xavier becerra

Xavier Becerra, who grew up in a 685-square-foot house with his parents and three sisters in working-class Sacramento before ascending to Stanford University, Congress and the White House Cabinet, will become California’s first directly elected Latino governor.

The historic victory thrusts the unassuming Democrat into the forefront of California’s scathing fight with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement, healthcare funding, environmental protections and social issues.

“I didn’t run to make history,” Becerra told supporters at his election night party in West Sacramento. “I ran to make a difference for anyone and everyone who calls California home — whether you voted for me or not.”

He paid tribute to his parents and late labor icon Dolores Huerta before stating his “straightforward” mission: “Deliver a California we can afford and defend a California we can’t afford to lose.”

The Associated Press declared Becerra the winner at 8 p.m. Tuesday. He beat Republican Steve Hilton, a conservative commentator and former British political strategist backed by President Trump. Hilton conceded defeat a little before 9:15 p.m.

“We have a new governor of California,” he told about 800 supporters at his election night party in Garden Grove. “I know it’s not the one you wished for but I do wish Xavier Becerra well.”

Though the mood at his event was mostly one of defeat, Hilton stirred the crowd with a promise to help Republicans break the Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature in 2028.

“We love California and we’re going to fight for California,” he said. “The fight goes on. We have a plan.”

Becerra, 68, will take the helm with a slate of potential economic opportunity: luring back Hollywood production, drawing international visitors to the 2028 Olympic Games and responsibly growing the artificial intelligence industry.

But there are also a long list of challenges: grappling with worst-in-the-nation unemployment, solving the housing crisis, and preparing for and responding to seemingly endless natural disasters.

Becerra spent more than 25 years in Congress before he was appointed California attorney general and, later, secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration. His long resume, as he often argued during the campaign, positions him to enter the governor’s office without “training wheels.”

“It’s groundbreaking,” Anna Sampaio, a professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University, said of Becerra’s win. “It’s particularly important in this moment when Latinos are under siege, when they’re targeted by the federal government, and you have a Latino not only being elected, but a Latino who is consistently delivering this message that he is going to stand in opposition to a Trump agenda.”

Despite his long-standing presence in California politics, the modest Becerra initially struggled to energize support for his gubernatorial campaign. When explosive sexual assault allegations pushed a front-running Democrat out of the race, Becerra, a staid and experienced candidate with a clean reputation, leaped to the top of the crowded field and finished first in the top-two June primary.

The state has had one Latino governor, Romualdo Pacheco, who assumed office in 1875 when Gov. Newton Booth stepped down after winning a U.S. Senate seat.

Becoming the first Latino directly elected to California’s highest office is a distinction Becerra was reluctant to promote on the campaign trail, preferring instead to focus on his humble roots. His father, born in Sacramento and raised in Mexico, labored on farms and construction sites; his Mexico-born mother was a clerical worker.

The largest ethnic group in California, Latinos make up more than 40% of the state’s population and roughly a third of its voters.

Though noteworthy, polling suggests Latino voters care more about results than his history-making win.

“We’re moving from an era that has defined Xavier Becerra’s career as focused almost entirely on representation to one where the voters are demanding results far more,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who studies Latino voters. “When the housing situation for Latinos is getting worse, when affordability is getting worse, when school performance measures are not getting better, what difference does it make who’s holding office when we should be focused on results?”

Though he offered few specifics, Becerra discussed his priorities throughout the campaign. He plans to declare a housing emergency and speed up construction.

He will take Gov. Gavin Newsom’s baton on the thorny question of who should pay when megafires burn. And he wants to ensure there are no disruptions to Medi-Cal coverage, even for undocumented workers — a herculean task with as much as $30 billion in federal cuts looming.

“Hopefully he uses an overwhelming victory to achieve what he wants to get done in 100 days,” said Steven Maviglio, who served as a spokesman for former Gov. Gray Davis. “That’s when you’re most powerful: when you assume office with an agenda, so hopefully he’ll detail that within days of being elected.”

Becerra’s victory ushers in a new era of Latino political power in California. For the first time, all members of the “big three” who negotiate the state’s behemoth budget — the governor, Assembly speaker and state Senate president — come from working-class, immigrant backgrounds.

“When you’ve watched your parents and grandparents struggle to make ends meet, you bring a different perspective,” said Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister). “If we do this right, history won’t remember us simply because we were the first. History is going to remember us because we made a difference. We want California to work for everybody.”

Times staff writer Andrew Campa contributed to this report.

