On June 2, California holds its primary election for Governor. The two leading Democrats are Xavier Becerra, a longtime Democrat who served 24 years as a California Congressman and then as Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services Director, and Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager and major Democratic donor who ran unsuccessfully for President in 2020. Others include former Congresswoman Katie Porter and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The main Republicans are Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host endorsed by Trump, and Chad Bianco, Sheriff of Riverside County, who has had an affiliation with the Oath Keepers, one of the far-right groups who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
The race also includes Ramsey Robinson, who is running for Governor with the “Vote Socialist” slate under the Peace and Freedom Party.
California uses a “top two” primary: whichever two candidates get the most votes, regardless of party, face off in the November election. With 24 candidates running as Democrats, there is real concern among those who oppose Trump that a Republican could be elected. And, for some, even though the Democrats have failed to stand for what is needed, they feel that voting for a Democrat that can win is a way of preventing a far-right Republican from being the next governor.
As much as we understand this perspective and the idea of voting for candidates that are not advancing such overt support for extreme right policies, we do not think the way to fight in the interests of the working class and the population as a whole is through voting for candidates who aim to defend and manage this system of exploitation. The Democratic and Republican candidates are representatives of the same system. It is not about which is a lesser evil. Capitalism needs both component parts — the centrists and the far-right elements — to function. Capitalism is the problem. We cannot endorse the parties that defend it.
Minneapolis showed us what real resistance to the functioning of this system can look like: ordinary people organizing themselves and relying on their own forces. While the Democrats denounced Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge” into the Twin Cities, they sent the National Guard and local police against people who were mobilized to confront Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and push them out of the city. The story was similar in Los Angeles in July 2025, when masses of people resisted the escalation of ICE attacks in the streets and their neighborhoods and workplaces, while Democratic politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom argued against Trump calling out the National Guard against protestors on the grounds that local police would be enough to put down the protests on their own, without state or federal troops intervening. Newsom wasn’t opposed to the National Guard being used against protestors — in fact, he had already mobilized the National Guard against protestors in 2020 in Los Angeles following the murder of George Floyd. This time his point was only that if the National Guard was to be called out against protestors that it would be his decision, not President Trump’s. The struggles against ICE terror, cuts to social services, increased militarism and wars around the world, the genocide in Gaza, and more can only be met by the organized power of the working class and the rest of the population.
This is why we would not endorse any Democratic candidate for Governor.
Although Robinson represents an alternative, we are not endorsing his candidacy. Robinson presents himself as a socialist and while we may agree with many of the stated goals of his campaign, we have disagreements with the illusions in elections that his campaign conveys.
We think the central message revolutionary socialists running in elections should present is that elections are not the vehicle for the changes that are needed. It is only the mobilization of the working class and the majority of the population that can stand up to the attacks of this system, implement the changes we need, and bring a socialist society into being. The Robinson campaign does not emphasize this. Instead, his campaign continues to frame things much more as what he would do as a socialist governor to solve the problems we face in California, as if elections alone — not mass struggle of the working class — could achieve what we need.
With that said, we acknowledge this campaign rejects the two capitalist parties. We respect the perspective that a protest vote for Robinson is a way to show opposition to both parties.
