The results of the California governor’s race, Los Angeles mayoral race and several House races in the state’s June 2 elections could be a bellwether for the Democratic Party’s direction on Israel, experts told JNS.
Under California’s open primary system, the two candidates in each race who receive the most votes advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. A candidate that receives a majority of the vote wins outright.
In both the Los Angeles mayoral and the California governor races, none of the leading Democratic candidates are “strong Zionists,” but they “represent two very different directions on where the Democrats are headed on Israel,” the political science lecturer Dan Schnur told JNS.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Xavier Becerra, a former U.S. secretary of health and human services who is running for governor, are “status quo Israel supporters but without strong connections,” the scholar, who teaches at Pepperdine University, University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, told JNS.
Nithya Raman, a Los Angeles city councilwoman running for mayor, and businessman Tom Steyer, a gubernatorial candidate, would “represent a greater shift and greater challenge,” Schnur said.
In a May 15 appearance on the show of anti-Israel podcaster Hasan Piker, Raman said that she agrees with organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that Israel is guilty of “genocide.”
Piker, who has lauded Hamas, asked Raman if she thinks that Israel is an apartheid state. “Yeah. I think that they’re not treating people fairly,” she said.
Raman also said that she wouldn’t seek out Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles’s endorsement again after the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter censured her in 2024 for accepting an endorsement from the pro-Israel group.
Piker has said that Raman is “a million times better” than Bass.
‘Real-time test’
Jared Sclar, a Democratic political consultant in San Diego, told JNS that the races are a “real-time test of where the Democratic coalition is heading on Israel, but the results will cut in more than one direction, and that split is the story.”
It is “striking” that in the governor’s race, “antisemitism and Israel moved from the margins to the center of a California governor’s primary,” he said.
“Tom Steyer’s decision to brand AIPAC a ‘dark money’ group with no place in our politics put him on the wrong side of a lot of pro-Israel Democrats, and it cost him endorsements,” Sclar told JNS.
If the general election ends up pitting Steyer against Becerra, “we can expect Israel to come more into focus as both candidates will need to aggressively court progressives,” Sclar said.
Schnur, the political science lecturer, told JNS that there are multiple Democratic congressional primaries with candidates that have “significantly different” positions on Israel.
“The outcome of those House primaries could tell us a lot about where the Democratic Party is headed on Israel and the Middle East in a post-Trump era,” he said.
According to Sclar, the 11th Congressional District, the seat long held by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), ought to be watched closely.
In that race, Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator who is running for Pelosi’s seat, resigned from his position as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus in January after he said that Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza.
“Saikat Chakrabarti runs to his left on Israel and Connie Chan,” a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “with Pelosi’s backing, said the same,” Sclar told JNS. “When the center of gravity moves that far in the bluest district in America, that tells you something.”
Democratic Majority for Israel’s political action committee has gotten involved in the 22nd and 48th Congressional Districts, supporting Jasmeet Bains, a member of the California state Assembly, and Marni von Wilpert, a San Diego city councilwoman.
Bains is looking to unseat Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) in the Central Valley and is facing fellow Democrat Randy Villegas, a member of the Visalia Unified School District Board of Education whom Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has endorsed.
Von Wilpert is running for Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) seat, and one of her Democratic opponents is Ammar Campa-Najjar, the grandson of a founding member of Fatah.
Brian Romick, CEO and president of Democratic Majority for Israel, told JNS that “the road to a Democratic House runs through California.”
Bains and von Wilpert are “two strong, pro-Israel candidates who can win both primaries and tough general elections and have the credibility to actually deliver,” he said. “No one else is doing that work at this scale, and we believe it will be the difference between a pro-Israel Democratic majority and another two years in the minority.”
Sclar told JNS that “the party hasn’t settled this, and these races are the argument playing out in public.”
“Tuesday will tell us what moves Democratic voters more in 2026, the allegation that a candidate is bankrolled by pro-Israel groups or the ads those same groups are running for their preferred candidate,” the political consultant said.
“I suspect we land roughly where we started, a Democratic Party containing both pro-Israel and anti-Israel voices, with no clear verdict on which faction is winning,” he told JNS.
