Quick Take
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who was raised in Watsonville, says his working-class upbringing in the Pajaro Valley — shaped by immigrant farmworker communities, Catholic schooling and parents who lived paycheck to paycheck — informs his bid for California governor. The moderate Democrat joins a crowded field of more than 20 candidates, pitching government accountability, housing reform and tougher intervention on addiction and mental illness as central planks of his campaign.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan says his upbringing in Watsonville — attending Catholic and Jesuit schools and running around the agricultural fields in the working-class immigrant community — shaped his perspective of California, which he’s now pitching as a candidate for governor.
The moderate Democrat announced his campaign last week, and faces more than 20 other Democrat and Republican candidates, including former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter and billionaire investor Tom Steyer, both Democrats.
Mahan, 43, and his two younger sisters were raised in their parents’ home, which his mother still lives in, on Amesti Road. Mahan’s mom taught at a Catholic school in Salinas and his dad was a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service.
“We really benefited from the fact that our parents were civically and intellectually engaged,” he told Lookout on Tuesday. “They were interested in what was happening in the world. We had a fairly simple life in a kind of working-class community — and it was a really good life.”
He attended Moreland Notre Dame School in downtown Watsonville from kindergarten to eighth grade before getting a needs-based scholarship to attend Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit high school in San Jose. He commuted four hours a day, waking up around 4:45 a.m. to catch the Highway 17 Express bus and make it on time.
After Mahan graduated from high school, he went on to Harvard University, where he was an honors student and student body president. He spent a year with the Peace Corps in Bolivia, moved back to the Bay Area to work in tech, and became a CEO. He began his political career in 2020, when he was elected to the San Jose City Council; in 2022, he was elected mayor for a four-year term.
For this interview, Lookout asked Mahan about his life before politics and his upbringing in Watsonville. He described a nurturing home, with hardworking parents, enriching dinner-table conversations and going to private schools.
“When it was time for high school, a lot of my friends went to Watsonville [High], and at the time, the dropout rate was higher than the graduation rate,” he said. “It was a really challenging time in the ’90s for our city. And my mom, who, again, had grown up in San Jose, encouraged me to look at schools on the other side of the hill.”
Mahan said he still visits his mother at their family home in Watsonville every few months.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Lookout: What do you remember most vividly about growing up in Watsonville? How did those experiences shape your view of California?
Matt Mahan: I remember how hard my parents worked. My dad worked six days a week. He always wanted that overtime to make sure we could make the monthly mortgage payment. We were often paycheck-to-paycheck in the sense that my parents were actively looking at the budget and making sure we could meet our financial obligations. I remember that being part of the conversation.
I mentioned the dinner-table conversations that included civic life, politics and religion and the big questions, which really opened up my eyes. I remember getting the Register-Pajaronian [now The Pajaronian] every day in our house, and I loved getting home from school and opening it up and reading about the world. I loved access to nature. I spent a lot of time as a kid down in the creek and running around the fields, getting chased by farmers.
What I remember most of all was the hard work, and not just my parents. I would get up really early. My mom taught in downtown Salinas, so we would leave the house very early. She would drop us off way before school started downtown at Notre Dame. Every morning the sun would be coming up and there’d already be people out in the fields picking strawberries. It was incredible. So I was surrounded by an immigrant community that worked incredibly hard to achieve the American dream.
Lookout: Watsonville and the wider Pajaro Valley have experienced years of systemic neglect – not just due to local policies, but also as a result of state and federal policies. What would the top statewide office allow you to do to address this?
Mahan: I think a lot about that. I love Watsonville. Everywhere I go, I tell people about where I grew up. It’s a special place, but it has been underinvested in. Part of what I’m running on is the notion that we have to get back to basics and hold our government accountable for delivering better results with the resources we have. The answer to every problem can’t be that we’re going to just keep raising taxes. We spend a lot in California, but a lot of it stays within the bureaucracy, and I want to get more of it out to our communities in places like Watsonville, in the form of better infrastructure and better schools and safer communities and on the biggest impediment to economic mobility, which has become housing. The state government has for far too long been part of the problem, unfortunately.
CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR’S RACE: Read Lookout’s coverage of the 2026 candidates here
In San Jose, what we’ve done is had to look in the mirror and really acknowledge the fact that our rules, our slow processes, our fees, all of our requirements have gotten us to a point where it can cost a million dollars to build one new apartment. In San Jose, we’ve reduced fees and streamlined the process, which has made it easier for us to build housing. Just last year, we got 2,000 new homes under construction that had been approved years ago and were just stuck in the pipeline. That’s the kind of thing that government can do to expand opportunity. We can’t just keep trying to get more resources. We’ve got to be more strategic and focused and accountable for the outcomes we need.
Lookout: Shifting gears a little here, what do you think Santa Cruz County gets right — and wrong — about housing and homelessness?
Mahan: I’ve been an observer now from Santa Clara County. For many years, I’ve seen a lot of progress in Santa Cruz County. I think that there’s growing support for building the housing that we need. It’s clear that we’re starting to make progress on homelessness. I don’t want to be critical but, like my county, I think most counties in our state have been slow to grapple with the reality of addiction and mental illness in our communities and especially out on our streets.
We have a duty to intervene and save lives. I do not believe it is compassionate to leave people to suffer and die on our streets. I know from my own experience with family members who have experienced serious addiction that we have to be willing to intervene and create accountability for recovery. That’s not a very easy or comfortable thing for most of us to talk about. But I’m tired, and I know most Californians are tired of seeing thousands of our neighbors die on our streets of addiction and suicide. We have to be able to intervene and get people to help that they need faster and in more effective ways.
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