Rumors are circulating that San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan may enter the race for California governor. If the recently elected Democratic mayor makes the move, he could jolt a contest that, to date, has been remarkably sleepy.

California’s Assembly District 47 stretches across Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, encompassing the cities of Banning, Beaumont, Calimesa, Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Yucaipa, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, and the town of Yucca Valley, along with portions of Redlands, Highland, and San Jacinto.

Gallup released its latest identification numbers, and independent voters are now 45%. Nobody disputes the data. But there are competing opinions as to what the data means.  

Kyle Bailey, a former Maine state legislator and Maine’s leading major election reformer, had an excellent op-ed in the Portland Press Herald in 2025. In that piece of commentary, “How we do elections matters,” Bailey celebrates the value of ranked choice voting to Maine and urges its expansion to state general offices.

While much of the U.S. was slammed with severe winter weather over the weekend, volunteers for Oklahoma State Question 836 – which would end the use of taxpayer-funded closed primaries – made a final push to get their campaign to over 200,000 petition signatures.

Stretching across portions of Alameda and Santa Clara Counties, California’s Senate District 10 is one of the state’s economic powerhouses. It includes the cities of Fremont, Hayward, Milpitas, Newark, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and Union City, as well as portions of San Jose. The district’s economy is anchored by Silicon Valley’s technology sector, which attracts a global workforce. The Apple factory where the first Mac computer was manufactured was located in Fremont. The Tesla factory is located in the district and employs tens of thousands of workers.

California independent voters are not a monolith. They fall across the political spectrum and hold diverse opinions on a variety of social and political issues. But one thing that unites them is a shared belief that California needs more choice elections.