I’ve seen a lot of ugly attack ads, but this one felt weirdly aggressive – especially for an obscure state office that rivals the American vice presidency in the “not worth a bucket of warm spit” category.
Among other AI-generated depictions of termed-out Assemblyman Mike Gipson, the video showed the Democrat from Gardena in a robe with a cigar, supposedly living the high life off campaign contributors’ largesse. The outlandish renderings of the Black legislator set to ragtime music gave the spot an unmistakable minstrel-show vibe.
The big reveal came near the end:
It was paid for by Yvonne Yiu, the former Democratic Monterey Park City Councilmember and investment manager who is running against Gipson and several others for a seat on the Board of Equalization in the June 2 primary.
Oh, her again?
I say that as an exasperated resident of Alhambra, the Los Angeles suburb that has seen this candidate in action before. Yiu has spent more than $9 million of her personal fortune running for three different state offices since 2022, when she dropped an astonishing $5.7 million of her own funds in a failed primary run for state controller.
Just $33.33. It's less than a tank of gas or a bag of groceries. But that's all it would take from each of our readers to keep Golden State going through 2026.
Two years later, Yiu self-financed a run for state Senate. She used about $2.8 million of her own money to produce nasty videos and cram my mailbox and those of other Senate District 25 voters with glossy flyers attacking another candidate, Democrat Sasha Renée Pérez. For a few months, it felt like I couldn’t watch anything on YouTube without seeing a video casting Pérez as a lazy, cackling cop-hater.
Yiu lost and failed to make it to the general election – but did earn the distinction as the biggest donor to any race in the March 2024 primary.
This year, Yiu is once again dipping into her own fortune ($750,000 of the campaign’s roughly $1 million raised, according to searchable state records) and attacking another Democrat to nab an elected office. Now, her evident desperation has her reaching for the lowest-hanging fruit in California: the Board of Equalization, a place for politicians without much else to do.
Less than 10 years ago, the state Legislature all but eliminated the board amid embarrassing corruption and nepotism scandals. It had never been easy to describe why California has the country’s only elected tax commission other than they oversaw the collection of about a third of state tax revenue. That changed after 2017, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill stripping the board of nearly all its tax-collecting and appeal powers, transferring most of its work to other bodies.
What wasn’t stripped? The elected jobs themselves – and the roughly $184,000-salary that comes with each of them. The members meet once a month and oversee county property tax assessments and the collection of a handful of state taxes, but not much else.
Jim Newton
Perhaps that explains why the candidate quality for the board seat for Los Angeles County leaves something to be desired. Gipson, the state Democratic Party endorsee whose advertising has returned Yiu’s fire, was found by a CalMatters investigation last year to have, at best, exaggerated his service in the Maywood Police Department and his relationship with an officer killed while on duty in 1992. Another candidate for the seat, former Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez, was accused in 2012 of registering to vote in a district in which he didn’t actually live.
Ideally, this lackluster lineup would spur new calls for eliminating the Board of Equalization. In 2023, then-Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) introduced a state constitutional amendment to abolish the board, but his effort failed.
Desperate efforts such as Yiu’s to win a job, any job, in state government could still perform a service: If enough voters are so put off that they simply refuse to mark their ballots in the race, perhaps that’ll incentivize state lawmakers to – appropriately – kill off the Board of Equalization once and for all.
Noted, With Comment: Election edition, part 2
The meth election: At his Substack Dreamland, journalist Sam Quinones says the arrival of super-pure meth and deadly fentanyl fundamentally changed Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis – and voters' anger over the city’s lack of response could sway the June 2 election.
Still undecided: Longtime Sacramento columnist George Skelton says his ballot remains on his kitchen table. But he writes in the Los Angeles Times that he knows he won’t vote for the two Republicans, and appears to favor one of the Democrats.
Fill it out already: Undecided voters might have been waiting for a governor candidate to surge. That was fine, for a while – but the longer voters wait, the longer it will take to count ballots, says the Santa Rosa Press Democrat editorial board.
Golden State staff
Meh on top-two repeal: Go ahead and get rid of California’s so-called jungle primary, as both major parties want to do, says the Southern California News Group editorial board. Just don’t expect better elections as a result.
Speech! Speech! When was the last time you heard a candidate for office make a speech that moved you? Former Obama administration official Ben Rhodes writes in the New York Times that you certainly didn’t see any of those in the California governor’s race, which has been filled with podcast interviews, shout-filled debates and attack ads. The “net result is that it feels as if you simultaneously know a lot and nothing at all about the candidates,” he says.
Noted, With Comment: Everything else
Ante up: Billionaires could have it a lot worse than the 5% wealth tax proposed in California. In the L.A. Times, attorney Stephen Lands says a fairer tax on their “unrealized gains” could look more like what typical working Californians pay – all told, 40%.
Room for more on “Abundance”: At his Substack Climate Colored Goggles, Sammy Roth admits to only recently reading “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. His take: It’s flawed, and it isn’t quite the progressive pile-on of environmental regulations that some critics make it out to be.
Jon Regardie
That’s shady: Is shade as bad for you as toxic soil? Of course not, but as the San Francisco Chronicle’s Allison Arieff notes, opponents of proposed housing developments exploit a California Environmental Quality Act flaw that allows shadows cast by buildings to hold up new projects.
Fishing for hope: California is allowing commercial salmon fishing after a three-year hiatus to allow the population to rebound. But don’t confuse this good news for a full recovery, writes The Nature Conservancy’s Charlton “Chuck” Bonham in the Sacramento Bee.
Wild Art
Golden State staff
Mariel Garza
