- State & Local
- California
At the risk of starting this column with young readers muttering “never heard of the guy,” it was former House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill who coined the phrase “all politics is local.”
Granted, O’Neill didn’t always practice what he preached during a three-decade span in Congress that ended in the mid-1980’s, unless one thinks that his concern over the internal workings of Nicaragua, while he held the Speaker’s gavel, was as vital to his constituents as building tunnels through congested Boston.
Tip O’Neill’s story comes to mind now that another former House Speaker, San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi, has announced her retirement after 2026, bringing to an end a congressional career of almost four decades . . . and triggering something San Francisco hasn’t seen in ages: the makings of a contentious primary and what direction local Democrats will take.
With one big difference: whereas the race to replace O’Neill back in 1986 boiled down to sentimentality and name familiarity (the winner was Joseph P. Kennedy II, the elder son of Robert F. Kennedy), replacing Pelosi in San Francisco, in 2026, will be far more complicated.
Here’s why.
First, there is no Democrat in the San Francisco race with a megawatt surname, nor does Pelosi have a political heir apparent, which invites the question of why her daughter Christine, for years presumed to be gearing up for a run to replace her mother, decided not to pick up where her mother is leaving off (the answer, it seems: the younger Pelosi’s eyes are on a State Senate seat). Instead, the current field pits State Sen. Scott Wiener against Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a Silicon Valley engineer.
What we’ve learned so far about a primary that’s not for another six-and-a-half months: Pelosi Derangement Syndrome is transferable. Witness this National Review column describing Wiener’s record as “a made-for-Netflix tragicomic collection of utterly bonkers legislation that would almost certainly weigh on Democratic candidates everywhere.”
Second, there’s no certainty that Wiener will be the preferred choice of San Francisco primary voters next June if the race boils down to his more traditional brand of “EssEff” politics (the openly gay legislator champions LGBTQ issues and urban redesign) versus Chakrabarti’s more upstart style (as a longtime advocate of a progressive overhaul of America’s economic system, he represents what Politico calls “a campaign . . . to transform the Democratic Party”).
Then again, more Democrats could enter the field. The most notable: former mayor London Breed, ousted from office last November but reportedly considering a congressional run (should she win, it would be a remarkable comeback as Breed lost her mayoral reelection effort by 10 points).
What this adds up to is something as alien to San Francisco as summertime heat and humidity: earnest competition in a congressional district that’s been under the control of two families for the past six decades. And it also serves as a preview of the 2028 presidential primaries, with loyal Democrats asked to choose between the tried and true (Wiener deemed “moderate” by local media) or the more ambitious and progressive upstart. Not coincidentally, it’s the same strategic and messaging challenge for Newsom should he embark upon a presidential run after leaving office in January 2027 (i.e., how to balance progressive and centrist policies).
An interesting factoid about Newsom: should he somehow manage to get elected as America’s 48th president in 2028, it will be so after six decades of living in the San Francisco’s Bay Area blue bubble—Newsom being born and raised in San Francisco and nearby Marin County, followed by undergraduate studies at Santa Clara University, then back to San Francisco to begin wine and hospitality ventures before embarking on a political career that’s taken him from San Francisco’s City Hall to the State Capitol in Sacramento.
Should he return to his alma mater, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Newsom would find an eponymous county whose finances speak to the fiscal trainwreck that is California writ large—unless there are other states that managed to go from a $100 billion surplus to a $73 billion deficit in just two years.
Last week, at the same time Newsom was taking a victory lap for Proposition 50’s easy win and Pelosi was preparing to release her retirement video, Santa Clara County voters approved Measure A and a five-year increase in the county’s sale tax—a 0.625 percent boost, taking the sales tax to 9.75 percent—ostensibly to fund health care services. Why the urgency? According to the measure’s title: “To help our community address severe federal cuts enacted by the President and Congress (Measure A is estimated to raise about $300 million annually to help offset an anticipated $1 billion annual budget shortfall).”
At first glance, Santa Clara County pleading poverty might seem odd given the area’s ties to dizzying wealth—once a land brimming with agricultural produce (the so-called “Valley of Heart’s Delight”), the local fruit of choice in the county’s modern existence would be apples (with a capital “a” and not pluralized). The county’s $420 billion GDP ranked sixth in the nation for all counties in 2023.
Further evidence of local lucre: Santa Clara County is home to four tech titans currently on the Forbes “Top 10 Richest People in the World” list. This would be Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang—Huang the “poorest” of the three with a reported wealth of a mere $176 billion.
“Poor,” in fact, is not what you might think in the land of tech. According to California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, “low income” applies to individuals making under $111,700 annually due to the local high cost of living.
That said, missing from the conversation regarding Measure A and widening the county’s revenue stream: the need to rein in spending. In 2019, Santa Clara County’s government operated on an annual budget of $8.1 billion, a 16 percent increase over the previous year. The current budget: $13.7 billion, or a 69 percent increase in spending while the county’s population decreased from approximately 1.922 million in 2019 to about 1.916 million at present.
In this regard, a county government in Northern California is little different from its bigger brother in Sacramento—the first budget Newsom signed in 2019 totaling $215 billion. The state budget he signed this past June totaled $321 billion, or a 49 percent increase in spending while the state’s population fell from 39.44 million residents in 2019 to 39.14 million in 2024 before recovering to 39.5 million residents.
Prior to election day in Santa Clara County, the anti-tax complaints were similar to those registered against the state government’s secretive fiscal practices. Reportedly, the measure was conceived with little in the way of public input and introduced two days before it went on the ballot. As Measure A doesn’t specify how the extra revenue will be spent (long an open question at the state level), it required only mere majority support for passage (Measure A getting 57 percent approval, some 14 points less than Proposition 50 countywide).
The question in Santa Clara County as in Sacramento: Is there a better way to manage the public’s finances?
Ironically, it’s the same county which, back in May, released a multilingual media campaign to show support for local immigrants—“Once County One Future,” offered in six language. Along with this vow from local leadership:
“The County will continue to find the most effective ways to fulfill our mission of being the safety net for those in greatest need, regardless of immigration or economic status, religion, country of origin, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, disabilities, religion or political affiliation.”
Credit the county with wanting to be a welcoming home to all.
What a better home it and California would be, if their fiscal houses were in order.
