Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped his California governor campaign Sunday evening, then quit Congress the following afternoon. The exits came fast after the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published detailed accounts Friday of sexual harassment and assault allegations from multiple women.
Swalwell had denied wrongdoing before those stories ran. Once they were out, he posted a video on X keeping that denial intact while apologizing to his wife for “mistakes in judgment” and to the public “if in any way you have doubted your support for me.” That statement didn’t stop the bleed. Major Democratic Party leaders and unions, moving with unusual speed, called on him to step down within hours of the Chronicle piece hitting.
By Sunday night, he was done. His post on X read: “I am suspending my campaign for governor. To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past. I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made, but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”
The resignation reshapes a Democratic primary that had, before Friday, looked like a three-person contest among Swalwell, billionaire investor Tom Steyer, and former Congressmember Katie Porter. The other 61 names on the June 2026 ballot don’t register in any serious polling. They’re stuck in low single digits and that’s not changing.
Steyer had already been sharpening his elbows. During Sunday’s San Francisco Giants and Baltimore Orioles broadcast, with Swalwell still technically in the race, a Steyer ad aired taking direct aim at Swalwell’s congressional voting record. The Giants lost, and a few hours after the final out, Swalwell posted his suspension. The timing wasn’t subtle.
Steyer’s now the best-funded candidate in the field. But according to CalMatters, the candidate with the most to gain from Swalwell’s collapse may actually be Porter. The allegations describe a pattern of conduct that’s likely to drive real anger among women voters, and Porter’s entire political profile is built on holding powerful people accountable. She doesn’t need a new message. The story hands it to her.
Porter told reporters she found the accounts disturbing and that Swalwell was right to step aside.
There’s a structural problem the collapse also exposes. Swalwell’s campaign was built almost entirely on his identity as a Trump critic in Congress, with thin engagement on the things California voters actually cite when you ask them what’s wrong: homelessness, water supply, an economy that’s moved sluggishly, and a state budget deep in the red. That anti-Trump posture raised money. It didn’t give him a platform that could survive a personal crisis. When the Chronicle and CNN stories ran, he had no policy foundation to retreat to.
The legal exposure doesn’t end with a campaign suspension. A New York prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation into an alleged assault in that city. Congressional leaders are already hearing calls to accelerate his departure before he formally completes the resignation process.
Swalwell’s supporters, particularly in the Bay Area districts he’s represented, are now scrambling. Some were already privately uncomfortable with his polling trajectory even before Friday. His base in the 72-hour period after the Chronicle story broke didn’t hold. It fell apart. That’s the kind of thing you see when a candidate’s support is wide but not deep, when people are with you because you’re familiar, not because they’ve made a considered commitment.
What happens to those voters matters. Porter’s campaign believes they’re movable. Steyer’s team is making the same calculation. The 04 percentage points separating candidates in some internal surveys could shift substantially once the June ballot crystallizes around a real two-person race.
“But I think you know who I am,” he said earlier in the week, before the stories published, in an apparent attempt to reassure donors who’d heard rumors. It didn’t hold.
The 2026 governor’s race is now genuinely open in a way it wasn’t 72 hours ago.