Five candidates have been showing up to gubernatorial forums across California this spring. Two Gen Z policy students have been taking notes.
Andrea Escobar, a master’s student in public policy at UCLA, and Joselen Contreras, an undergraduate public health student at UC Berkeley, spent recent weeks attending publicly accessible forums in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as part of their work with the Ad Hoc Latino Leaders group. Their goal was straightforward: figure out how prepared the major candidates are on the issues that actually matter to young Californians, then report back to peers who either aren’t following the race or don’t see why it matters.
What they found didn’t reassure them.
Who Showed Up
Across eight forums, the candidates who appeared most consistently were Betty Yee, Antonio Villaraigosa, Katie Porter, Xavier Becerra, and Tom Steyer. The events were hosted by health coalitions, labor groups, civil rights organizations, and community forums. That’s a reasonable cross-section of organized California Democratic politics.
What those forums didn’t produce, according to Escobar and Contreras, was much in the way of concrete policy commitments aimed at Gen Z or Latino voters. The candidates talked about those communities. They didn’t talk to them, or at least not with the specificity that would signal a real plan.
The Cost of Vagueness
Escobar puts the stakes in direct terms. She works two jobs while pursuing her degree to cover tuition and rent in Los Angeles. That’s not a background detail. That’s the economic baseline for a significant share of California’s younger students.
The two researchers focused specifically on economic mobility, looking at which communities and issues candidates addressed most frequently and with what level of policy detail. They were looking for proposals on affordable housing and expanded CalGrant funding. What they heard instead was abstraction. Young voters and Latinos as categories. Not people with rent due at the end of the month.
This matters because California’s budget decisions over the past several years have repeatedly deferred costs onto younger residents. Tuition pressure has increased. Housing stock in the state’s university cities remains severely constrained. A student taking on debt and a second job to stay enrolled at a UC campus is not experiencing the California Dream that prior generations were promised. They’re financing a gap the state chose not to close.
Why the Caution
The candidates’ reluctance to commit to bold specifics probably has a strategic logic. California’s gubernatorial primary rewards coalition management. You don’t win by promising transformational policy to a demographic that turns out at lower rates than older voters. You win by not alienating anyone.
That calculation is self-reinforcing. Candidates play it safe with young voters because young voters don’t show up reliably. Young voters don’t show up reliably because candidates play it safe with them. Escobar and Contreras are essentially trying to stress-test whether any candidate is willing to break that loop.
So far, the answer looks like no. The candidates have been, in Escobar and Contreras’s framing, cautious. The word they use is cautious. Not wrong on the issues, not hostile to young voters. Cautious. That caution is a choice, and it has a cost.
What the Next Governor Actually Controls
California’s next governor will have real authority over the things Gen Z voters say they care about most. The state budget, which determines CalGrant funding levels and UC system allocations, runs through the governor’s office. Housing policy, including how aggressively the state pushes local governments to permit new construction, is substantially shaped by gubernatorial priorities.
This article draws on reporting from CalMatters.
The governor also sets the tone for how California approaches economic mobility at a structural level. Whether the state treats housing as infrastructure or as a local political problem. Whether it treats higher education as a public good or an increasingly privatized service. Those aren’t rhetorical distinctions. They produce different budget lines.
Escobar and Contreras aren’t asking for sweeping ideological commitments. They’re asking for a plan. Specifically: what does the candidate intend to do about housing costs in cities where UC and CSU campuses are located, and what does expanded CalGrant access look like under their administration.
The Engagement Gap
The disengagement Escobar and Contreras observed among their own classmates is real and documented well beyond their campuses. Young voters in California consistently report lower levels of interest in statewide races, partly because those races feel distant from their immediate concerns and partly because candidates rarely speak to them in concrete terms.
The two researchers didn’t wait for a social media explainer to tell them what each candidate stands for. They went to the forums themselves. Most of their peers haven’t done that, and probably won’t. Which means the candidates who want those votes need to come with something specific enough to cut through.
A governor who wins without Gen Z doesn’t have the coalition to actually deliver the structural changes that would improve their economic position. And a generation watching college costs rise while housing stays out of reach isn’t going to give the next administration much runway if it arrives without a plan.
The forums will continue through the spring. The candidates should probably use them differently than they have been.