Who Had The Worst Week In California Politics For The Week Ending 7/31?
Every Week, We Look Across The California Political Landscape To Answer One Simple Question: Who Had The Worst Week In California Politics?
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⏱️ 6 minute read
Worst Week In California Politics
Another week, another podium….
California politics never lacks for candidates, but only three can earn a place on this week’s medal stand. Sometimes the biggest losers are politicians who suffer an election setback. Sometimes they’re public officials who find themselves in legal trouble. Other times, they simply have a week they’d rather forget.
The medal stand is back.
California supplied another deep field of politicians and public officials who would prefer that we discuss almost anything else. Of course, only three can make the podium.
This week’s honorees include a highly compensated public official whose principal residence apparently depends on which state is asking, a powerful labor leader abandoned by much of his own political coalition, and a governor who voluntarily reopened the worst scandal of his career.
As always, these selections are entirely subjective. Disagreement is encouraged. Half the fun is deciding who should have placed higher—or who escaped the podium altogether.
Let’s award the medals.
🥉 Bronze Medal — Orange County Animal Care Director Monica Schmidt
Orange County taxpayers pay Monica Schmidt more than $373,000 a year in salary and benefits to run the county animal shelter. Texas taxpayers, meanwhile, apparently know her as one of their own.
Schmidt has worked for Orange County Animal Care since 2020 and became its director in 2024. But Voice of OC reports that she still owns a home in Houston and claims a Texas homestead exemption—an exemption reserved for a person’s principal residence. The application Schmidt signed warns that a false statement could result in a misdemeanor or state-jail felony. Records show she continued receiving the exemption through at least 2025.
Perhaps California has finally produced a government employee capable of living in two states simultaneously: Texas for property-tax purposes and California for payroll purposes.
That distinction matters because Orange County insists Schmidt works full time in California. A county spokesperson says she is neither a remote nor a hybrid employee. Schmidt, however, was also regularly seen arriving at the Tustin shelter in a vehicle with Texas plates. California generally requires a new resident to register an out-of-state vehicle within twenty days. After animal-welfare activists began asking about the plates, Schmidt reportedly started driving a different vehicle—with California plates.
Problem solved. Nothing to see here. Please stop looking at the parking lot.
The county’s response has been an exercise in bureaucratic minimalism. Officials repeatedly declined to make Schmidt available for comment, calling the matter a personnel issue. They confirmed she is not a remote employee, then declared that questions about her property and tax documents are unrelated to county employment.
That might be more persuasive if Schmidt were not simultaneously telling Texas that her Houston house is her principal residence while Orange County tells taxpayers she works full time in Tustin. Both propositions may have an innocent explanation. If so, county officials should provide it.
And that compensation package deserves its own footnote. Nearly $400,000 a year—for the director of an animal shelter—is California government finance in miniature. Every agency has a director, every director has a compensation package that would astonish the people paying for it, and elected officials somehow remain mystified when budgets are perpetually strained. Schmidt’s pay is not the cause of California’s fiscal dysfunction, but it is a tidy allegory for it.
Schmidt had every opportunity to offer a simple public explanation—or to say the reporting was wrong. Voice of OC repeatedly sought her comment. She chose not to provide one.
For collecting a hefty California public salary while maintaining a Texas residence she has represented as her principal home, even as Orange County says she works full time in California—and for leaving taxpayers to figure out how both claims can be true—Monica Schmidt earns this week’s bronze medal.
🥈 Silver Medal — SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan
Dave Regan set out to make California’s billionaires pay. This week, he discovered that even California’s labor unions are not eager to help him collect.
Regan is president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West and the architect of Proposition 40, a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of roughly 200 California billionaires. He says the measure would raise $100 billion to compensate for federal healthcare cuts.
The billionaire opposition was predictable. The humiliation came from inside the house.
This week, the executive board of SEIU California—the statewide organization representing Regan’s union and other SEIU affiliates—refused to endorse Proposition 40. It voted to remain neutral after UHW moved ahead without first securing support from its sister unions.
That is the labor equivalent of your own family declining to attend your wedding to keep its options open.
The rejection did not happen in isolation. Proposition 40 is opposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, the California Teachers Association, the State Building and Construction Trades Council, Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association and pro-housing advocates. This week, the California State Council of Laborers and United Domestic Workers joined the opposition.
When Planned Parenthood, teachers unions, construction unions, domestic workers and Gavin Newsom line up on the same side as billionaires, you have achieved something rare in California politics: genuine bipartisan—or at least bi-ideological—unity.
