We sat at a circular table with a pink tablecloth against two huge single-pane windows that met in the wedge of a street corner. Inside a Cantonese restaurant with a view of the foggy San Francisco night, a place picked by my oh-so sophisticated local cousin Noreen, plates piled with orange chicken and honey walnut shrimp paraded past me on the lazy Susan in the center. I was 8 or 9 years old, had never seen such a contraption, and had never felt fancier. Memories like these compound with time and taste. Late-night al pastor tacos from a stall in the Rampart district of Los Angeles. Untold orders of combo plates or carne asada fries from any of the dozens of taquerías in metropolitan San Diego with names that end in -berto. A simple, abundant cheese plate on the patio of a winery in Temecula, or Napa Valley or Santa Ynez Valley. My first slice of Zachary’s deep-dish spinach pizza in Rockridge, Oakland. A lamb skewer. A banh mi. A roadhouse cheeseburger. Pho. A Guatemalan …

p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text”> Kounalakis is well known in state politics. She is serving her final term as lieutenant governor, a largely ceremonial role that includes seats on various higher-education boards including the University of California Board of Regents and the California State University Board of Trustees. A major Democratic donor, Kounalakis in 2023 launched a campaign to become California’s next governor before dropping out of the race and announcing in August 2025 she would run for state treasurer. Kounalakis holds a master’s in business administration from UC Berkeley and is the daughter of Sacramento real estate magnate Angelo Tsakopolous. She spent 18 years working for AKT Development, the business her father founded, eventually becoming its president. In 2009, she was appointed to the U.S. ambassador post in Hungary by President Obama. “I have been using my international experience serving the state as our representative for international trade and investment, which has a very heavy economic development piece to it,” she said this year. Hawks is a retired businesswoman and a Republican activist. She has served as president …

p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text”> A hot button measure on the ballot is Proposition 39, which would require voters to present government-issued identification, such as a state driver’s license, every time they vote in person. The initiative would require election officials to verify that all registered voters are U.S. citizens. Voters who use mail-in ballots — the most popular method of voting in California — would be required to write a four-digit number, or a PIN, on their ballot envelopes. The PIN would come from ID such as a driver’s license or could be provided by the county. Wagner supports Proposition 39 and believes that the legislature should “fix” ballot harvesting, which refers to collecting completed absentee ballots from voters and delivering them to polling places. “We ought to do a more thorough job of cleaning ghost voters who don’t belong on the rolls any longer. Either they passed away or they moved away,” he said. “Things can be done when the office of the secretary of state is willing to do them. I’m willing to do it and …

p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text”> The Times submitted surveys to the candidates. Unedited excerpts from the surveys, in which candidates lay out detailed goals and policy analysis, can be found at the links below. Barrera Shaw Aligned with their parties Shaw, 44, is the president of the Chino Valley Unified Board of Education, overseeing a relatively large school system of 26,000 students in San Bernardino County. Barrera, 59, is the president of the San Diego Unified Board of Education, which governs the state’s second-largest school system with about 113,000 students. Barrera also serves as a senior adviser to state Supt. Thurmond, whom Shaw has sharply criticized. Both are parents. Barrera’s children are grown; Shaw’s still are in school. Shaw broadly characterizes the public education system as failing because of liberal Democratic policies, although she praises the quality of the public school system over which she presides. On the culture-war front, she supports flag bans at schools — which were conceived to target gay pride flags — and book restrictions that target content deemed as sexually obscene. She became politically …