Mayor Matt Mahan was raised by working-
class parents: a school teacher and a
member of the letter carriers’ union.
Mayor Matt Mahan
was raised by working-
class parents: a school teacher and a member of the letter carriers’ union.
Growing up in Watsonville (where your strawberries come from!), his neighbors were
farmworkers and families like his own who lived paycheck to paycheck.
Growing up in Watsonville (where your strawberries come from!), his neighbors were farmworkers and families like his own who lived paycheck to paycheck.
The topics at the dinner table each night revolved around two things that most of us have been told not to talk about: politics and religion. These lively conversations sparked Mayor Matt’s early interest in civic issues like crime, unemployment, and fixing under-performing schools.
When it came time for high school, his mother wanted him to think big. Susan Mahan was a teacher – and she knew that the local high school had a higher drop-out rate than graduation rate. She wanted better for her children.
Matt decided to make the long, often four-hour-a-day commute by public bus to San Jose to attend Bellarmine College Prep, which offered him a full work-study scholarship as a low-income student. There, he was active in community service and student government, joined the wrestling team, and worked on the grounds crew to pay for his education.
Mayor Matt went on to Harvard, where he was an honors student and student body president. While there, he co-led the first successful campaign to end the University’s investment in companies supporting the war in Darfur, lived down the hall from Mark Zuckerberg – and most importantly, met the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his children, Silvia.
The topics at the dinner table each night revolved around two things that most of us have been told not to talk about: politics and religion. These lively conversations sparked Mayor Matt’s early interest in civic issues like crime, unemployment, and fixing under-performing schools.
When it came time for high school, his mother wanted him to think big. Susan Mahan was a teacher – and she knew that the local high school had a higher drop-out rate than graduation rate. She wanted better for her children.
Matt decided to make the long, often four-hour-a-day commute by public bus to San Jose to attend Bellarmine College Prep, which offered him a full work-study scholarship as a low-income student. There, he was active in community service and student government, joined the wrestling team, and worked on the grounds crew to pay for his education.
Mayor Matt went on to Harvard, where he was an honors student and student body president. While there, he co-led the first successful campaign to end the University’s investment in companies supporting the war in Darfur, lived down the hall from Mark Zuckerberg – and most importantly, met the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his children, Silvia.
After graduating, Mayor Matt spent a year in Bolivia building irrigation systems with family farmers to increase their economic opportunities. He then returned to San Jose to teach middle school English and history in San Jose’s East Side community through the Teach for America program.
There, he worked long days, coaching the soccer team and keeping his classroom open after school as a safe space for his students to learn. To this day, he still gets texts from his former students.
When Mayor Matt’s Teach for America program came to a close, he joined Causes, a startup and early Facebook application that enabled people to raise awareness and funds for their favorite nonprofits. Over the course of five years, Mayor Matt worked his way up from Director of Business Development to COO and eventually CEO. Causes ultimately grew to 190 million users in over 150 countries, and helped individuals fundraise over $50 million for nonprofits in the U.S. alone.
In 2014, he co-founded Brigade, which built the world’s first voter network: a nonpartisan platform for voters to discuss issues, advocate to their elected officials, and vote for candidates who reflect their values. Brigade ultimately reached millions of voters and its innovative engagement solutions and early success led it to be acquired in 2019 by Pinterest and Countable, respectively.
Mayor Matt has long been deeply involved in the community. After serving on a number of neighborhood and civic boards, including the City of San Jose’s Clean Energy Advisory Commission, Matt made the decision to run for City Council in 2020 because he believed the answer to every problem should not always be another tax, another measure or another regulation.
After graduating, Mayor Matt spent a year in Bolivia building irrigation systems with family farmers to increase their economic opportunities. He then returned to San Jose to teach middle school English and history in San Jose’s East Side community through the Teach for America program.
There, he worked long days, coaching the soccer team and keeping his classroom open after school as a safe space for his students to learn. To this day, he still gets texts from his former students.
When Mayor Matt’s Teach for America program came to a close, he joined Causes, a startup and early Facebook application that enabled people to raise awareness and funds for their favorite nonprofits. Over the course of five years, Mayor Matt worked his way up from Director of Business Development to COO and eventually CEO. Causes ultimately grew to 190 million users in over 150 countries, and helped individuals fundraise over $50 million for nonprofits in the U.S. alone.
