Your guide to the California lieutenant governor race: Ma vs. Romero

The race for California’s next lieutenant governor offers voters a familiar choice between a Democrat and Republican to succeed termed-out Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis.

The job is largely a ceremonial post, but if the sitting governor dies, resigns or is removed from office, then the lieutenant governor would be elevated to take over.

In the June primary, state Treasurer Fiona Ma finished first with 19.1% of the approximately 8.5 million ballots cast. In second was former State Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, with 17.8%. Voters will pick a winner on Nov. 3.

Here is how the race breaks down.

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Voter guide to the 2026 California general election

California’s general election takes place on Novemer 3. Learn about L.A.’s city and county races as well races for state office.

Oct. 1, 2026

The California Democratic Party is backing Ma, whose quarter-century in electoral politics includes stints on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in the State Assembly and on the State Board of Equalization. She was elected treasurer in 2019 and is termed out.

The California Republican Party has endorsed Romero, who has been campaigning with Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton on what the two term a “golden ticket” (though voters elect each office separately).

The Republican designation is relatively new for Romero. She was a Democrat when she served in the Legislature from 1998 to 2010. She became a Republican in 2024, asserting that Democratic party standards no longer aligned with her beliefs.

“I consider myself to be common sense, a new Republican with the values of American exceptionalism that once upon a time the Democratic party stood for, but it’s been overrun by the socialists and the communists that have taken over the party,” she told the Times.

Ma’s parents emigrated from China and eventually settled in New York. Her father started a design and manufacturing firm, and her mother was a high school art teacher. Fiona Ma played sports, was a Girl Scout — “a top cookie seller,” she boasts on her campaign website — and graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology. She moved to San Francisco, started an accounting practice and became a part-time field representative to Assemblymember John Burton. She won her San Francisco supervisor’s seat in 2002 and, four years later, was elected to the Assembly.

Romero grew up in a Catholic household in Barstow, with pictures of the Pope and President Kennedy on the walls. She described her parents, a railroad worker and a mother who once cleaned houses, as “Depression-era Democrats.”

She started in community college and eventually earned a PhD. She was a college professor, an L.A. Community College trustee and a city of L.A. charter reform commissioner before being elected to the state Assembly in 1998. She moved to the Senate in 2001 and became the first female majority leader. Today she lives in El Sereno.

Fundraising data will be updated regularly until the election.

The lieutenant governor position often is described as essentially powerless. The officeholder serves on the California Coastal Commission (as a nonvoting member) and on the boards overseeing the University of California, California State University and community college systems.

Both candidates claim they would be more than a governor-in-waiting. Ma said her background in accounting and finance would allow her to be impactful. She pledges to use the “bully pulpit.”

“I am not shy to be out there, fight the good fight, take on challenges head on,” she told The Times.

Romero, who while in the state Senate wrote the “parent trigger” law giving parents more power over underperforming schools, envisions having a prominent role in the education system. She hopes to help lower the cost of attending a University of California school.

She said her background would enable her to take advantage of the lieutenant governor’s role as president of the state Senate.

“I look at it as, if you think you are powerless, you will behave in a powerless way,” she said.

The Nov. 3 ballot measure would put a retroactive, one-time 5% tax on Californians with assets above $1 billion. The aim is to raise money to offset federal healthcare cuts.

Both candidates oppose it, with nuance in their reasoning.

“We need our billionaires, our millionaires and all our companies and people who are paying taxes, especially when the federal government is not giving us our fair share,” Ma said.

She also believes the initiative is poorly written by aiming to tax people on their net worth. “Most of these people don’t have liquid money sitting around,” she said.

Romero bashed the proposition as an attempt at “asset seizure” and cast it as the first step in eventually taxing people further down the economic ladder.

“It is basically a death march that will throw California over the edge,” she said.

Another ballot measure would require voters to show government-issued ID at the polls, or provide the last four digits of a government-issued ID if voting by mail. It builds upon assertions by President Trump that the nation’s voting system is insecure, though elections experts have dismissed allegations of widespread fraud.

Ma opposes the measure, saying, “We are trying to make voting accessible and easier.”

Romero strongly supports it, saying people must show ID for things such as checking into a hotel. “It’s really about election integrity,” she says.

If Ma wins, she would be a high-ranking official in a state that consistently clashes with Trump and the federal government. Romero, meanwhile, might find herself opposite a Democratic governor in Xavier Becerra, who is the front-runner, and a Legislature in which Democrats have a supermajority.

So how would they be effective?

“I have a reputation of working across the aisle during my time in the Legislature,” Ma said. She adds, “I’m willing to work with anyone who wants to work with me, and focus on the needs and priorities of California.”

Romero says she knows Becerra from when he served in Congress and she was in the state Senate and has “great regard and great respect” for him. She thinks he “took a lurch to the left,” but she knows that campaigning and governing are different beasts.

“I favor Steve of course, but I know Xavier, and I think he and I could work very well together,” she said.