California’s candidates abandon the migrant while fighting for the governorship. On Tuesday, voters will encounter a ballot stripped of traditional partisan guardrails by the top-two system adopted in 2010. All names appear together. The two who gather the most votes advance to face you in November. The campaign architects have locked you into a manufactured contest, treating governance as a relay race for political capital rather than a stewardship over human lives. The trajectory of the race fractured in April when Representative Eric Swalwell stepped aside following sexual assault accusations, leaving a vacuum that opportunists rushed to fill. You are competing for the executive leadership of an economy that rivals nations, crafting platforms and trading in slogans, but you leave the stranger to cross in the dark. The mechanics of the jungle primary reveal the moral arrangement of a state that preaches justice to the federal government while practicing its opposite at its own border.
Those of us who welcomed the departure of the polished candidate must confess our own complicity in a political culture that consumes women’s voices to elevate men until the scandal becomes too loud to ignore. We who line up to vote in these managed elections bear our own share of the weight. We hand our moral reasoning to party pamphlets, celebrate the federal-state saber-rattling as sport, and demand moral reckoning from the aspirants while shielding our own parishes from the harder work of confronting the abuse of power within our own communities. The system treats the accusation as a political inconvenience; you treat it as a scheduling conflict rather than a wound to a human person. We shield our own coalition from scrutiny.
Governor Gavin Newsom, who leaves office in January, recently signed a law to shield California’s elections from federal interference, drawing cheers from a constituency that believes the state stands alone as a bastion of progress. But the aspirants who would inherit his chair position themselves against Washington while ignoring the crucifixion at your own gates. This procedural shield against the federal government does not pour a single drop of irrigation into the cracked soil of a Central Valley orchard during a record drought, does not enforce the overtime pay of a fast-food worker in Los Angeles, and does not place a single roof over a displaced family. The governor’s seat controls the levers that determine whether a family keeps its home. Yet the race proceeds as if the executive office is merely a launchpad for national opposition research. Resistance to Washington is a hollow posture if it does not mean resistance to the deportation machine grinding forward, relying on voluntary departure and self-deportation to purge the poor. The bishops’ pastoral letter Strangers No Longer names the right to migrate as a moral necessity, yet you enforce the very policies that tear families apart and leave children to wait in limbo.
You speak of the Central Valley as if its acres harvest themselves, of Silicon Valley as if its code writes without hands, of the entertainment sector as if its images conjure from nothing. The farm laborer who feeds the nation and the janitor whose invisibility keeps the engine running are the people you celebrate in your platforms and forget in your policies. The Hebrew prophets and the red letters of the gospel speak with one voice against the worship of economic output when it demands the collateral damage of the poor. You treat the migrant as a ballot variable rather than a human person. What reigns in Sacramento is a cool, comfortable politics that has forgotten how to weep for the suffering, a politics that calls the system broken while refusing to mend the broken bones it creates. You are handed chess pieces and told they are leaders.
The door of return stands open to whoever occupies the desk on January 1, 2027. Every economic and political theory must set about providing each inhabitant of this state with the minimum wherewithal to live in dignity. Governing is not a performance for cable news; it is the daily administration of mercy in budgets, in zoning, in school funding, in the treatment of the undocumented family and the abandoned veteran. Lay down the partisan armor. Pick up the actual work of feeding the hungry and shoring up the levees. The migrant who crosses the desert is not a scheduling conflict for the top-two runoff. He is a person, and the governor who remembers this will find the grace to lead. The land does not care which coalition holds the seal; it only asks that those who govern it honor the ledger of human need and stop treating the vulnerable as collateral damage in the wars they wage for themselves.