I saw it personally as a Legislative Analyst in 1963. There were a couple of intelligent decent men in the legislature, but they left when they saw the lay-of-the-land. The legislature became an instrument of a political machine.
The man who created most of this machine was Jesse Unruh. He had a knack for finding electable politicians and funding their local campaigns with money from the big unions. He was Speaker of the Assembly and within four years he had the Assembly he wanted and within six he had the majority of the Senate in the machine. He promptly reached out to determine California’s Congressional elections and local city and county elections.
The mechanism of finding pliable candidates and union money was new to California and very effective. The California open primary had been eliminated a few years before Jesse came to the Assembly.
Jesse was succeeded by Willie Brown, who had been his Whip. Willie was a comparable party boss and carried on the machine work into the 1980s.
The genius of Jesse took him next to the Treasurer’s office where he controlled California’s giant pensions: CalPERS and CalSTRS. He used fresh money he got from large corporations, whose stock was held by the two State pension funds, to feed his election machine funds. He also forced investment advisers to the two state pension funds to channel money into the machine.
Willie, a political genius in his own right, added a few flourishes to Jesse’s brilliant machine. Annually he brought up taxing bills to tax businesses operating in California requiring them to pay taxes on their global revenue; he also proposed, annually, bills requiring bottling companies to pay a high price for returned bottles. Both threats got corporate and consultant money for Willie to fund the machine.
That is where the California machine gets its money. To understand the power of the unions in California, they got the legislature to pass AB5 in 2019 to end most common forms of independent contractors, giving the unions a spectacular new organizing tool. Part of this legislation was voted down by the citizens in a state referendum in 2020.
How does the machine get the political candidates who will support the machine? These must be people with a variety of intelligence levels, but a moral level suitable for political machine life.
I only know San Francisco intimately. San Francisco is the home of Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris and most state executive office holders.
The city/county of San Francisco has 500 advisory committee positions; each committee is attached to one of the many city/county departments. Each person is appointed by the Mayor or Board of Supervisors. Those appointees who have ‘potential’ with appropriate political moral standards are then run for the elective boards of the public schools or City College. From there, they move up to the Board of Supervisors. From the elected, district-based Board of Supervisors they go to higher elective office.
San Francisco also has a very coherent Chinese voting population, organized by the late Rose Pak who was important in City elections from the mid 1980s until 2016. She also represented Communist China during that time.
That is how the California Democrat political machine gets its money and elected office holders.