The California governor 2026 race is the most crowded gubernatorial primary in state history, and most of the candidates getting the airtime are the ones writing the biggest checks. On this episode of Purple Political Breakdown, host Radell Lewis sits down with Reza Safarnejad, an independent (No Party Preference) candidate for governor of California whose ballot designation is Small Business Owner and whose path into politics started the day the Palisades fire burned his entire neighborhood to ashes. Reza is not a career politician, but he is also not new to how government works. He is an immigrant, a working family man, and a University of Maryland graduate who spent twenty years in leadership roles on large scale federal, state, and local government programs before running for office. From 2006 to 2014 he worked at the National Institutes of Health on national level programs, including the National Cancer Institute's cancer.gov platform that helps doctors and patients find the best treatment options, and large scale virus and genomic research collaboration systems. Since 2014 he has worked in criminal forensics with crime labs and crime scene units across the country (including with the Ohio State Crime Labs), building unbiased, transparent platforms that serve victims and the wrongly accused. He is also the author of the book Veiled Souls and has written and spoken widely on civic issues. After the Palisades fire, Reza spent a year trying to work through California's local and state politicians and help new candidates, and what he found was systemic corruption baked into the party system itself. That is what pushed him from advocate to candidate. In this conversation we cover: the affordability squeeze on working California families, the homelessness factory that no amount of spending seems to fix, the billionaire tax loopholes that quietly hand sixty five percent Airbnb write-offs to the wealthy while regular Californians pay the bill, and the monopolies (Uber, Kroger and Albertsons, PG&E, Blue Cross, DoorDash, the pharma bros pushing ketamine and fentanyl) that he says are draining the state. We get into the Gavin Newsom critique without it becoming a Newsom episode, push back on the framing of the so-called billionaires' tax that excludes real estate moguls and Wall Street, dig into the Palisades fire accountability question, and talk through what California can actually do to push back when a Trump administration starts pulling federal funding and sending in the National Guard. This is a long-form, fact-checking, solutions-focused conversation with one of the lower-name candidates on the June 2 primary ballot. Whether Reza Safarnejad ends up in your top two or not, the conversation maps the issues every California voter should be testing every gubernatorial candidate against: affordability, monopoly power, homelessness, drug enforcement, tax fairness, and what it actually takes to be a governor for the people instead of the donors. Topics covered: California governor 2026 primary, independent candidate California, Palisades fire accountability, California affordability crisis, breaking up monopolies, California wealth tax, billionaire tax loopholes, Airbnb tax write-offs, California homelessness crisis, drug enforcement and marijuana legalization, federal funding fights, Newsom legacy, June 2 primary preview. Visit purplepoliticalbreakdown.com for episode notes, position statements, and the Research on a Dime archive. Subscribe, rate five stars, and share with a friend who's tired of toxic politics and ready for political solutions without political bias. 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