In 2014, he co-founded Brigade, which built the world’s first voter network: a nonpartisan platform for voters to discuss issues, advocate to their elected officials, and vote for candidates who reflect their values. Brigade ultimately reached millions of voters and its innovative engagement solutions and early success led it to be acquired in 2019 by Pinterest and Countable, respectively.
Mayor Matt has long been deeply involved in the community. After serving on a number of neighborhood and civic boards, including the City of San Jose’s Clean Energy Advisory Commission, Matt made the decision to run for City Council in 2020 because he believed the answer to every problem should not always be another tax, another measure or another regulation.
He knew that government needed to live within its means and find ways to work smarter – just as he had seen his parents and neighbors do each month growing up. He knocked on 10,000 doors – as he earned the trust of his neighbors, going on to win the race overwhelmingly.
Once he entered office, Matt’s focus was on improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods by making City Hall more responsive and accountable, especially on the issues of public safety, homelessness, infrastructure and cleaning up our streets.
During his time on the city council, Mayor Matt made good on his promises.
But he knew San Jose city government desperately needed one important value – focus. He ran for Mayor to get government back to basics. In that race he faced long odds and took on a better-known, long-term political leader with a significant financial advantage. He won by making a simple pledge – he would focus relentlessly on Getting Government Back to Basics.
His first initiative was reducing the City Council’s top priorities from 40 to 4. He knew that city resources were being spread too thin, and residents couldn’t afford another tax to fill the gap. In order to make real progress, he knew city government needed to act first on the issues that mattered most, starting with public safety, housing, and street homelessness.
That focus paid off. Last year, San Jose was rated the safest big city in the nation. It’s the only city in the nation that has solved 100% of homicides nearly four years running.
Matt believes there are two sure-fire ways to keep crime low: assure consequences and build trust. People now know, if they harm San Jose, they will be found and held accountable. They also know their neighborhood police officer. San Jose did this by strategically targeting investments in technology and working to build trust through transparency and time spent in the community.
Mayor Matt knows that public safety is the fundamental responsibility of government – so when he saw that repeat theft was harming his city and small businesses were paying the price, he knew he had to act.
It’s why he became one of the main proponents of Prop 36 in 2024, which Californians overwhelmingly passed with nearly 70% of the vote. Matt won his second term for Mayor that same year in a landslide – winning the support of 87% of his neighbors who had started to see progress on the issues they cared about most.
But in the time since, Prop 36 has not been fully implemented – which is why Matt has continued to advocate for an era of mass treatment to help people suffering on the streets, and stealing to survive, to get the treatment they need to recover.
Matt knows Prop 36 won’t solve our addiction crisis alone. We need to get people indoors and address the underlying mental or physical health crises fueling their addictions. That includes interrupting cycles of chronic homelessness – on which San Jose has made massive progress under Mahan’s leadership.
Mayor Matt shifted the city’s approach on homelessness from one based on expensive, nearly $1 million-per-door units to one that acts quickly and efficiently by building safe, interim shelter sites. This shift has led to the largest expansion of shelter in any city on the West Coast and reduced the number of people living outdoors in San Jose by nearly a third.
He knew that government needed to live within its means and find ways to work smarter – just as he had seen his parents and neighbors do each month growing up. He knocked on 10,000 doors – as he earned the trust of his neighbors, going on to win the race overwhelmingly.
Once he entered office, Matt’s focus was on improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods by making City Hall more responsive and accountable, especially on the issues of public safety, homelessness, infrastructure and cleaning up our streets.
During his time on the city council, Mayor Matt made good on his promises.
But he knew San Jose city government desperately needed one important value – focus. He ran for Mayor to get government back to basics. In that race he faced long odds and took on a better-known, long-term political leader with a significant financial advantage. He won by making a simple pledge – he would focus relentlessly on Getting Government Back to Basics.
His first initiative was reducing the City Council’s top priorities from 40 to 4. He knew that city resources were being spread too thin, and residents couldn’t afford another tax to fill the gap. In order to make real progress, he knew city government needed to act first on the issues that mattered most, starting with public safety, housing, and street homelessness.
That focus paid off. Last year, San Jose was rated the safest big city in the nation. It’s the only city in the nation that has solved 100% of homicides nearly four years running.
