Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) is officially throwing his hat into the ring to replace term-limited California Gov. Gavin Newsom, telling ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday night, “I’m ready to bring this fight home.”
Swalwell used the late-night stage to pitch himself as the tough guy California supposedly needs, insisting the Golden State “needs a fighter and a protector.” He rattled off a familiar list of Democratic talking points about affordability and wages, saying, “Someone who will bring prices down, lift wages up. And we can say that we’re the fourth-largest economy in the world, and we are, and I love to brag about that. But what does that mean if you can’t afford to live here?”
He pointed to his past stints as a Dublin city council member, a prosecutor in Oakland, and a Trump antagonist on Capitol Hill. “But I’m ready to bring this fight home. So, I came here tonight, Jimmy, to tell you and your audience that I’m running to be the next governor of California,” he said, drawing applause from the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” crowd.
Swalwell, who flamed out early in the 2020 presidential primary, doubled down on affordability fears in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “People are scared and prices are high, and I see the next governor of California having two jobs — one to keep the worst president ever out of our homes, streets and lives,” he told the paper. “The second job is to bring what I call a new California, and that’s especially and most poignantly on housing and affordability in a state where we have the highest unemployment rate in the country, and the average age for a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old, and so we need to bring that down.”
Rep. Eric Swalwell speaking on CNN. Swalwell is infamous for falling victim to an alleged honeypot scheme.
He also reprised his role as one of Trump’s loudest critics, blasting the former president’s immigration enforcement and claiming it “pisses me off to see Californians running through the fields where they work from [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents or troops in our streets.”
“It’s horrifying. Cancer research being canceled,” he said. “It’s awful to look at.”
Swalwell took another swing at Trump over the long-delayed Epstein files, accusing the former president of behaving like someone with something to hide. Trump signed the bill forcing the release earlier this week after months of resistance. Swalwell told Kimmel that as a prosecutor, “We would tell every jury, whenever you had a defendant who went out of their way to, like, destroy evidence or conceal evidence or hide evidence, that that’s a consciousness of guilt. You can use that behavior to imply or infer they did something wrong.”
“I’ll just say this,” he added. “He’s not acting like somebody who has nothing to hide, and we shouldn’t take him at his word. But this to me is just a motivating factor for why we have to be in the majority. The majority matters.”
The Bay Area Democrat now joins a packed field vying to succeed Newsom. Billionaire Tom Steyer jumped into the race earlier this week, and nearly a dozen Democrats and Republicans are already circling the governor’s mansion.
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