My maternal grandmother, Marcela Miranda, was born in Arizona’s copper country in 1914 and lived in the United States until she was about 7.

She was part of a generation whose parents were from the rancho of El Cargadero, Zacatecas, and started families in el Norte while waiting out the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s and the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s. Many returned to their home village when things calmed down.

After growing up in Mexico, my grandmother moved to California with my grandfather and their children in the 1960s. Only the American government considered her a native-born U.S. citizen, while society dismissed her as a Mexican. We grandchildren always considered our Mama Chela a doña — a grand Mexican dame who never wore pants and frequently covered her hair with a veil out of modesty. All she remembered from her early childhood in Arizona were snippets of the nursery rhymes “Did You Ever See a Lassie?” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”

The El Cargadero diaspora, which mostly settled in Anaheim, saw our forebears’ American birth as a stroke of provenance allowing them to legally enter the U.S. and give their progeny a head start that other Mexicans could only dream of. It’s a story I’ve repeatedly told over my decades-long journalism career, and no one has yet challenged my description of my grandmother as an immigrant.

If they did, I’d think they had too much time on their hands, or maybe that they were a wackjob contrarian.

Cue Steve Hilton.

The Republican candidate for California governor is trying to make a scandal out of his Democratic opponent, Xavier Becerra, portraying himself as the son of Mexican immigrants. Twice last week during their CNN debate, Becerra said his parents came to California “with $12.” In previous interviews during his decades in the political spotlight, Becerra has shared that his father, Manuel, was born in Sacramento in 1928 and moved to Mexico as a child during the Great Depression, eventually returning to the land of his birth.

Hilton, who has been endorsed by President Trump, has as much a chance of becoming the Golden State’s next governor as Stephen Miller. But he and his supporters have latched on to Becerra’s statement like it was the borderlands version of stolen valor. Critics combed through Becerra’s family genealogy like Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail, then posted their findings online — Becerra’s dad grew up in Tijuana before coming back to California, then married in Guadalajara before returning in the 1950s to Sacramento, where Xavier was born — to claim that Becerra is one giant, pandering fraudster.

“Unlike Xavier Becerra, I am an immigrant,” the British-born son of Hungarian refugees harrumphed on social media. He followed up by declaring that Becerra is “LYING” about his family’s American experience “in order to score identity points.”

What more proof do California voters need that Hilton is laughably out of touch with how we live? Many Mexican Americans, including my cousins and me, consider family members raised in Mexico to be immigrants, even if they were born in the U.S. Growing up down south forever shapes your language, work ethic, appreciation for how hard life can be and so much more. When they return to the U.S., such people often find themselves ostracized as paisa — country — and must learn the mores of American life, just like those born abroad.

To argue that calling them immigrants is technically wrong is like getting angry at people who don’t pronounce Los Feliz the Spanish way. For Becerra’s critics to claim he’s stretching his immigrant roots to appeal to Latino voters is an insult to Latinos. We know a cultural faker when we see one, and the Becerra family story isn’t an anomaly; it’s our lives.

Gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton addresses patrons at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood in September.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s a weird gotcha,” said Cal State Fullerton Chicano studies professor Alexandro José Gradilla, whose wife’s grandmother was born in California and raised in Mexico, then bounced between the two countries for the rest of her life. “What’s the dis? Where’s the dunk? It’s so normative, especially of that generation. We cannot have the 2026 definition of immigration, the border and policy apply to a completely different landscape.”

Becerra’s critics subscribe to “this very American bias that an immigrant only moves once to the U.S., the land of opportunity, of hope — all that mythology,” Gradilla continued. During the Ellis Island era, he noted, European immigrants returned to their home countries with their U.S.-born children, and then those children faced many of the same hardships as first-time arrivals when they came back to the U.S. as adults.

“‘We don’t call those people expats or returnees — ‘immigrant’ is the only intelligible label we understand,” the profe concluded. “Until we come up with a better label, Becerra’s dad is an immigrant.”

There are many legitimate reasons to bash Becerra, from his refusal to participate in more debates to his paltry number of public rallies to a platform that sounds like more of what created California’s current woes. His family history isn’t it.

Hilton’s fixation on Becerra’s immigrant bona fides shows how desperate he is to gain some traction, any traction, with Latino voters. He at least has picked up on Latinos’ regard for immigrant success stories. But after bragging about being the candidate of legal immigrants, for Hilton to hold being born here against someone who went back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico is a weak salsa pendejada.

