Democrats have run California into the ground for 16 straight years, with supermajorities and zero excuses—not a single Republican to blame.   Now, with Gavin Newsom term-limited, they’re supposed to pick a successor. And what do we get? A clown car of mediocrity: A weak, fractured bench so pathetic they can’t even decide on a candidate, let alone consolidate behind one. Seven major Democrats are still splitting the vote weeks before the primary, each refusing to drop out because none of them actually stands out.  This is not a field of leaders. This is a lineup of failures. Every single one of them doubling down on the exact same failed progressive policies that gave us tent cities, smash-and-grab crime, crushing costs, and a record exodus.   And right now, the establishment is desperately trying to coordinate one man as the savior.  Xavier Becerra—how the heck is this guy even running? But let’s start with the rest of the sorry crew first. Katie Porter: She’s the whiteboard warrior who grilled CEOs on TV. She built a brand yelling at corporations, then ran for Senate and flamed out. Zero executive experience, zero record of fixing anything.  She’s still pushing the same anti-business populism while California families get crushed by the highest cost of living in America. But, no—don’t worry. She drives a minivan.   Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate crusader, self-funding his way through ads—he ran for president, got nowhere, and now he’s back with the same green mandates that doubled your electricity bill in California and made gas the most expensive in the country.  His past investments in coal and private prisons—conveniently ignored—while he lectures the rest of us.   Matt Mahan, San Jose mayor, who criticizes Newsom from the Left. His city, San Jose, still deals with the same homelessness and crime wave every other blue city has. No statewide vision, just more of the same.  Antonio Villaraigosa, the former L.A. mayor and assembly speaker—he had his shot years ago. L.A. streets got worse on his watch, and now he’s recycling the same old promises while the state hemorrhages residents.   Tony Thurmond, state school superintendent—California pours mountains of cash into education and still ranks near the bottom. He oversees that mediocrity and wants a promotion.  Betty Yee—she’s the only one, again, who has dropped out, but she’s still on the ballot—but she’s the former controller. She watched the budget swing wildly with stock prices and did nothing to stop the tax-and-spend insanity.   So every one of these people has something in common: They’re a loyal foot soldier in the same failed experiment.  Higher taxes, heavier regulations, soft-on-crime reforms, endless spending on homelessness that produces more tents, and green fantasies that make life unaffordable. They’re not offering change. They’re offering four more years of the same decline.   And that’s why the party can’t consolidate. Nobody stands out because they’re all the same. Recycled progressive failures who helped create this mess and now want to manage it.  So who does the Democratic Party machine turn to when the field is this weak? Xavier Becerra. The insiders, the donors, the Sacramento power brokers—they are rallying hard behind him right now. After Eric Swalwell imploded in scandal and dropped out, Becerra’s poll numbers shot up overnight. He’s suddenly the top Democrat in the race.  The establishment is trying to coordinate him as the anointed one, the safe, experienced choice to keep the machine humming.   This is their best? This is who they want to hand the keys to the fifth-largest economy on Earth? I’d like to talk about why that’s insane.  How is Xavier Becerra even running for governor? The guy has never run anything successfully. He’s a career politician and lawyer with zero health care experience, zero executive leadership record, and a trail of embarrassing failures everywhere he’s gone.  As California attorney general, he was a partisan attack dog who sued the Trump administration over 120 times, wasting your tax dollars on political theater instead of actually protecting Californians.  He went after pro-life pregnancy centers, forcing them to advertise abortions—a law the Supreme Court smacked down as unconstitutional.   He demanded nonprofits hand over donor lists and published them, violating privacy and exposing people to harassment. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against him there, too.  Becerra threatened reporters who wanted public records on crooked cops. He coddled bad police while pretending to be a reformer.   And during the early COVID chaos, his office was slammed for failing to lead on unemployment fraud—the biggest taxpayer rip-off in state history. He owns that.  Then Biden made him HHS secretary, head of the entire federal health apparatus during a pandemic. No medical background, no science background—just a left-wing trial lawyer.   What did Becerra deliver? An invisible, detached disaster. Critics called him missing in action—MIA. He barely showed up for briefings. He let infighting between CDC, FDA, and NIH drag on.  He violated the Hatch Act by campaigning for a Democrat while in office. He botched the legal reappointment of key NIH officials, putting billions in research and jobs in legal jeopardy—an attorney who couldn’t even handle basic paperwork required by the Constitution.  His monkeypox response—another mess under his watch. COVID guidance flip-flopped while he stayed on the sidelines. He pushed vaccine mandates and government tracking of who got jabbed, saying it was the government’s business to know your medical choices.  And then, my favorite—there’s the migrant-children scandal, one of the darkest stains on his record. Under Becerra’s watch at HHS, the department lost track of tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children. Early reports showed at least 85,000 children they couldn’t reach after placing them with sponsors. Broader estimates from oversight reports put the number unaccounted for as high as 320,000. Many were rushed into the hands of unvetted sponsors—some with criminal ties, some addresses that turned out to be strip clubs. Children ended up in forced labor, exploited and trafficked—reports of kids working in dangerous jobs, disappearing into the shadows.  Congress grilled Becerra repeatedly. His response: He downplayed it, claiming they just weren’t answering the phone. The top Health and Human Services official in America—the man in charge of protecting vulnerable kids—couldn’t account for tens of thousands of children placed under his department’s care.  That’s not oversight. That’s catastrophic negligence. That’s children treated like inventory in a failed open-border experiment.  Add in the corruption cloud from his own campaign account—money siphoned off by his longtime chief of staff and insiders in a federal fraud case. The former top law enforcement officer in California claims he had no idea.  I mean, the former attorney general of California, the top law enforcement officer in the state, didn’t notice his own inner circle running a scam. That’s incompetence wrapped in denial.  And this is the guy the Democratic establishment wants to crown—the one who helped turn California into a cautionary tale and then went to Washington to fumble a national health crisis.   The one who spent his career attacking religious freedoms, privacy rights, and common sense while doubling down on the same progressive poison that created our tent cities, our crime wave, and our middle-class exodus.  Becerra is not the solution. He’s the problem with a fresh coat of paint.  The Democrat bench for governor is embarrassingly weak because the entire party is bankrupt of new ideas. They can’t consolidate because every option is just more of the same failure that’s already destroying the state—and their desperate choice to rally behind Xavier Becerra proves it.  This is the best they’ve got? A scandal-plagued, unqualified careerist who failed at every level and now wants the biggest job in California.   Well, I guess he’s following in the footsteps of Gavin Newsom, who also failed upward spectacularly.  Nonetheless, California deserves better than this pathetic parade of has-beens and never-weres. The evidence is everywhere. It’s undeniable—the tents, the bills, the moving trucks.  If this is the Democrat bench, the state is in even deeper trouble than we thought.  This is Drew Allen with The Daily Signal. Thank you for watching.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.