The Billionaire on the Ballot: What Tom Steyer Teaches us About Voter Guides
In a race defined by a lack of a viable socialist candidate, voters in California looked for guidance on who to pick. But what could have been an opportunity for the California DSA to show political leadership was instead mired in contention and buried in the footnotes.
by N.E. Watson
Credit: D Everett
California’s 2026 gubernatorial race should have been a chance for a change. The state is obscenely rich: it is the world's 4th-largest economy, having recently overtaken Japan. Yet, it remains one of the most unequal states in the Union. Millions of Californians barely scrape by as rising rents, grocery bills, and gas prices devour their paychecks. Those who can’t make the cut? They join the state’s 187,000 other homeless residents, accounting for a shocking 28% of the entire nation’s homeless population. If there was ever a place where a socialist organization should have been able to make a credible intervention statewide, it was here. Instead, today, on the day of the primaries, the California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have hitherto found themselves embroiled in internal and external controversy over the question of whether to back a billionaire for governor.
For those blissfully unaware, the race for the governor’s mansion in Sacramento has been anything but uneventful. First, California is a jungle primary state, meaning that voters choose any candidate regardless of party affiliation, with the top two proceeding to the general election. It is even possible for the final two candidates to be from the same party. With now-former Congressman Eric Swalwell’s dramatic exit from his clear frontrunner position in the race, the possibility of a Republican lockout, a situation where both candidates in the November general election were Republican, loomed over the heads of the candidates like the blade of a guillotine. Of the candidates who surged after Swalwell’s exit, former Health and Human Services Secretary — and infamous 2016 DNC Superdelegate — Xavier Becerra looked to be the new starchild of the California Democratic establishment. At the same time, progressive billionaire and failed 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer was neck and neck with Becerra in the polls, both trailing behind the Trump-endorsed Republican and former Fox News TV host Steve Hilton. Whatever dynamics the race had prior to April had entirely given way to an all-out brawl between Democrats and Republicans alike as they scrambled desperately for a spot in the top-two runoff in an increasingly chaotic, low-trust environment.
California DSA’s voter guide did not emerge from a vacuum. It was born from a gubernatorial race where, among a whopping 62 candidates on the ballot, none were a viable left-populist alternative, and the organization was left without clear options. The Democratic establishment — having been largely caught with all its eggs in one basket in Swalwell — was scrambling to move cash and operations to the Becerra campaign, which, before the former Congressman’s departure, had been remarkable only insofar as it was completely unremarkable. This timely process left the lane open for Steyer to surge in the polls, bringing him into genuine contention for the governor’s mansion and slightly decreasing the likelihood of an outright Republican lockout. Still faced with the dilemma of an increasingly unlikely but still possible Republican lockout or a Becerra governorship, California DSA’s voter guide made the tactical case for Steyer as the most progressive viable candidate while simultaneously refusing to state that case plainly to voters, omitting him from the official list of recommendations, by far the most visible part of the guide.
Formally, California DSA did not endorse or recommend Steyer, nor has any other California chapter. On the question of endorsements and recommendations, DSA Los Angeles, in their endorsement FAQs, distinguishes endorsements from recommendations as requiring a higher level of organizational commitment and direct campaign support, whereas the latter functions more as tactical guidance: a signal that, while the organization is not committing resources to the candidate, it considers them worth supporting on the ballot. California DSA’s guide appears to attempt to preserve this distinction, even within the governor’s race. However, the distinction between these two terms — endorsement and recommendation — is nebulous at best to the general public. California DSA offered no formal recommendation for governor, yet the write-up that followed still identified Steyer as the most progressive viable candidate, while also heavily discouraging protest votes. It is precisely at this moment that the contradiction at the heart of this argument sharpened. The guide’s formal category said one thing, while its political messaging suggested something else altogether. The guide reads:
There are myriad left-wing protest votes one could take… the most prominent of which are Ramsey Robinson and Butch Ware. We highly encourage voters to not cast a protest vote, as the stakes are incredibly high and the chance of the top two candidates both being Republicans is still very real… However, the most progressive of the current viable candidates for governor is Tom Steyer. Time will tell whether he’s truly a class traitor.