Hilton would have been better off with his conservative base if he had labeled Becerra the son of an anchor baby.

At a press conference with elected officials to oppose Proposition 39, which would mandate voter identification, my colleague Nicole Nixon asked Becerra about Hilton’s attacks on his dad. Becerra finally unlocked the inner cholo so many of us have been waiting to see, instead of the Chicano Ned Flanders he’s been projecting for decades.

“So this is what happens when people who don’t understand immigration start to pontificate,” he responded, summarizing his family story once again and pointing out the discrimination his father faced as someone of Mexican heritage, birthright citizenship be damned.

“Steve Hilton may not know that [Mexican American history] because he’s not from the U.S.,” Becerra said. “Steve Hilton may not know that because even though he’s an immigrant, he hasn’t taken the time to research.”

Wow, the brown Democratic candidate calling the white Republican candidate a dumb immigrant — California politics sure have changed!

But Becerra’s smackdown had a point. Conservatives deeply misunderstand what it is to be Mexican American. We’ve never fit into the American assimilation story and so have created our own narrative, one that people like Hilton refuse to accept at their own peril.

Hilton needs to take a Chicano studies class, where discussions about the fluidity of Mexican identity inevitably come up.

And, wouldn’t you know it, Gradilla planned to bring up that very subject with his students this week — he didn’t even know about Hilton’s attacks against Becerra until I told him.

The profe has had to update his lectures about the forced removal of upward of a million Mexican Americans south of the border during the Great Depression. He relates that history to the present, when many undocumented Latinos are returning to the countries of their birth with their U.S.-born children, either because they’ve been deported or to avoid being arrested and locked up under Trump’s hellfire immigration enforcement regime.

“For Hilton, anyone of Mexican heritage in this country needs to be grateful, you need to be loyal, and you need to be here,” Gradilla said. “Who would ever want to leave the U.S.? Well, some people have to.”

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton dove deep into his housing platform and lobbed a few attacks at his Democratic opponent, Xavier Becerra, during a town hall with Los Angeles news outlets Tuesday.

Hilton also pointed to some disagreements with President Trump, providing daylight between himself and a president who remains deeply unpopular in California, during the event hosted and livestreamed by the Los Angeles Times and LAist.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s final term ends in early January, providing California voters the opportunity to select a new governor at a time of conflict between the state and the Trump administration over environmental policies, immigration, healthcare and other pressing issues.

Ballots already have started to arrive in California voters’ mailboxes ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

Here are the top takeaways from the discussion with Hilton:

Walking the tightrope on Trump

Republicans running for statewide office already have an uphill battle because of California’s heavily Democratic electorate. It’s an acute challenge this year, campaign experts say, because many Democratic voters are itching to help their party regain control of Congress and neutralize Trump’s agenda.

Trump endorsed Hilton in April, which helped the former Fox News host pull ahead of his GOP rival, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, and secure the second-place spot in the primary election, behind Becerra.

On the campaign trail, Hilton has remained supportive of Trump and said Democratic policies, not the war in Iran, are to blame for high prices.

Pressed to name an instance where he disagrees with the president, Hilton named federal funding cuts for the University of California, threats to withdraw Customs and Border Protection agents from airports in states with sanctuary policies, and the federal government buying stakes in California-based companies.

The Republican said those differences are rooted in his strong support for states’ rights.

“The broader point I want to make, and you can track this back to the commentary and what I’ve written over the years, is I’m a strong believer in decentralizing power,” he said. “I think there’s far too much involvement of the federal government in our affairs in California, and I’m going to be a very strong advocate for bringing those powers back in all sorts of ways.”

Gas prices, taxes and housing permits

Hilton described California’s cost of living as “a nightmare” and a major contributor to residents and businesses moving out of the state.

He laid out an affordability plan, which he refers to as “Califordable,” that he would prioritize if elected governor. His plan includes:

• Ending income taxes for Californians who earn $150,000 or less.
• Slashing oil industry regulations and clean energy mandates for utility companies to achieve $3 gas and lower electric bills.
• Ushering in a new construction boom of single-family homes, including by developing 10 new cities around the state, and capping government fees on newly constructed houses.

He blames the state’s affordability woes on Democrats, who have controlled the state legislative seats and held every elected statewide office since 2009.

“It’s not just that it’s time for some change in California, it’s time for balance. It’s time to try something different after 16 years of doing it the same way,” he said.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton said he does have some policy differences with President Trump during a town hall at the Los Angeles Times Building on Tuesday in El Segundo.

