San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has officially bowed out of the race for California governor.
As of 10 p.m. Tuesday, Mahan is in sixth place with 4.5% or 190,643 votes, trailing conservative pundit Steve Hilton in first place with 26.7% or 1,122,670 votes, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra in second with 25.8% or 1,084,522 votes, billionaire Tom Steyer in third place with 19.7% or 827,973 votes, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco in fourth with 11.2% or 472,268 votes and former Congresswoman Katie Porter in fifth with 5% or 210,173 votes.
Mahan acknowledged that Tuesday night marked the end of his campaign, but voiced optimism it influenced the race in profound ways around public safety, homelessness and housing.
“Over the past four months, everywhere I go and every room I walked into, I said the same seven words: ‘Here’s what we’re doing in San Jose,’” Mahan said in a speech to supporters. “I had the privilege of telling the whole state about our city, about our problems, about our progress and about our people.”
Mahan signaled his effort to change California policy won’t end with this election.
“This is not the last time I will ask you to come together to fight for a better California,” he said to uproarious applause.
It spells a decisive defeat for the big city mayor whose campaign sought to peel off centrist Californians from both political parties, with millions of dollars in fundraising from Silicon Valley tech founders and billionaires. Mahan had teased his gubernatorial prospects for more than a year in San Jose, forming a moderate political think tank and sizing up Gov. Gavin Newsom over public safety and anti-Trump politics on TV news stations across the state.
Mahan, his wife Sylvia Scandar and supporters reacted with applause and smiles after results showed him trailing behind other candidates in the race.
“All of us who worked on this campaign have hope cause we saw Mahan-mentum,” Scandar told supporters in a speech after the first round of results. “If we had more name recognition earlier on, Matt would have been the leading Democratic candidate. We got in late but we did great.”
Mahan and his supporters took to Three Sisters in downtown San Jose’s San Pedro Square to keep track of live election results, where bartenders peeled rubber to keep a thirsty — and anxious — crowd in good spirits.
“I’m pretty sure tonight is not going to go well, but we already knew that going in, so our expectations were low and any surprises tonight to the upside would be a welcome relief,” Daniel Fernandes, a software engineer who lives in the Rosemary Park neighborhood, told San José Spotlight. “I’m interested to see if San Jose solutions can apply to the broader state of California.”
Mahan’s late January entry met great fanfare, with major donors including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and YCombinator CEO Garry Tan. But internal tension over his failure to gain momentum in polling signaled to many observers he would not make the top two spots advancing to the November general election — dealing a blow to the tech industry’s efforts to seize control of state politics.
Mahan entered the race notably late compared to other candidates, despite his ambitions for higher office being San Jose’s worst-kept political secret. He was the second top fundraiser in the race — at more than $15 million in donations — behind billionaire Tom Steyer, whose $197 million campaign was almost entirely self funded.
Signs of trouble in Mahan’s campaign have been visible since April, after the mayor parted ways with a top strategist, Eric Jaye, who had been in the mayor’s political orbit for years. Around the same time, supporters of Mahan pitched a desperate “all or nothing” fundraising effort to raise $35 million in an escrow account by mid-April.
Last month, an outside committee set up to support Mahan’s campaign, Deliver for Mahan, filed papers to shut down while another, California Back to Basics, refunded a $1 million donation from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who later disavowed the refund and reaffirmed his support for the mayor.
Things aren’t looking entirely sour for Mahan, who was first elected to serve a short, two-year term as mayor in 2022 after residents voted to move the mayoral election to align with the presidential election to increase voter turnout. He’s in the middle of his first full term ending December 2028 and can run for another four-year term — serving a potential total of 10 years in the office.
Contact Brandon Pho at brandon@sanjosespotlight.com or @brandonphooo on X.
This story originally appeared in San Jose Spotlight.