The Auction House in Sacramento

Tom Steyer is everywhere. You cannot drive across California this month without being ambushed by his face — a billboard in Fresno, a bus-stop ad in Oakland, a mid-roll spot on the podcast you put on while making dinner, Steyer grinning with the benign resolute expression of a man who has paid for your attention in bulk. He has spent $120 million on advertising alone in the California governor's race so far this cycle, which is to say nearly four times what Gavin Newsom spent winning the entire 2018 race. And the primary is still six weeks away.

This is fine.

Steyer is the hedge fund billionaire turned climate activist turned second-time-around office seeker, and by the rough accounting of the two political campaigns he has now spent money on, he is the half-billion-dollar man — $340 million torched in the 2020 presidential pyre, $120 million plowed into California so far, and whatever unspecified sum is queued up for the final sprint. This is more than Gavin Newsom. This is more than the Democrats' all-in gerrymandering push in California currently running parallel. This is, per Politico, more than any other campaign in America this cycle.

And the result, at present, is that Tom Steyer is statistically tied with a former congressman named Eric Swalwell — a man whose campaign detonated last Friday.

That is a great deal of money to buy a tie with a man in midair.

Swalwell was, until Friday, the labor-coalition candidate, the safe vote, the figure the California Teachers Association had endorsed. Then the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published stories detailing sexual misconduct and assault allegations from four women, and the entire apparatus came apart like a card table in a hurricane. Within seventy-two hours, Swalwell had lost all twenty-one of his Democratic House and Senate endorsements and suspended the campaign. The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation. By Tuesday, the California Teachers Association had un-endorsed him and rolled its support over to Steyer.

Assemblymember Tasha Boerner — for whom Steyer is now the fifth candidate she has endorsed this cycle, each prior choice having withdrawn or imploded in succession — defected the same day. Rep. Jared Huffman, sensing the updraft, had already climbed aboard the Sunday before. “I'd been hoping Tom would break out of the pack for a long time,” Huffman said. This is, I note, a thing you say when someone has spent more on television ads than the GDP of a small Pacific island nation and is still not breaking out of the pack.

Steyer, for his part, remains serene. “You're going to find this hard to believe, but there's been a lot of incoming calls,” he told reporters this week.

The calls, one imagines, are coming in fine.

But here is the thing hanging in the Sacramento air like a bad smell that is half brush fire and half money: the $120 million has not, in any meaningful sense, worked. Steyer has bought his way into the top tier. Yes. He is now tied with former Rep. Katie Porter. Before Friday, he was tied with Swalwell. The consultant Addisu Demissie — a veteran of enough California statewide races to have developed the thousand-yard stare of a Civil War daguerreotype — put it this way:

He can boost himself, he can do negative on Katie, he can do negative on Mahan — he can do it all. But the flashing yellow light is: He spent $120 million to be tied with Eric Swalwell and now potentially tied with Katie Porter — will another $120 million fundamentally change that?

Probably not. Probably the next $120 million does exactly what the first $120 million did, which is to say it turns into ad impressions that slowly ratchet Tom Steyer's name recognition upward by increments too small to be observed by the naked eye. We are watching a billionaire attempt to solve a political problem with the only tool he has, which is more money. It is like watching a man try to nail a painting to the wall using a blender.

And this is where the real bile of the California race enters. An anti-Steyer PAC — a dark and cheerful coalition of real estate developers and investor-owned utilities, the kind of people who own the pipes the rest of us pay to use — has started running ads accusing Steyer of having, many years ago, profited from investments in private prisons. This is in fact true. Steyer's old hedge fund did invest in private prisons. The PAC's spokesperson, a person named Amelia Matier, issued a statement declaring that “we're not going to sit back and let a hedge fund billionaire buy the governor's office.”

Reader: the PAC is funded by billionaires.

This is the bezel of the California governor's race as currently configured. One hedge-fund climate man running on breaking up the utilities. A PAC of utilities and developers running on breaking up the hedge-fund climate man. Both sides claiming the mantle of the people. Neither side, it must be said, has ever been mistaken for the people.

There is a precedent here. In 1998, two big-spending candidates in the California governor's race went so negative on each other that they functionally canceled one another out, and a mild and moderate figure named Gray Davis walked through the wreckage straight into the governor's mansion. Nobody is saying out loud that Porter, or San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan — the tech-backed long-shot whose super PAC is currently shopping an internal third-place poll around Sacramento like it's the Zapruder film — could be the Davis of this cycle. But people are thinking it. The weather in Sacramento is that kind of weather.

And hanging over the whole race, in a way that is both too obvious to mention and impossible not to mention, is California's top-two primary. Any two candidates regardless of party advance to the general. Split the Democratic field finely enough and two Republicans slip through. This is, in part, why the establishment had been coalescing around Swalwell in the first place — consolidation as triage. Now the triage is in pieces on the floor and the patient is Steyer, bleeding money, polling level with Porter.

I'd file more but the Steyer ad just came on for the fourth time in an hour.

He is promising to fix California.

So was the last guy.