Regan’s week was already deteriorating. A Los Angeles Times investigation reported that he offered to withdraw the tax during negotiations with Newsom’s office if demands were met, allegedly including union contracts and organizing concessions involving hospitals, clinics and dialysis companies.
Regan calls those allegations “categorically false” and insists that his only objective is to prevent what he calls a healthcare catastrophe. But UHW has a long history of qualifying ballot measures targeting healthcare businesses, negotiating with those businesses, and sometimes withdrawing the measures after reaching agreements that are helpful to its organizing efforts. California’s initiative process may be direct democracy, but in Regan’s hands it can look remarkably like a bargaining table with 870,000 signatures attached.
This time, he may have overplayed his hand. Wealthy Californians responded by pouring tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns, helping moderate Democrats defeat nearly every SEIU-backed candidate in more than a dozen June primaries. They are now organized, angry and unlikely to disappear.
Regan picked a fight with billionaires, expecting labor and California’s progressive establishment behind him. Instead, his parent union stepped aside while much of the Democratic coalition joined the opposition.
For spending $31 million to place a wealth tax on the ballot before securing the support of his own statewide union—and for discovering that even California’s left thinks he went too far—Dave Regan earns this week’s silver medal.
🥇 Gold Medal — Governor Gavin Newsom
Most politicians would prefer that the worst scandal of their career remain twenty years in the past. Gavin Newsom put his back into circulation.
In his new memoir, Newsom revisits his affair with Ruby Rippey, a San Francisco City Hall employee married to Alex Tourk—Newsom’s close friend and deputy chief of staff. Newsom calls it the “stupidest and also briefest of affairs” and says he eventually “came clean” to Tourk.
Then Rippey told her version.
In a first-person Vanity Fair essay ($), she describes an affair that was neither as tidy nor as brief as Newsom’s phrasing suggests. Rippey accepts responsibility and says she was not coerced. But Newsom was still the mayor; she was his subordinate, and her husband was one of his most trusted aides.
Rippey supplied plenty of blackouts, hotel-room wreckage and chauffeured transportation for opposition researchers. If you want all the sordid details, we covered them separately here.
The politically consequential part of her account, however, is not what happened in the hotel rooms. It is what happened when the affair ended.
Newsom writes that he “came clean” to Tourk. Rippey says she confessed first, after which Tourk confronted Newsom. His version presents a man who voluntarily admitted a terrible betrayal. Hers presents one who acknowledged it after the husband had already been betrayed.
So, does it matter?
An affair from 2005 probably does not end a presidential campaign in 2028. Voters have forgiven worse, and Newsom apologized nearly twenty years ago. But Newsom made the episode relevant again by placing his version in a memoir intended to introduce him to a national electorate.
The political question is no longer simply whether Newsom exercised terrible judgment two decades ago. It is whether he is sanitizing his past while preparing to ask voters for a promotion.
His opponents do not need to dispute Rippey’s insistence that the affair was consensual. They can acknowledge her responsibility while pointing to the obvious power imbalance: Newsom was the mayor, Rippey worked beneath him, and her husband worked beside him.
Republicans will use the story, of course. The greater danger may come from Democrats who do not want Newsom to become their 2028 nominee. They can use Rippey’s account to question his judgment, his treatment of subordinates and—most damagingly—his honesty about an embarrassing chapter he chose to reopen.
Opposition research works best when it reinforces something voters already suspect. Newsom’s critics portray him as slick, ambitious and carefully packaged. A disputed memoir account suggesting that he polished his role in an old scandal fits that caricature perfectly.
Newsom’s office pointed to his previous apology and declined further comment. But once a politician publishes his version of history, the other people in that history are entitled to check his work.
The affair makes the story salacious. Newsom’s retelling makes it politically relevant.
For voluntarily reopening the worst scandal of his career, only to have the other participant challenge the most self-serving part of his account just as he prepares for a likely presidential campaign, Gavin Newsom earns this week’s gold medal.
The “Winners” Accept Their Awards…
California politics produces plenty of bad weeks. The challenge is narrowing the field to three.
Sometimes a medal is earned through arrogance. Sometimes it comes from political miscalculation. Sometimes it arrives because a story someone hoped was safely buried suddenly begins breathing again.
This week’s podium gave us one of each.
These awards are not lifetime-achievement honors, although some California politicians appear determined to build qualifying résumés. They reflect one week, three especially unfortunate developments and the people who found themselves standing closest when everything went sideways.
The podium is now cleared. The medals have been awarded. Somewhere in California, next week’s “winners” are already getting to work.