In California, where one party governs almost everything, the money has learned to fight its wars inside the family. With less than three weeks to Election Day, outside groups are pouring millions into two kinds of legislative contests: purple districts where a Democrat faces a Republican, and safe Democratic districts where the real argument is between Democrats of different convictions. Political action committees backed by unions and business have spent over $100 million on state legislative races this cycle, a CalMatters analysis found, eclipsing 2024. The law permits unlimited “independent expenditures” for or against a candidate, so long as no one coordinates with the campaign.
Since January, two new tech-funded groups have dominated. Grow California, financed by cryptocurrency investor Chris Larsen and venture capitalist Tim Draper as a self-described “counterforce” to union spending, has spent more than $20 million. California Leads, funded by Meta and Google, has spent close to $14 million behind candidates devoted to “real-world solutions rather than ideological fights.” A third machine, Legislative Action PAC, was founded by Republican strategists in 2025 at the request of Republican lawmakers frustrated with their own state party; funded by Google, AT&T and oil and gas companies, it and two offshoot PACs have spent at least $6 million since April to defend seats Republicans flipped in 2024.
CalMatters counted campaign spending from the June 2 primary through Sept. 19 and independent expenditures through Oct. 13 to rank the nine most expensive competitive races. Among them:
The priciest: two councilmembers in Santa Ana
At $5.6 million, Assembly District 68 pits two millennial Democrats from the Santa Ana City Council against each other. Jessie Lopez is the progressive: she helped pass a rent control ordinance in 2021 and survived a recall attempt by the local police union after voting to create a police oversight commission in 2022. Tech money flows to her opponent, David Penaloza — $1.4 million from California Leads and $1.3 million from Grow California in recent weeks — while unions representing public employees, nurses and Cal State faculty have spent a combined $1.4 million for Lopez and against Penaloza.
Landlords’ money on the coast
Senate District 24, $5 million, takes in Malibu and Santa Monica in the contest to succeed Sen. Ben Allen. John Erickson, a West Hollywood councilmember, wants to repeal both the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act and the Ellis Act, the twin pillars limiting local rent control. That has drawn the landlords: the California Apartment Association has spent $450,000 attacking him, and a PAC funded mainly by the California Realtors Association has spent over $600,000 backing Brian Goldsmith, an entrepreneur and former senior adviser to Democratic Majority for Israel. Labor and criminal justice reform advocates bankroll Erickson.
Wallis defends a purple island
Assembly District 47, $4.7 million, joins deep-blue Palm Springs and Cathedral City to conservative suburbs around Redlands and Yucaipa. Republican Assemblymember Greg Wallis, a moderate with a pro-business record, has outspent Democrat Leila Namvar — a former labor leader and city planner — six to one, with independent spending for him better than five to one: $1.1 million from California Leads, some $450,000 from an oil and gas PAC, about the same from Legislative Bipartisan Action PAC. The Democratic Party has countered with roughly $1.8 million to Namvar since mid-September.
The strangest bedfellows in Los Angeles
In Senate District 26, $4.6 million, two Democrats seek to replace progressive Sen. María Elena Durazo. Grow California and California Leads have put about $3 million behind Sara Hernandez, a community college trustee — though her own website vows to “fight for strict rules with real enforcement” on Big Tech profits. Cardrooms at the nearby Hawaiian Gardens and Commerce casinos, locked in a perennial war with tribal casinos, added about $500,000. Her rival, East Los Angeles planning commissioner Sarah Rascón, rejects corporate money; her campaign had spent about $34,000 by mid-September, with over $100,000 in outside help from the Working Families Party and California Environmental Voters.
Assembly District 12, $3.8 million, spans Marin and part of Sonoma. Grow California has spent some $1.8 million for Marin County Supervisor Eric Lucan over progressive Rohnert Park Councilmember Jackie Elward, who told KQED she supports moratoriums on “all things AI,” including data centers, because “protecting workers is the priority.” The California Labor Federation, Consumer Attorneys of California and SEIU’s state council have spent over $1 million for her.
Three Republican holds
Along the Mexican border, Assembly District 36 ($3.2 million) went for Trump by 1.3 percentage points in 2024, the year Republican Jeff Gonzalez flipped it. Oil and gas companies, a Chamber of Commerce PAC and Legislative Bipartisan Action PAC have spent $2.7 million to keep him against Democrat Ida Obeso-Martinez, a nurse practitioner and Imperial County councilmember, who has no outside spending behind her but received over $1.5 million from the Democratic Party. In Assembly District 7 ($2.8 million), Republican Josh Hoover’s allies — business groups, cardrooms, the Legislative Action PAC — have spent at least $2.3 million against retired superintendent Amy Slavensky, whose support comes only from about $1 million in party money. And in Assembly District 58 ($2.6 million), Republican Leticia Castillo, who took the Riverside County seat by 596 votes in 2024, faces a rematch with Clarissa Cervantes, who finished 24 votes ahead of her in the June primary and has outspent the incumbent — close to $1 million from her campaign account to Castillo’s $80,000.
Read the whole ledger and a pattern emerges. The unions spend where workers are organized; the cardrooms spend where cards are dealt; the landlords spend where tenants organize. But the new money — crypto fortunes, social media empires, search engines — spends everywhere, and what it buys most reliably is the moderate Democrat in a safe seat. California’s one-party politics has not abolished the contest between capital and labor. It has merely moved it indoors, into primaries and runoffs where everyone wears the same color and the advertisements never mention who is paying.