Some of the candidates hoping to become California’s next governor made opening statements in Spanish this week during their visit to the central San Joaquin Valley, which is one of the youngest and most Latino areas of the state.
Some highlighted their Latino immigrant roots and past work on behalf of immigrants. All the candidates in the crowded Democratic field who attended one of Fresno’s two forums this week blasted Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its masked agents.
Top Democratic and Republican contenders seemed to echo a message of affordability as a main pitch for the Latino community — an electorate long considered a safe bet for Democrats, but one that has appeared to go purple in recent years.
Affordability will likely “drive a lot of youth voter turnout,” said Bryan Beltran, regional director for the Central Valley Young Democrats.
In Fresno County alone, almost 30% of the population is under age 18 and more than 50% is Latino. The county in 2024 voted Republican in the presidential election for the first time in 20 years as the GOP made big gains with Latinos largely focused on economic issues. Just one year later, Latinos largely backed California democrats’ controversial Prop 50 congressional redistricting effort — a move experts say was driven by anger over perceived broken economic promises by President Donald Trump as well as his administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics.
Latinos’ purple voting behavior reflects overall voter registration in the central San Joaquin Valley. Neither of the two major parties dominates the electorate in the region, and some political analysts say the concerns of its residents are a good barometer for the election.
“While we may not have the same population density as other more politically influential parts of the state, many of the issues that Valley residents are currently facing are a good reflection of the entire state,” said Blake Zante, executive director of The Maddy Institute.
The primary for the gubernatorial election is June 2 and the general election is in November.
Leading candidates talk Latinos, affordability in Fresno
The Democratic candidates polling the highest, Bay Area U.S. Congressman Eric Swalwell and billionaire businessman Tom Steyer, cited scheduling conflicts and did not attend the two forums in Fresno this week. The two Republicans in the race, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, attended a Wednesday morning forum at Fresno State focused on agriculture and business but were not at an evening Fresno City College forum focused on labor that attracted a more Latino crowd.
Bianco, though, has made a visible effort to connect with Latino voters in Southern California, where he has appeared on multiple right-leaning Latino podcasts. He recently shared data on social media from David Binder Research that showed him polling at 20% with Latinos. (That’s higher than any other candidate in that poll but well below the 34% of Latinos who said they were still undecided.)
After the forum Wednesday at Fresno State, Bianco told The Bee that Latinos support him because “they know everything I do is to make people’s lives better.”
He was recently endorsed by the National Hispanic Republican Assembly. “That was huge to get that not only for a Republican but a non-Hispanic,” he said.
“A lot of them are saying ‘we don’t really care about race, we know you don’t care about race either, we want you to make our lives better,’” Bianco said. “And they’re getting behind me.”
Former Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter was the only democrat among the race’s top five candidates who appeared in Fresno this week, speaking at both forums.
She told The Bee after the evening forum that her emphasis on affordability issues such as housing, child care and college tuition appeal to the Valley’s Latino voters. Porter emphasized that she is a single mother of three teenagers and also someone who flipped a seat long held by the GOP when she was elected to Congress in 2018.
“Latino voters are just like other voters,” Porter. “They want to take care of their families, they want to have a good life. They want to have an opportunity.”
Dems say ‘abolish ICE,’ Bianco says abolish CA sanctuary policies
Every democratic candidate who attended the forum Wednesday evening at Fresno City College said they support extending state-funded services to undocumented people, a community that in California pays billions in state and local taxes every year.
They also all criticized the ICE enforcement tactics and said they’d combat the agency’s presence in California. Besides Porter, the other democratic candidates at the forum were: former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.
Mahan touted his city’s multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration intended “to protect our neighbors and resources.” That city has passed its own face mask ban for law enforcement officers and has created a legal defense fund for immigrants, he added.
Porter called Trump a “racist pendejo,” a profane insult in Spanish, and said California’s next governor should provide “moral clarity on the need to abolish ICE.”
“The governor can do a lot to help make sure we flip congressional districts across this state and send people to Washington who will vote to do exactly that,” she said.
Thurmond said the same, but added that he is sponsoring a new state bill, AB 1633, that intends to impose a 50% tax on the gross revenues of private detention facility operators. He described it as a tax on “any company in California that operates an ICE detention center.”
“That’s how you abolish ICE,” he said.
Villaraigosa said he has never seen the type of enforcement ICE is using today, describing agents as “covered from head-to-toe like the Ku Klux Klan, no identification, violently arresting people.”
The former Los Angeles mayor said that as governor he would support California laws that ban warrantless arrests in homes, businesses, schools and hospitals.
Becerra said similar: If elected governor, he would support banning immigration agents from government buildings, healthcare facilities, schools and courthouses. He touted his experience as a former California Attorney General who sued the Trump administration in 2017 over its attempt to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a policy that has protected immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
“We will prosecute the ICE police,” Becerra said. “If they decide they want to violate the law, we have a right to do that.”
Though Bianco did not attend Wednesday evening’s forum, he has said he believes immigration enforcement is “the sole responsibility of the federal government.” But he has also criticized California’s sanctuary law as the reason federal agents are making arrests on the streets and in immigrant neighborhoods.
California’s SB 54, known as the California Values Act, prohibits the use of local and state resources for federal immigration enforcement. It also limits the pool of immigrants that local jails can transfer to ICE custody to those who have committed more serious crimes.
Last year, Bianco said in a video posted online that SB 54 “forces federal immigration officials from ICE into our communities” because they cannot take more people from county jails. He added he will “continue to fight to reform an extremely dangerous sanctuary state law.”
