How Did Larry Elder Become a Front-Runner in California’s Governor Race?

Mr. Newsom, whose fate rides on turnout, has made a foil of Mr. Elder, a “small-l libertarian” who reliably agitates the governor’s base with claims, for instance, that the minimum wage should be zero, the “war on oil” should be ended and racial preferences are destructive.

“The leading candidate thinks climate change is a hoax, believes we need more offshore oil drilling, more fracking, does not believe a woman has the right to choose, actually came out against Roe v. Wade, does not believe in a minimum wage,” Mr. Newsom has told supporters.

“Don’t paint me as some wild-eyed radical,” Mr. Elder said in a recent interview. “I’m running because of crime, homelessness, the rising cost of living and the outrageous decisions made during Covid that shut down the state.”

To his loyal listeners, Mr. Elder paints himself as the native son of a California that was once simpler and safer than the teeming, disaster-prone nation-state he sees anchoring the West Coast today. Listeners know that his father, a former U.S. Marine, saved his pay as a janitor to open a restaurant in Los Angeles’s Pico-Union district, and to buy a house in a neighborhood that shifted from mostly white to mostly Black residents in less than a decade.

His father was also violently abusive, Mr. Elder wrote in 2018, driving him to leave home the moment he graduated from Crenshaw High School. Admitted to Brown University under an early affirmative action program, Mr. Elder, the second of three sons, stayed away from California for years, moving on to the University of Michigan Law School and becoming a lawyer and legal recruiter in Ohio.

He was a guest on a Cleveland PBS show when the stand-in host, the Los Angeles-based conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, suggested he come back.