When Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, jumped into the governor’s race at the end of January, he did so with ease and confidence — and with multiple millions of dollars backing him.
Mahan was the final major Democratic candidate to throw his hat in, enlarging the pool of candidates to 11 people at the time. Some were skeptical of a run from a novice politician like Mahan, who was only elected mayor of San Jose in 2022 after just two years on the city council and at 43 was the youngest candidate in the race by a decade.
But others, particularly the tech elite in Mahan’s backyard of Silicon Valley, were ecstatic. Mahan was branded as the only moderate on a long list of Democrats, and as a candidate who had real-time experience handling public safety and housing issues in the state’s third-largest city. A Harvard grad, Mahan lived in the same dorm as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the two have stayed in touch, Mahan recently confirmed to SFGATE. A column published in CalMatters described Mahan’s candidacy as a litmus test to see if left-leaning Californians were ready for a more middle-of-the-road leader…