Gubernatorial candidates are playing it too safe for Gen Z

By Andrea Escobar and Joselen Contreras, especially for CalMatters

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California’s next governor will usher in the economic mobility, success and safety of Generation Z.

Gen Z voters are looking for candidates who have a plan of action. All our lives we were sold California Dream — affordable housing, quality education and access to well-paid work. But today these promises seem more and more distant, because students take on massive debt and multiple degrees just to stay afloat economically.

Although we both study politics at UCLA and UC Berkeley, our colleagues on campus seem to have little interest in it race for the governorship or they don’t understand how a new governor will affect our future. So instead of waiting for TikTok to crack each of the contender platforms, we set out to see for ourselves.

Through our work with the Ad Hoc Latino Leaders group, we aimed to attend as many publicly accessible gubernatorial forums as possible in the Bay Area and Los Angeles to provide our fellow students with a high-level understanding of how prepared the candidates were to advance a political agenda focused on our issues of health, wealth and dignity.

Out of eight forums, these candidates appear most consistently: Betty Yee, Antonio Villaraigosa, Katie Porter, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer. They attended events organized by health coalitions, labor groups, civil rights organizations, and community forums.

When we looked at the substance of each candidate’s policies, specifically which communities and issues they talked about the most, we were left unsatisfied.

The candidates appeared wary of fully embracing the bold leadership needed to lead the world’s fourth-largest economy. California deserves a governor who breaks away from legacy political frameworks and instead paves a new future for the state’s Latinos and young voters.

The economic challenges facing Californians are not abstract to me, Andrea. As a full-time student, I have to balance two jobs to afford tuition and rent in Los Angeles.

My main focus was how the candidates plan for economic mobility not only for our generation, but for Latinos as a whole. In the last few years, it has been felt that state leaders have been doing so we balanced the budget against our future.

We wanted to hear a plan for affordable housing and for increased CalGrant funding to help us make ends meet with rising costs. Instead, young voters and Hispanics were talked about in the abstract.

Without a clear plan to address the issues we care about, e.g college access and affordabilitythese candidates remain excluded from mobilizing young voters like us.

However, this is a much broader problem. Although the growing concern of voters vs immigration enforcement and assaults, few candidates talked about immigrants or Latinos. For these candidates, immigration is framed as an identity marker, with candidates invoking their immigrant heritage, lifelong advocacy, or platitudes to defend the immigrant community.

But the voters understood it clearly threats to democracy and worsening economic conditions are the most important issues facing the US.

For myself, Hoselen, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley — the birthplace of the free speech movement during the Vietnam War era — I can’t help but feel that history is repeating itself. As international tensions once again raise the specter of war, California’s next governor must be ready to fight for civil rights here at home.

We need candidates who are ready to act on the issues voters care about: economic mobility, protection of civil rights and affordable housing.

Betty Yee and Tony Thurmond were the only candidates who had clear plans to increase access to health care by standing up to ICE and the federal government and increasing access to food security resources. Both are near the bottom of the field, but are the only candidates taking a risk by pushing their vision for Californians.

Research has never been more important in this race, as institution after institution uses surveys to root out the field. The cancellation of a recent USC debate brought those metrics into sharp relief, with all candidates of color failing to qualify for the forum according to its criteria. Instead of considering which voices are being left unheard, USC decided to cancel the event.

Candidates like Yee continued to highlight the underrepresentation of candidates of color in these forums. And USC’s move calls into question how the race is being shaped by outside forces rather than a focus on what the candidates want to achieve.

It is not enough to acknowledge that communities of color and young voters are part of California’s history. We need substantive policy measures that we can use to hold our leaders accountable when they are in office.

We need to be sold a vision of California that does more to ensure that young Californians can stay in this state, have quality jobs, and be protected from the threats of the federal government. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s sparring style may be polarizing, but the state’s voters need to feel that their next governor is passionate about more than just getting elected.

With each new forum ahead, we continue to assess who is stepping up to be the leader our generation so desperately needs.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.