it almost passed a California-style law that would have capped greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.
NextGen officials say they are confident in their strategy — and persistent. “This is a multi-cycle effort,” said Chris Lehane, Steyer’s lead political strategist. “If it was easy, it already would have been done…. Social change like this is not like switching on a light bulb.”
The GOP takeover of the Senate occurs as the science of climate change has grown more definitive and the predictions of widespread effects more detailed and dire. On Sunday, a panel of hundreds of climate scientists convened by the United Nations warned that climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was already affecting life on every continent and in the oceans and that the window was closing rapidly for governments to avert the worst damage expected later this century.
Yet skepticism of climate science remains Republican orthodoxy. North Carolina Sen.-elect Thom Tillis said in a primary debate that climate change is not “a fact.” Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is expected to take the helm of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and dismissed the U.N. science panel “as a front for the environmental left.”
Obama moved to cut greenhouse gas emissions by issuing new rules for power plants and the nation’s vehicle fleet. The GOP-run Congress will not be able to nix the rules outright. But it could so thoroughly weaken or delay them through riders to key legislation that they’d be rendered ineffective, analysts said. Deeper cuts to the nation’s emissions would probably require congressional action, and the current GOP position on climate change makes such action improbable.
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune acknowledged there was a “copious amount of bad news” in Tuesday’s election. But he says there was “significant good news” as well.
“Candidates who formerly denied climate science are now saying they are not scientists and instead talk about clean energy and associate themselves with it,” he said.
“The money from Tom Steyer made a difference in elevating climate science and pushing all these lawmakers to move off a denial platform,” Brune said.
