State primary may have seeded San Jose mayor’s future goals

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is going back to City Hall with his hat in his hands. But while his bid for governor failed, he’s shown residents and political observers a new side of himself – and the monied interests he’s willing to rub shoulders with.

Mahan – who was in sixth place behind Steve Hilton and Xavier Becerra for governor as of Monday morning – has since told KTVU he plans to run for another mayoral term in 2028. If successful, that would give him a total of 10 years in office as the politically moderate face of City Hall.

It remains to be seen how his gubernatorial support from Trump-aligned tech figures – and his attacks on California’s Democratic establishment – might translate in an otherwise comfortable 2028 reelection appeal to mostly liberal San Jose voters. But it’s clear that residents, this time around, will know he’s got his eyes on a higher prize, and that future policy proposals could be in furtherance of higher prospects.

Mahan’s campaign declined to comment.

“Obviously he’s very ambitious to run for governor after just a couple of years as mayor – it says a lot and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but a lot of people were surprised he’d try to move as quickly as he did,”  Rich Robinson, a political consultant who’s worked on presidential campaigns for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, told San José Spotlight. “He wasn’t ready for primetime.”

Mahan often struggled to reconcile his Democrat image with his campaign’s financial support. He was the second largest fundraiser in the race at nearly $16 million, second only to the self-funded campaign of billionaire Tom Steyer at $216 million. And while Mahan often attacked Steyer in the register of a billionaire skeptic, he offered innocuous rationales for taking money from the world’s wealthiest tech moguls, including those who have expressed support for President Donald Trump.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale are among the Trump-aligned elites who maxed out their legally-allowed contribution into Mahan’s campaign this year.

“I think the troubling part of the campaign was the first thing most Democrats learned about him: He was getting money from allies of Donald Trump,” Steve Maviglio, a Sacramento-based political consultant, told San Jose Spotlight. “And that sort of doomed the whole candidacy.”

Robinson said Mahan was on the upswing in the early days of his campaign due to his pragmatic ‘nuts-and-bolts’ policy approach. He had nabbed a coveted Super Bowl spot, an appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and appearances on mainstream cable TV news.

“That was actually a good message, as ‘I get s**t done’ does appeal to voters, but then he started attacking fellow Democrats and getting in with the billionaire boys club,” Robinson told San José Spotlight. “I was disappointed with the messages that came out of that. I think he hurt himself long-term with the Democratic Party.”

Some local Democrats, including Santa Clara County Democratic Party Chair Bill James, never bought into Mahan’s message from the start. Still, the campaign has granted James clarity on some of the mayor’s past decisions, including Mahan’s public sizing up of Gov. Gavin Newsom over crime and anti-Trump politics on TV news stations across the state.

“One can see from the last couple of years that the mayor was preparing himself to be in the position to run as the outsider reform minded candidate — the conflicts he provoked with Gov. Newsom seemed now in hindsight to be calculated as branding himself as the change candidate,” James told San Jose Spotlight. “I don’t think those conflicts served San Jose in any way.”

But there remain plenty of locals who still have faith in “Mahan-mentum.” The mayor’s cool and calm debate stage presence helped show voters his campaign was about detailed policy proposals, not partisanship. In the process, he presented compelling cases at times for going beyond ambiguous, anti-Trump talking points favored by some candidates in place of actual ideas.

 

Over the course of the campaign, Mahan rolled out a dozen-page-long document on how he’d tackle housing affordability and regulate artificial intelligence without discouraging innovation. Regardless of whether those plans were feasible or sound, they lit the central thesis of his campaign — that the best resistance to the federal administration was delivering government results to residents.

“I see Mayor Mahan as a generational talent,” Ahmad Thomas, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, told San José Spotlight. “I think young people are really in need – now perhaps more than ever in my lifetime – of positive role models in government. We need more leaders our children can look up to.”

Editor’s Note: Ahmad Thomas serves on the San José Spotlight Board of Directors. 

Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.