Matt Mahan

San Jose has become the safest big city in California and in the country.

We've reduced homelessness by about a third in just the last four years.

We've dramatically cleaned up many of our public spaces.

People are coming back out into their parks and trails.

We're starting to get investment back into the city.

We have thousands of homes under construction that had been stuck in the pipeline for years.

We had to do some hard things.

We had to speed up our permitting processes, still something we can do better with.

We had to reduce impact fees, but we've been problem solving.

We've been going issue by issue on the big ones, the ones that matter.

safety, homelessness, housing costs, economic opportunity, setting public goals, and rethinking our policies and how we spend our money and our time in City Hall to deliver better outcomes.

And I guess my hope and maybe intuition on this is similar to what you said, which is at some point, people just want government to work.

They get, even though folks are, I think somewhat rightly, whipped up in a frenzy of partisanship in reaction to the Trump administration and gross violation of civil liberties that we've seen play out in places like...

Minnesota, I also think people understand that we need our next governor to both fight legally and rhetorically against this abuse of power from the federal administration, while also focusing on fixing our problems.

Because we've actually given Trump his most powerful ammunition here in California by failing to fix our problems.

And it's incumbent upon us, if we want to save the country, to demonstrate that California's values of diversity, being an inclusive place that welcomes people, investing in human capacity, really care, you know, as we rhetorically say, we really care about things like education and healthcare and providing people with the things that they need, a respect for difference.

You know, the values that we have have to work in practice.

And if they don't, we're actually aiding and abetting this authoritarian impulse that Trump represents.

And so I view the project here as being vital to the future of the country and the protection of our democracy because it's not enough to be against something.

We have to also be for something.