California Attorney General won’t decide on governor run until after election, he says

California Attorney General Rob Bonta won’t say if he’s running for governor until at least November, he told The Sacramento Bee during a quick one-day trip to Washington D.C.

Bonta flew in on a redeye flight for an event about promoting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, like himself, with Vice President Kamala Harris, who was California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017.

He met with the state’s U.S. senators and will fly out tonight. Bonta, a Democrat who became attorney general in 2021, sat down with The Bee for a 45-minute interview at a downtown hotel in the afternoon.

Not until after the 2024 election will Bonta, 51, declare his political future.

“I’m very grateful that many folks are encouraging me to run for governor. I’ll make a decision at the right time,” he said. “That time is not now. It will be after the election.”

Of his potential gubernatorial opponents, Bonta said it’s far too early to have announced.

“Honestly, the fact that people announced four years before, it just seemed premature to me,” he said. “Like, getting sworn in and then announcing that you’re going to run for something four years later? That’s just me, it just seemed early. I wanted to do the job. I have a consequential job.”

Compared to the 2026 candidates for governor who have announced — including Democrats Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, California schools chief Tony Thurmond, state Sen. Toni Atkins of San Diego and former state Controller Betty Yee — Bonta has the most campaign cash for a run. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a former California congressman, is also mentioned as a possible candidate.

For now, Bonta’s focused on being California’s chief lawyer. He discussed several issues he’s working on in a 45-minute interview with The Sacramento Bee on Thursday.

Homelessness and housing laws

Bonta’s office has sued several California cities on housing policy, citing state laws that require towns updating plans based on community needs. He pointed to several issues contributing to California’s homelessness crisis — notably a lack of affordable housing.

“We need 2 to 3 million more units by 2030. We’re not on pace to get there,” he said. “The median price for a home in California is over $800,000. It’s too much. It’s not affordable.”

He said solutions included enforcing tenant protections for people without stable housing against evictions for retaliatory or arbitrary reasons and CARE Court, a statewide system of county mental health courts meant to compel treatment for those with severe mental illnesses.

Bonta touted Proposition 1, which narrowly passed in state’s March 5 primary election, to unlock more money for homelessness housing and behavioral health treatment centers, restructuring California’s Mental Health Services Act.

He noted there is a political pendulum swinging away from treating unhoused people with compassion because “now people are at wit’s end with homelessness.”

“The pendulum swings come from emotional decisions,” he said. “When fear or anger go up, reasonable policy-making goes down. And so I try to be a voice of reason, and not everyone listens to me.”

Privacy protections and TikTok

Bonta, whose office is investigating TikTok and suing Meta over whether the social media platforms are addicting and subsequently harming children, did not comment on a recent law President Joe Biden signed that would ban TikTok nationwide if its China-based parent company doesn’t sell in nine months to a year.

But Bonta said that the First Amendment argument and others in TikTok’s lawsuit against the law were “compelling.”

California’s investigation into TikTok has been ongoing for two years. Bonta expressed frustration with the speed.

“The lack of action means that more kids get exposed and harmed, and that’s from anecdotal data with my own kids to Surgeon General data about the whole country,” Bonta said.

He also decried a federal measure on data privacy protections that, as written, would preempt California law. California has stringent privacy protections. He said he’d support the bill, the American Privacy Rights Act, if a clause about preempting state laws on the issue was removed: “I think there’s like Americans who will benefit from the floor. It’ll raise their privacy protections up to a base level.”

Currently in California, Bonta described consumers who go to a website have control over if a company can keep, use and sell the information. That could go away if the federal law undercuts California’s.

“If you like to shop and get makeup at Sephora: You go onto their website and you buy makeup and they know that you like certain kinds of rouge or lipstick. And you can’t say ‘I don’t want to share this.’ You can’t say, ‘I don’t want this to be sold,’” Bonta described.

“And then you start getting advertisements that you never asked about, that ask you if you want such-and-such a product or you get outreach from another company that has bought your information.”