California’s governor’s race has nine candidates left standing after Eric Swalwell’s exit, and not one of them has reckoned seriously with the data describing the state they want to run.
That’s the honest read from a cluster of think tank reports released in 2026. Schools are underperforming. The private sector is stagnant. And people are leaving.
Start with the classrooms.
The Public Policy Institute of California found that only 49% of students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts. Math was worse: just 37% cleared the bar. Federal testing delivered an even harder verdict, with only 29% of California fourth-graders scoring proficient in reading and 25% of eighth-graders reaching proficiency in math.
Mississippi, not a state that’s historically set the national standard for education, actually moved the needle by mandating phonics instruction statewide and backing it with consistent oversight. California drifted toward phonics eventually but never fully required it. An Atlantic piece examining Mississippi’s gains made the mechanism clear: voluntary adoption doesn’t produce the same results that hard mandates do. California’s candidates don’t seem eager to draw that conclusion.
The economic story isn’t more comfortable. Newsom regularly invokes California’s $4 trillion economy as evidence the state is thriving. The Public Policy Institute of California’s recent analysis tells a different story. Job growth has been concentrated in health care and local government. AI-driven stock gains have inflated the headline numbers. Unemployment hasn’t spiked, but it’s running higher than it was in 2022 and above nearly every other state in the country.
The private sector has barely grown. The Pacific Research Institute published its own report on the same problem, and author Wayne Winegarden didn’t soften the finding. “The data shows that California’s economic challenges are no longer theoretical, they are measurable and worsening,” Winegarden said. He went further: California’s weak job growth and shrinking private sector put the state at a crossroads, and without meaningful policy reforms, the gap between California and the rest of the country will only widen.
That’s not a fringe reading. It’s consistent with what the Public Policy Institute of California found when it looked at population.
Nearly 1.3 million people have left California on net since 2020. High housing costs are pushing workers to other states. The birth rate has hit a record low, which means the population can’t replenish itself naturally. Those two pressures together are reshaping the state’s demographic and fiscal picture faster than any of the nine candidates appears willing to acknowledge.
The budget consequences are structural, not cyclical. They won’t fix themselves in 2026 or 2027 regardless of who wins the election.
The Public Policy Institute of California flagged the core problem directly: “One major challenge for the next governor will be providing expensive services like health care to a growing older adult population while the share of workers shrinks.” That’s not a projection for some distant future. It’s a description of a problem already in motion, one that gets harder to solve the longer it goes unaddressed.
What’s the candidate response so far? Position papers, scattered promises, and debate talking points that don’t engage with any of these numbers. Gavin Newsom can’t run for governor in 2026 due to term limits, so the Democratic primary is genuinely open. The Republican field is also crowded. Neither side has produced a credible plan for the math.
The schools problem is solvable. Mississippi showed that. But it required political will and statewide enforcement mechanisms, not pilot programs and voluntary frameworks. California’s candidates haven’t committed to either.
The jobs problem is harder. California’s tax structure and regulatory environment have pushed private-sector growth to the margins while the public sector and a handful of tech giants carry the economy. That’s not a sustainable model, and it’s part of why workers are leaving. The next governor will either address the underlying conditions or preside over continued outmigration.
Winegarden’s assessment wasn’t directed at any single candidate, but it applies to all of them: the challenges are measurable and worsening. The question going into 2027, when a new governor takes office, is whether anyone running actually has a plan.
So far, the answer’s no.