Governor's race is wide open and awaits a star to emerge

In a state that’s home to nearly 40 million people and the fourth-largest economy in the world, the race for California governor has been lost in the shadow of President Trump's combustible return to office and, thus far, the absence of a candidate charismatic enough to break out of the pack.

- BY SEEMA MEHTA

MYUNG J. CHUN Los Angeles Times

CANDIDATES at a forum at the California Science Center in L.A. last month.

For the first time in recent history, there is no clear front-runner with less than five months before the June primary election.

"This is the most wide-open governor's race we've seen in California in more than a quarter of a century,” said Dan Schnur, a political communications professor who teaches at USC, Pepperdine and UC Berkeley. “We've never seen a multicandidate field with so little clarity and such an absence of anything even resembling a front-runner.

“There's no precedent in the modern political era for a campaign that’s this crowded,” Schnur said.

Opinion polls bear this out, with more voters saying they are undecided or coalescing behind any of the dozen prominent candidates who have announced bids.

Former Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) led the field with the support of 21% of respondents in a survey of likely voters by the Public Policy Institute of California released in December. Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, also a Democrat, and former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, a Republican, each won the support of 14% of poll respondents.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, also a member of the GOP, won the backing of 10%, while everyone else in the field was in the single digits, though some Democratic candidates who recently entered the race were not included.