Matt Mahan

“If you have dozens of priorities, you have none. When I took office, I saw this laundry list of things that we said were priorities, none of which we were excelling at. That’s why, when I became mayor, I said we would focus on only a few things: public safety, curbing homelessness, and making our streets as clean as possible. Today, San Jose is not just one of the safest cities in the state, but in the entire country.”

I heard this from Matt Mahan a couple of years ago after he became mayor of San Jose in 2023. He was young, impressive, and purely solutions-oriented. But he also understood the human side of government. He had been a schoolteacher in the classroom and had young kids at home. “The goal of government should be to help people succeed and live the kind of lives they want.” Pretty simple, straightforward mission statement.

Now, Matt is running for governor of California. “The spending of the government of California has gone up 60% in the past 5 years, to over $340 billion today. Has California gotten 60% better in that time? No one thinks it has.” Indeed, California today is experiencing net population outflows primarily because it’s gotten too expensive to live and raise a family. “I’m running for governor because I think I can make the government deliver more value for the people than we are currently getting.”

One example Matt cited to me in my interview of him for the podcast this week: “When I took office in San Jose, we had a homelessness program run by an organization that employed 40 outreach workers. They were averaging only 1 referral per month per worker. Now, it wasn’t entirely their fault, as we also didn’t have enough beds. But we shifted the resources to beds, and now we have only 10 outreach workers but they’re much more productive because they actually have resources to offer a person on the street.” Very common sense, but imagine that kind of recalibration across a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. Matt worked in the private sector after his stint as a teacher so he understands how to effectively use resources. The potential benefit for the state and its people is enormous.

His campaign slogan is “Back to Basics.” A lot of our politics has devolved into arguing about this priority or that. Matt’s approach is to get the machine of government actually delivering what it’s supposed to. What a straightforward, yet critical, mission.

The governor’s race in California is a non-partisan affair; the all-party primary is on June 2^nd with the top two vote-getters proceeding to the general election in November. If Matt gets over 20% of the vote in June he will probably go to the general election, where I think he would be very tough to beat.

As you can tell, I’m enthused about Matt’s campaign as I think it has enormous potential to improve the lives of tens of millions of Californians. For my interview of Matt, click here. To check out his campaign, including to donate (as I have), click here. I’m glad someone like Matt decided to make this kind of case in such an important race. He’s got the track record to demonstrate what kind of governor he’d be. And if enough people see his message, I have no doubt that he’ll be in Sacramento next year delivering massive wins for the people.

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