For the First Time in Eight Years, California Is Choosing a New Governor

However Californians vote on Tuesday, one result is guaranteed: the state will have a new governor for the first time since 2019. Gavin Newsom, elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, is barred by term limits from running again, and the open-seat race to succeed him headlines the Nov. 3 general election ballot.

Open gubernatorial races are rare in California — the governorship has changed hands without an incumbent on the ballot only a handful of times in the past half-century — and they tend to scramble the state's politics. Candidates build their own coalitions rather than inheriting one, and the campaign runs the full length of the state, from the Oregon line to the Mexican border, through media markets as different as Los Angeles and Redding.

The job itself is among the most powerful in American state government. California's governor signs or vetoes legislation from the 120-member Legislature, proposes and revises a state budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars, commands the state's emergency response through fire and flood seasons, and appoints judges and the heads of the vast apparatus of state boards and commissions.

The inheritance is equally specific: a housing shortage measured in millions of units, a homelessness crisis that has resisted a decade of programs, wildfire seasons that now arrive nearly year-round, and a budget that swings with the stock market fortunes of the state's highest earners.

Also on Tuesday's ballot: all 52 of California's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, half the state Senate, the entire state Assembly, and statewide offices including attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, and insurance commissioner. Whoever takes the oath in January will not govern alone — but the signature at the bottom of every new California law is about to change.