The write-up itself did not present Steyer as a socialist or even as a particularly trustworthy progressive. It put into question his billionaire status, his record, his claim to being a ‘class traitor’, and his refusal to call Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide. For this, we should commend CA DSA; if we seek a strong, organized movement that can concretize an independent political line, we must be capable of engaging with electoral organizing with enough nuance to clarify and differentiate our line from progressives, especially when it comes to controversial figures like Steyer. But politics simply does not happen in the footnotes. The critically nuanced Steyer line — the fact that he was bad but perhaps the best option available — was a fact buried in the voter guide. As a result, the guide leaves a void that can only logically leave its readers to understand it as advocating abstention from the race entirely. In an attempt to avoid the messiness of Steyer’s campaign, the guide that originally intended to give critical support did the opposite.
If we truly want to advance the line using Steyer, then this cannot be reduced to some half-hearted venture, as the voter guide attempts to do. DSA and the broader left cannot shy away from contradictory candidates by hiding them in the margins, as these contradictions actually serve our ends far more than an unnuanced full-throated endorsement ever could. Steyer’s usefulness extends so far as we, as a movement, are capable of using his contradictory nature to outline the subtleties and nuances of our line within the realm of mass politics that a candidate like Steyer invites.
While much of the controversy from certain corners of the internet can be chalked up to a misunderstanding of the voter guide itself — be it the belief that its authors secretly believed in billionaire saviors or that they forgot Steyer’s class position — the strongest critique to emerge from the post-guide discourse comes from the reality that a socialist organization cannot treat public voter guidance as merely another type of helpful information. Voter guides are expressly political acts. When a socialist formation, such as DSA, tells readers that a billionaire is the most viable candidate in a race, most people are not going to stop to parse the difference between the different inner-organizational terminology and levels of endorsement, recommendation, et cetera. They will hear one thing plainly, though: DSA recommended Tom Steyer. And any such actions taken after that will be informed based on that presentation alone, be it positive, negative, or neutral. And if a socialist voter guide warns against protest votes and informs readers that a billionaire is the most progressive viable candidate in a race, even without a formal recommendation, this functions as a de facto one, and it ought to be treated as such rather than as the half-measure it became. Half-in and half-out ends up being the only truly wrong option.
The Popstonox tweet claiming CA DSA had recommended Steyer ended up being the most visible media regarding the voter guide, with 14,000 likes and over a million views. The tweet generated controversy because some saw it as a misinterpretation of what was an internally conflicted write-up in the guide itself.
There still remained the issue of optics for smaller chapters of California DSA. North Central Valley DSA, located near the Modesto area, raised immediate and public objections to California DSA’s half-recommendation. They argued that California DSA’s very name and public communications are taken by members of the public — including their local organizing allies — as speaking for NCV DSA and, by extension, every other DSA chapter in the state. They argued these communications often fly in direct opposition to what they tend to espouse. Under those conditions, a statewide voter guide is not simply something that floats above the local organizing terrain, but instead lands somewhere tangible, with actual, on-the-ground outcomes. It lands in conversations with labor partners, community organizations, sympathetic left formations, and ordinary people who may now associate the Democratic Socialists of America brand with that of a billionaire candidate who, by virtue of his class character, they were already suspicious of. For smaller chapters in such hostile terrain as that of California’s Central Valley, this can be a serious issue.
This crisis of legitimacy is nothing new to California DSA, though, as anyone with familiarity with the topic can attest. The organization has long existed in an uneasy gray area between statewide ambition and the reality of organizational weakness. The expectations are that it ought to speak to statewide offices, ballot measures, and crises, yet it has struggled to secure consistent chapter participation, democratic clarity, and the capacity to carry out said functions. The fight over the Steyer recommendation, then, was not a new contradiction, but instead proved to be a more publicly volatile installment in the long saga over what California DSA should be, or whether it should be at all. The truth is, though, that these issues will never be resolved through avoiding the messy reality of struggle and what it means to answer the question of the day that the people present to us. We must parse this messiness, whether it be complicated gubernatorial candidates or the 2028 presidential race, and come out the other side with nuanced criticisms and even more nuanced answers that can develop into concrete guidance and leadership for the masses of progressive forces.
Put simply, the answer to a weak statewide formation and unclear electoral intervention is not to hollow it out further, but to increasingly embrace and expand it. Some of the loudest voices in this fight incorrectly mistake these voter guides themselves as the source of the problem, rather than this mistake being the natural expression of an organization that lacks internal clarity on how these guides ought to be presented. That lack of clarity is now simply being exposed on a mass scale. California DSA is clearly grappling with the question of how to make a complex political environment legible to voters who look to it for guidance. But refusing to engage in the mass-political education opportunity that is a voter guide will not magically create a better, socialist candidate out of thin air. Refusing to coordinate a statewide strategy would not have changed the dynamics of this top-two primary. And, refusing to intervene doesn’t stop voters from asking what to do when faced with a complicated ballot full of bad options. Shying away from such advocacy entirely by omitting Steyer from the list of official recommendations does not solve this. The masses will still ask these crucial questions, and when we refuse to answer, they may look to other opportunistic actors to find them, including the far-right. They will be looking to us for a political leadership we are voluntarily declining to provide.