Matt believes there are two sure-fire ways to keep crime low: assure consequences and build trust. People now know, if they harm San Jose, they will be found and held accountable. They also know their neighborhood police officer. San Jose did this by strategically targeting investments in technology and working to build trust through transparency and time spent in the community.
Mayor Matt knows that public safety is the fundamental responsibility of government – so when he saw that repeat theft was harming his city and small businesses were paying the price, he knew he had to act.
It’s why he became one of the main proponents of Prop 36 in 2024, which Californians overwhelmingly passed with nearly 70% of the vote. Matt won his second term for Mayor that same year in a landslide – winning the support of 87% of his neighbors who had started to see progress on the issues they cared about most.
But in the time since, Prop 36 has not been fully implemented – which is why Matt has continued to advocate for an era of mass treatment to help people suffering on the streets, and stealing to survive, to get the treatment they need to recover.
Matt knows Prop 36 won’t solve our addiction crisis alone. We need to get people indoors and address the underlying mental or physical health crises fueling their addictions. That includes interrupting cycles of chronic homelessness – on which San Jose has made massive progress under Mahan’s leadership.
Mayor Matt shifted the city’s approach on homelessness from one based on expensive, nearly $1 million-per-door units to one that acts quickly and efficiently by building safe, interim shelter sites. This shift has led to the largest expansion of shelter in any city on the West Coast and reduced the number of people living outdoors in San Jose by nearly a third.
Matt understands we can’t continue to make progress on homelessness without a governor who knows what local communities need. That’s why he supports a restoration of state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) dollars and a fair share framework that ensures each city is making progress.
This bold new approach is helping the most vulnerable among us move indoors, but just as Matt fought successfully to make it faster and more affordable to help homeless neighbors find housing, he is working overtime to make housing more affordable and accessible for everyone.
The reality is this: we have broken the housing market in California. The good news? Mayor Matt is focused on the comprehensive solutions that will help fix it.
In 2024, San Jose saw zero construction starts for new market-rate housing. The problem wasn’t that the government was saying no to projects — the problem was they simply weren’t “penciling out”, meaning it would cost home-builders more to construct the units than they could make back by renting or selling them.
That’s why at the start of 2025, Mayor Matt proposed reducing fees and the Council agreed. That year, San Jose broke ground on 2,000 units. And in early 2026, the Council voted to further reduce fees, likely unlocking over 2,000 more units.
But Mayor Matt knows we need to do more than reduce fees – we need to get creative.
Downtown office vacancies are high, and so is the demand for housing. That’s why Matt has proposed changing the rules to make it easier to convert empty commercial buildings into something our state desperately needs — more homes.
San Jose’s Downtown Residential Incentive Program has already enabled 1,226 homes across three projects in the urban core. This year, Mayor Matt fought to expand that same incentive to office-to-housing conversions by removing the financial barriers that make these projects impossible to pencil — including development fees and inclusionary requirements for qualifying projects.
One of the most exciting examples is the historic Bank of Italy building in San Jose. This 100-year-old building helps define the city’s skyline, but for years, it has sat empty. Now, it’s poised to become housing — bringing new life, new residents, and new activity to the heart of the city.
This is how we fix still-struggling downtowns — turning empty buildings into homes, bringing people back, and making our cities safer, more vibrant, and more economically resilient.
But we can’t continue to make progress on our housing crisis without a governor who knows what we need. That’s why Matt will work to eliminate bureaucratic barriers to housing approvals, lower and defer fees statewide, unlock surplus government land, train the workforce we need, unlock private-sector financing, and promote dramatically lower-cost construction methods, like factory built units.
On fiscal issues, Mayor Matt knows what it’s like to balance a budget – at home and on behalf of one million San Jose residents. He’s had to make tough tradeoffs – disappointing some for the good of many. In doing so, he’s gotten San Jose back to basics. And he made sure residents could see the needle move. He strongly believes that our government should do better with the dollars we send them now before they ask us to pay even more.
That’s why Mayor Matt brought real transparency and accountability to how our tax dollars are spent. He launched real-time dashboards to identify goals, share the rationale for how we reach those goals, and ensure that if a program or policy wasn’t working, the City could shift quickly toward something new.
He believes we need more transparency from the top – and to take a hard look at wasteful programs. Because if they aren’t working, why are we continuing to fund them?
