Gen Z voters in California are watching the 2026 governor’s race with a mix of frustration and resignation. The candidates showing up to forums are saying the right words, but the students paying attention say they aren’t hearing much of a plan.

Andrea Escobar, a master’s student in public policy at UCLA, and Joselen Contreras, an undergraduate public health student at UC Berkeley, spent the past several months attending gubernatorial forums across the Bay Area and Los Angeles through their work with the Ad Hoc Latino Leaders group. Their goal was straightforward: figure out which candidates had anything concrete to say to young voters, and report back to peers who largely weren’t following the race.

What they found wasn’t encouraging.

Of eight forums they tracked, five candidates showed up with any consistency: Betty Yee, Antonio Villaraigosa, Katie Porter, Xavier Becerra, and Tom Steyer. The forums were organized by health coalitions, labor groups, civil rights organizations, and community groups. The audiences were engaged. The candidates, by Escobar and Contreras’s account, played it safe.

“The candidates appeared cautious to fully embrace the bold leadership needed to lead the fourth largest economy in the world,” they wrote in a commentary published this week. Their assessment: California deserves a governor who breaks from legacy policy frameworks and charts a different course for young voters and Latinos specifically.

The critique isn’t abstract. Escobar works two jobs while attending school full time to cover tuition and rent in Los Angeles. For her, the question of economic mobility isn’t a policy talking point. It’s a monthly calculation. She wanted to hear candidates address affordable housing and expanded CalGrant funding. Instead, she said, young voters and Latinos were invoked in broad terms without specifics attached.

That gap between rhetoric and policy detail has real consequences for candidate outreach. Escobar and Contreras noted that many of their fellow students at two of California’s most prominent public universities showed little interest in the governor’s race or didn’t understand how the outcome would affect them. The civic engagement problem and the policy substance problem are connected. Candidates who don’t offer concrete platforms give young voters little reason to pay attention.

California’s Generation Z voters came of age watching the state’s housing market become effectively inaccessible to anyone without family wealth. They watched tuition climb. They watched inflation compress already thin margins for working students. The California Dream that was sold to them, affordable housing, quality education, good-paying jobs, has functioned more as a brand than a reality for most of them. Taking on multiple degrees and significant debt to stay economically afloat is a common enough experience that it barely registers as unusual anymore.

The candidates have not been ignoring these issues entirely. Housing and education costs come up at every forum. But Escobar and Contreras found the discussion stayed at the level of acknowledgment rather than prescription. There’s a difference between a candidate who says housing is too expensive and one who specifies what funding mechanisms, zoning reforms, or tenant protections they’ll push in the first year. Voters who have spent years watching state budgets balanced through cuts to education programs are not going to be moved by sympathy without a follow-up.

The Latino voter dimension matters here for reasons beyond demographic arithmetic. Latinos represent a growing share of California’s electorate and an even larger share of the state’s working-age population under 35. Many are first-generation college students handling financial aid systems that haven’t kept pace with cost increases. Policies on CalGrant expansion, community college pathways, and workforce development are not niche concerns for this group. They are the core of the economic mobility question.

Escobar and Contreras argue that candidates are treating Latino and young voters as a constituency to mention rather than one to build policy around. That’s a structural problem with how campaigns have typically operated in California. Mobilizing these voters requires more than showing up to forums. It requires platforms that address the specific mechanisms by which people fall behind or get ahead.

None of this means the field has failed. There are months of campaigning left before the June primary. Platforms evolve. Candidates sometimes sharpen their positions in response to organized pressure from specific constituencies. The Ad Hoc Latino Leaders group and organizations like Unseen, where both writers hold fellowships, are doing the kind of accountability work that can, in theory, push candidates toward specificity.

But the window is narrowing. Young voters who are not engaged now are not going to suddenly start paying close attention in the final weeks of a primary. The forums are happening. The candidates are attending. What’s missing, according to two students who did the work of actually showing up and taking notes, is the substance that would give their peers a reason to care.

The nonprofit newsroom CalMatters covered this story.

California will elect a new governor this fall. Whoever wins will inherit a housing crisis, a public university system under financial strain, and a generation of voters who have learned to expect very little from Sacramento. The candidates who figure out how to speak to that last point with something more than general sympathy may find an electorate that’s less checked out than it appears.