Regardless of how we may feel, the ballot comes anyway. People will vote. This is not just true of committed dues-paying DSA members or terminally online socialists. Ordinary people — your neighbors, your teachers, your coworkers, your friends, your comrades — vote. And all of these people, from your dues-paying socialist to your coworker, can and will use a voter guide. Ballots are confusing! Local races are often opaque, especially in California’s arcane jungle primary system. And, in a state with Democratic hegemony like California, the Democratic Party’s own cues and labels are often useless or actively misleading (see Caruso’s run for mayor). A socialist organization that refuses to answer these questions is leaving workers to navigate the questions of bourgeois politics alone.
In much of the back and forth, the critics of the Steyer recommendation have not been given the credit they deserve for many of the critiques they levy. It is an undeniable fact of reality that the public distinctions between an endorsement and a recommendation collapse quickly. And a statewide body meant to carry out the task of political education and leadership that could potentially remedy this issue must earn the authority it needs to speak statewide. These are all incredibly important critiques to have been made regarding the crisis of California DSA. Yet, being right in the identification of issues does not imply that any one solution to come from said criticisms is correct. And the retreat from this crucial electoral terrain that many are suggesting is to simply avoid the strategy that is needed at this time.
None of this is to say that DSA must recommend a candidate in every race, though. “No recommendation” can be a serious political position that a socialist organization must be willing to take. However, it cannot be the default. An idea that has been floated around a few times is to revisit the concept of endorsements and recommendations in its entirety with that of a scorecard system. This is just one of several examples of ways that socialists can re-evaluate their relationship with the electoral mass politics while not abandoning their mass base. Abstention alone, though, cannot be a substitute for strategy. If DSA wants to become a political reference point — not just in California but nationwide — it must take responsibility for the fact that people already treat it like one.
Anecdotally speaking, this has even played out in my own circles. When election season rolls around, my friends, family, et cetera, have reached out to me for help navigating California’s massive ballots. DSA voter guides have been absolutely pivotal in that process. Earlier this week, for example, a friend in Sonoma County — a DSA member, though not a particularly active one — told me she had filled out her ballot according to both the Sonoma County and California DSA voter guides, but left the governor’s race blank until I got back to her. When I talked to her, she seemed confused by the “No recommendation” topline of the guide, especially after reading the write-up. So, she asked me the same question the guide itself had avoided: who am I supposed to vote for? The unavoidable truth is that the California DSA voter guide failed in providing its readers with clarity on this crucial question.
Credit: N.E. Watson
This does not mean that Tom Steyer has to be ours. He is not a socialist, nor even the class traitor he claims to be. He is not ‘proof’ that capital can be morally persuaded into serving the interests of the working class. Ultimately, he is still a billionaire — just one whose campaign happened to sit to the left of any other viable options in an outright miserable electoral field. If a tactical vote for Steyer is to be defensible, it is defensible only as a tactical decision — not as any leap of faith or the confidence of socialists in California as a substitute for genuine socialist politics. What the left critiques of the tactical Steyer recommendation would have you believe about California DSA is that they simply wish to uncritically endorse Steyer and proceed as if nothing happened. And, were this to be the case, that would be a massive mistake on the part of organized socialism across the state. But that is clearly not what’s happening here. And, while many have their quibbles and qualms with the wording of the voter guide itself (i.e., the usage of Steyer’s ‘class traitor’ slogan, even if ironic), the true mistake to be made in the tactical support of Steyer would be to forget what he truly is: a billionaire capitalist.
The danger of engaging struggle in the Democratic Party lies not with the reality of socialists making tactical concessions, as this is necessary for any organization that wishes to engage in the political sphere, regardless of context. Politics is, if nothing else, a game of concessions, even in triumph. The danger instead lies in tactical choices being reduced to political horizons. Glass ceilings. Barriers that we, as the organized movement to abolish the present state of things, cannot overcome. A public-facing socialist voter guide can, and should, tell the truth about bad political terrain, but this bad terrain cannot limit the ambitions of what socialists fight for. Herein lies the true failures standing before California DSA and the Californian socialist project, failures that must be reckoned with in order to transcend potential stagnation within our current phase of development.
