The California primary is fast approaching. Mail-in voting begins in a couple weeks and Election Day is less than two months away. Nine Democratic and Republican candidates remain in the crowded race for governor and Insight is looking to interview all of them in the lead up to the election.
We kicked off our series of interviews with former State Controller Betty Yee. She was the state’s top financial officer during both Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom’s administrations from 2015 to 2023. The Democratic candidate joined Vicki Gonzalez to talk about why she’s running to be the next governor of California.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
So, you have a long career in state public office, dating back to Governor Gray Davis, as his budget director, to the state board of equalization, overseeing property taxes, and then, of course, as California state controller, acting as the chief fiscal officer. What drew you to a career that revolves around money and funding?
My family business. My parents are both immigrants from China and they started a laundry and dry cleaning business. And with any family business, particularly with immigrant parents who don’t speak English, the children are the best employees. So I took care of the books for the business, at the young age of 8. It was very rudimentary. I followed how much we took in every week and how much we paid out and what we earned every week but it just gave me very good insight into the role of numbers and finance.
You were state controller during the time of both Governor Brown and of course Governor Newsom. How do you view Governor Newsom’s two terms in office? Is there anything you would do differently?
I think Governor Newsom has been a good governor. I particularly give him high marks during the pandemic. He was a very visible governor. He put forth a lot of public information and really kept the people of California well-informed in terms of what was happening.
It was a challenging time and I think everyone just wanted to just figure out how to cope. People lost jobs and so it was a very challenging time but I appreciated his just being present every single day with information and also with assistance.
I would say that where I believe he’s fallen short is just really about, now governing for California. This is a time when that’s quite fraught with looming healthcare cuts coming from the federal government, people are really trying to live through a huge affordability crisis that we have here in California. And I just think that this is a time where we need to lean in and really build our strength with how we’re going to lift up communities as the antidote to fight back against Trump’s target towards California.
California is the fourth largest economy in the world. But everyday Californians don’t necessarily feel that benefit. You’ve been a leader with the state’s finances for the better part of two decades. Why should voters choose you if they don’t agree with the fiscal priorities and the direction of the state?
I think this is what it’s about, how do we set a new direction to where we can live up to the ambition of being a large global economy that rests on the economic health of each Californian. And by that, I mean, where can we make investments that actually do help Californians be able to share in this economic prosperity. California is experiencing a widening wealth gap. And that’s really the context within which I speak about everything.
It’s been hitting our brown and black households much more significantly, but it’s also encroaching upon the middle class. When you approach looking at how you solve the wealth gap, and I’m not sure that we’re going to close it all together, we look at how do we create opportunities for people to earn more. And then be able to look at how they can start creating wealth. And also how do we look at really having those supports that are going to help them be able to be in the workforce to look for those opportunities to earn more.
So the cost of health care, the cost of child care, those kinds of things that are going to have to be investments and they’re going to have to be subsidized. But I think the return in terms of what we will get relative to economic benefit, we’ll be able to pay for all that.
California has had some pretty dramatic budget swings from these record surpluses in the days of the pandemic, to now facing a deficit that is projected to grow in future budget cycles. You were the state’s chief fiscal officer during the pandemic. At that time, was there any foreshadowing that we would be in this difficult budget situation today?
You know, what I really surmised during that time, is we were in an emergency situation. So, I understand that when we had surpluses during that time, we would deploy our resources fairly quickly to keep Californians healthy and safe.
I think we could have done a better job with respect to looking at how we modernize existing programs so that coming out of the pandemic, we have those programs in place. Not necessarily standing up new bureaucracies or new entities, but really modernizing them. Because we have the talent in state government. This is what professionals do all the time from administration to administration from economies to economies. And we didn’t do that.
We also looked at the one-time COVID relief as something that was going to probably be there longer than we thought it would be. And so that always is a trigger for me that relief is not a permanent solution. And so what we have today is a period of the last number of years where we’ve spent more than what we’ve brought in.
And I think for me it is really about, how do we have discipline, always looking out what we have to work with to begin with instead of always trying to create the next new attractive program.
This race in particular is pretty unusual and that there’s just a large field of candidates. There are growing concerns that the Democratic vote could be diluted in the primary, possibly leading to two Republican candidates advancing to the general election in November. How serious of a possibility do you think that is?
I personally don’t think that’s a serious possibility. We are here in California. Democrats had a huge victory with Prop 50 in November. The organizing and mobilization is already beginning with respect to winning the House seats that were part of the Prop 50 redistributing plan. So that work was already underway. But we have two fairly prominent Republicans who are running, one just endorsed recently this week by the president. And they are not aligned with our values here in California.
I don’t think that is a threat. I think from my perspective, it was fabricated in part just to try to narrow the field and I think those who are polling in single digits such as myself are getting lots of communication about dropping out of the race.
From the very beginning of this race it’s been a lot of starts and stops because there was speculation about all different kinds of people jumping into the race all the way from our former Vice President Kamala Harris to our U.S. Senator Alex Padilla. So as a campaign we’ve been just assessing our viability all the way along. My pollsters have been polling gubernatorial races for the last 50 cycles and I’ve never seen anything like this from the perspective of how voters are not focused on this race yet.
We still have about 25% of the electorate undecided. Those who are picking a candidate are still shopping for one. They don’t really know that much about the candidates. And so from that perspective, I think my job is to just continue to make my case. And by the time ballots hit the early part of May, I think the question that most voters ask themselves when they have the ballot in hand is, “who’s going to represent my interests and concerns the best?”