(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)

Hilton said he would stop enforcing laws requiring communities to meet housing production goals and instead focus on building in undeveloped areas of the state that want new homes.

“We’ve got this attitude that the only place you can build is inside what’s currently developed, and that’s motivated by a desire to stop traffic and sprawl and all these things. But the consequence of that is that you end up finding [it] almost impossible to build anything” because of permitting battles and lawsuits, he said. “My plan is to open that up so that we build outwards, not just upwards, increasing the amount of space we use for housing.”

How he would pay for it all

Hilton said that Newsom and Democratic lawmakers have gotten accustomed to spending big and that he wants to return California’s state budget to its pre-pandemic size.

Earlier this year Newsom signed a budget just shy of $352 billion. His first budget as governor, in 2019, clocked in at nearly $215 billion.

The growth occurred during a time “when around 2 million people on net have moved out of the state,” Hilton said. “So we’re spending twice as much for a big reduction in population and worse results.”

He said he could offset the tax cuts by ending funding for high-speed rail, trimming state agencies by 5% and cracking down on Medicaid fraud. Together, he estimates those cuts would save about $25 billion annually. He has also promised to end state-funded healthcare for undocumented immigrants and to hollow out agencies that regulate the state’s air quality and coastlines.

Another round of attacks on Becerra

While he largely stayed focused on policy, Hilton criticized Becerra’s record as U.S. Health and Human Services secretary and dinged him for skipping the town hall.

“Looking forward to perhaps one day having another chance to sit down with my competitor in this race, Xavier Becerra. We’ve had one debate. He promised that there would be debates, plural. Not to be today. But hopefully we can have that conversation because Californians deserve a conversation about the future of our state,” he said during his opening remarks.

On Monday, Hilton attacked Becerra for having “pulled out” of the debate, though the Democratic candidate never agreed to attend a debate proposed by The Times and LAist. Becerra’s spokesperson said the campaign declined the invitation because of a full campaign schedule.

In the weeks following the June primary election, Becerra made himself scarce on the campaign trail and attended few public events. In August, he told reporters there would be multiple debates. He and Hilton faced off last week in an hourlong debate on CNN but no other debates have been announced.

Offshore wind projects “grotesque,” Hilton says

At a time when the Trump administration has systematically dismantled climate and environmental policies, Hilton took care to cast himself as an environmentalist who is concerned about climate change.

He criticized many of the policies favored by Democrats, however, as a “very one-dimensional way of thinking” and offered a more business-friendly approach to addressing climate change:

• Planting 3 billion trees and restoring wetlands.
• Expanding the use of climate-friendly geothermal energy near places such as the Salton Sea and Sonoma and Modoc counties.
• Expanding oil production in California, which he said reduces the need to import foreign oil on tanker ships that spew carbon emissions.

“So that’s a way of reducing carbon emissions that doesn’t burden working people and small businesses with the highest energy costs in the country. We’ve got to get the balance right,” Hilton said.

Hilton aligns with Trump’s vehement opposition to offshore wind projects, a potential source of abundant renewable energy. This year, the Trump administration announced deals to pay wind project developers billions to abandon U.S. wind leases off the coasts of California, North Carolina, New York and New Jersey.

“I think offshore wind is an absolute abomination. I mean, you look at beautiful Morro Bay or Humboldt up in the northern part of our state,” Hilton said. “The industrialization of our coastline that offshore wind would create, I think, is just grotesque, and I’m dead against it.”

Working across the aisle

When asked how he would work with a Democratic majority in the state Legislature, Hilton said he has experience doing it — as an advisor to former United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron, he shared an office with a member of the opposite party.

“We worked together very well. Didn’t agree on everything,” he said. “That would be my attitude. I’m very open. I’m not tribal. I’m not particularly partisan. I’m a pragmatic, problem-solving kind of person, and I’m looking forward to working with the Legislature.”

He said he would press the Legislature to cut spending and “the endless number of bills that they pass every year. … But I want to work together to reduce costs for Californians.”

Hilton also found alignment with Democrats who ran in the gubernatorial primary, including former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, San José Mayor Matt Mahan and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“Katie Porter in the primary … actually endorsed my tax plan. Matt Mahan and I agree on a lot of things to help” cut costs and speed up housing constriction, he said. “Antonio Villaraigosa, we agreed on a lot of things to do with energy policy. So I think there are Democrats who we’ll be able to work with to get consensus on some of the things that we need to get done.”