Opinion: Former Gubernatorial Candidate John Cox and The Perils of One-Party Rule in California

In our era of one-party rule by complacent Democrats, California might benefit from a coherent and compelling political opposition.

Instead, we keep getting John Cox.

You probably don’t recognize Cox’s name. This is the heart of the problem.

Cox, a businessman and former Republican presidential candidate from Illinois who moved to the San Diego area more than a decade ago, has been the most prominent opponent of ruling Democrats during their 14-years-and-counting of total political control in the Capitol.

Cox ran twice against Gov. Gavin Newsom — losing to the governor in 2018’s regularly scheduled election and again in the 2021 recall. Since 2013, Cox has also proposed provocative ballot measures, including initiatives to increase the size of legislature, and force elected officials to wear their donors’ names on their clothing.

None of Cox’s initiatives passed. And he made no lasting impact on state governance

He recently wrote a book that, mostly unintentionally, demonstrates why.

The Newsom Nightmare: The California Catastrophe and How to Reform Our Broken System, published late last year, recounts scandals over regulating the utility PG&E, which the state bailed out even after it killed people in fires and a gas explosion. And he offers vignettes of California small businesspeople and local officials frustrated by a state that is great at many things—but not governance.

But like so much of the political conversation in our state, Cox’s book doesn’t add up to very much. Cox offers no future-focused opposition narrative that would pressure Democrats to improve their performance or create public demand to cast them out of office.

Maddeningly, Cox clearly understands the perils of an absent opposition. “Having a single-party supermajority govern every branch of government throws the checks and balances crucial to representative democracy off kilter. It renders democracy impotent,” he writes.

And he correctly points out structural problems in the governing system that give power to rich people and interest groups. He shows how California legislative districts are so big — by far the most populous of any in the U.S. — that lawmakers become reliant on a few big donors. And he recounts how the power of big money prevents Californians from turning their grand ambitions and good intentions for better education, health care, and housing into reality.

“The key to solving these problems,” he writes, “is to fashion solutions that reflect good practice and policy, forged by intelligent and well-thought-out tradeoffs, that have the effect of helping the vast majority of our people rather than favoring a narrow interest or group.”

But you’ll read in vain for a detailed Cox proposal of well-thought-out tradeoffs. And that’s not the book’s only contradiction . Cox rightly bemoans the politics of personal attacks — since personality and cultural wars distract us from deeper problems. Yet he still chose The Newsom Nightmare as his title.

The bigger problem is that Cox can’t elucidate what a California opposition could stand for. His book is all over the place. There’s Ronald Reagan nostalgia, blasts at bureaucracy, word-salad about immigration, and a confusing ending about the national peril of what Cox calls “Californication,” which seems to be about many things but has nothing to do with an old David Duchovny series about sex in our state.

Cox does draw blood when he writes about the abusive tactics of trial lawyers and the distorting power of the state’s public employee unions, which saddle government budgets with unsustainable pensions. But he never offers a clear solution to the tricky question of how to take away benefits that are legally guaranteed.

He also takes a few swipes at his own party, but doesn’t explain how someone might bring Republicans back to relevance in California.

Cox’s failures of coherence wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except that there is another gubernatorial election scheduled for 2026. And already, a half-dozen Democratic politicians — all with long experience in politics and little record of governing success — appear to be running for the office.

There is, as yet, no clear opponent to these insider Democrats. And there is no one offering a clear prescription for how to change California’s structure so that people in our progressive state finally get the progressive solutions they’ve been promised — higher wages, high-quality healthcare, stronger schools, and affordable housing.

Perhaps someone will step forward to provide real opposition, and offer a compelling vision for how to fix the state’s broken governing system and deliver more and better services.

Or perhaps Californians who want a change will be stuck with someone like John Cox, again.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an Arizona State University media enterprise.