Matt understands we can’t continue to make progress on homelessness without a governor who knows what local communities need. That’s why he supports a restoration of state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) dollars and a fair share framework that ensures each city is making progress.
This bold new approach is helping the most vulnerable among us move indoors, but just as Matt fought successfully to make it faster and more affordable to help homeless neighbors find housing, he is working overtime to make housing more affordable and accessible for everyone.
The reality is this: we have broken the housing market in California. The good news? Mayor Matt is focused on the comprehensive solutions that will help fix it.
In 2024, San Jose saw zero construction starts for new market-rate housing. The problem wasn’t that the government was saying no to projects — the problem was they simply weren’t “penciling out”, meaning it would cost home-builders more to construct the units than they could make back by renting or selling them.
That’s why at the start of 2025, Mayor Matt proposed reducing fees and the Council agreed. That year, San Jose broke ground on 2,000 units. And in early 2026, the Council voted to further reduce fees, likely unlocking over 2,000 more units.
But Mayor Matt knows we need to do more than reduce fees – we need to get creative.
Downtown office vacancies are high, and so is the demand for housing. That’s why Matt has proposed changing the rules to make it easier to convert empty commercial buildings into something our state desperately needs — more homes.
San Jose’s Downtown Residential Incentive Program has already enabled 1,226 homes across three projects in the urban core. This year, Mayor Matt fought to expand that same incentive to office-to-housing conversions by removing the financial barriers that make these projects impossible to pencil — including development fees and inclusionary requirements for qualifying projects.
One of the most exciting examples is the historic Bank of Italy building in San Jose. This 100-year-old building helps define the city’s skyline, but for years, it has sat empty. Now, it’s poised to become housing — bringing new life, new residents, and new activity to the heart of the city.
This is how we fix still-struggling downtowns — turning empty buildings into homes, bringing people back, and making our cities safer, more vibrant, and more economically resilient.
But we can’t continue to make progress on our housing crisis without a governor who knows what we need. That’s why Matt will work to eliminate bureaucratic barriers to housing approvals, lower and defer fees statewide, unlock surplus government land, train the workforce we need, unlock private-sector financing, and promote dramatically lower-cost construction methods, like factory built units.
On fiscal issues, Mayor Matt knows what it’s like to balance a budget – at home and on behalf of one million San Jose residents. He’s had to make tough tradeoffs – disappointing some for the good of many. In doing so, he’s gotten San Jose back to basics. And he made sure residents could see the needle move. He strongly believes that our government should do better with the dollars we send them now before they ask us to pay even more.
That’s why Mayor Matt brought real transparency and accountability to how our tax dollars are spent. He launched real-time dashboards to identify goals, share the rationale for how we reach those goals, and ensure that if a program or policy wasn’t working, the City could shift quickly toward something new.
He believes we need more transparency from the top – and to take a hard look at wasteful programs. Because if they aren’t working, why are we continuing to fund them?
Early in 2026, Matt got home from work and his wife Silvia told him he needed to run. And after many long conversations at the kitchen table, it was decided. Silvia, Nina and Luke were behind him 100%.
Mayor Matt is running for Governor because he knows California needs a fighter AND a fixer.
He’ll take the lessons he’s learned in San Jose and make sure cities and local governments have what they need to create change – because the best resistance to the divisive politics that plagues us is a focus on results.
Mayor Matt and his wife Silvia live in the Almaden neighborhood, where they are raising their two young children, Nina and Luke. They are members of Holy Spirit Church.
Early in 2026, Matt got home from work and his wife Silvia told him he needed to run. And after many long conversations at the kitchen table, it was decided. Silvia, Nina and Luke were behind him 100%.
Mayor Matt is running for Governor because he knows California needs a fighter AND a fixer.
He’ll take the lessons he’s learned in San Jose and make sure cities and local governments have what they need to create change – because the best resistance to the divisive politics that plagues us is a focus on results.
Mayor Matt and his wife Silvia live in the Almaden neighborhood, where they are raising their two young children, Nina and Luke. They are members of Holy Spirit Church.
A Better California Starts
With Getting Back to Basics.
A Better California Starts
With Getting Back to Basics.
PAID FOR BY MAHAN FOR GOVERNOR 2026. FPPC# 1486858
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