One Slick Mailer That Exposes California's Disgusting One-Party Rule
Issue No. 4 | May 2026
A Mailer Arrived. It Said a Lot.
Somewhere in the 21st Assembly District of California, which stretches across parts of San Mateo County on the San Francisco Peninsula, a glossy political mailer arrived in mailboxes earlier this year. On the front, in large bold type: “Assemblymember Diane Papan. Making California Affordable.” On the back, a thank-you note praising her for “leadership and commitment to keeping Californians housed.”
It looked like a campaign piece. It read like a campaign piece. And it was paid for by an organization called WWW.CAANET.ORG, better known as the California Apartment Association, whose Sacramento address sits prominently in the return label.
Here is what the mailer did not mention: Diane Papan never voted for anything. On January 13, 2026, when the California Assembly Judiciary Committee took up AB 1157, a bill that would have lowered the state’s annual rent cap and expanded tenant protections to cover single-family homes and condominiums, Assemblymember Diane Papan was present in that hearing room. The bill needed seven votes to pass. It received four. Papan was one of five Democrats who declined to vote at all. No yes. No no. Nothing. She sat out the most important housing vote of the session, and three months later, the California Apartment Association rewarded her with a full-color mailer sent to her own constituents telling them what a hero she is.
That is the story of California politics in 2026, delivered right to your front door.
What AB 1157 Was, and Who Killed It
To understand what happened, you need to understand what was at stake. California has approximately 17 million renters. Under the current state law, known as AB 1482, landlords can raise rents up to 5% plus the local inflation rate, with a hard ceiling of 10% annually. That law is also set to expire in 2030 unless the legislature acts. AB 1157, introduced by Assemblymember Ash Kalra of San Jose, would have lowered that cap, expanded protections to renters in single-family homes, and made the protections permanent.
The bill was supported by tenant advocacy organizations and labor groups. It was opposed, loudly and expensively, by the California Apartment Association and the California Association of Realtors.
In the committee hearing, the bill drew a packed room and passionate testimony from renters across the state. It received four yes votes and three no votes from Republicans. The five Democrats who could have passed it chose to do nothing. Rebecca Bauer-Kahan. Blanca Pacheco. Diane Papan. Catherine Stefani. Rick Chavez Zbur. Five Democrats. Five abstentions. One dead bill.
The Sacramento Bee called them out publicly for not “even being bothered to vote.” Tenant advocates described it as a betrayal of the very constituents these legislators represent. But Assemblymember Papan, at least, did not have to wait long for her reward.
Who Is the California Apartment Association, Exactly?
The California Apartment Association describes itself as “the nation’s largest statewide organization representing the rental housing industry.” What it does not advertise as prominently is how it actually operates.
The CAA functions as what researchers and advocacy groups have called a political go-between for some of the largest corporate landlords in the country. Companies like Equity Residential, AvalonBay Communities, and Essex Property Trust deliver large sums of money into one or more of the CAA’s four political committees. The CAA then distributes that money to elected officials, campaigns, and political groups across California. According to research compiled from state campaign filings, the CAA and its allied corporate landlords spent at least $233 million in political contributions and lobbying across three legislative sessions. In 2024 alone, the CAA’s independent expenditure committee spent $3 million on political candidates and groups.
That $54 million raised to defeat Proposition 33 in November 2024, the ballot measure that would have expanded rent control? Eighty percent of it came from just 14 corporate landlords, all of them channeling money through the CAA. Those same corporate landlords use the same strategy, over and over, in city halls and the state Capitol: fund the CAA, let the CAA fund the politicians, let the politicians protect their ability to charge whatever the market will bear.
Politicians like to say that campaign contributions do not influence their decisions. The CAA and its corporate landlord backers apparently do not believe them either, because they keep writing the checks.
The Shell Game in Plain Sight
What makes the Papan mailer so remarkable is not just what it says. It is the raw transparency of it.
A political donor paid to mail a piece of campaign literature to every household in a lawmaker’s district. That literature credits the lawmaker with an achievement. The achievement is that she did nothing. She did not vote to protect renters. She did not vote against protecting renters. She simply stood aside while a bill that might have helped hundreds of thousands of her constituents died in committee. And for that, she received a taxpayer-mailbox-delivered endorsement from the very industry she chose not to cross.
This is not a coincidence. This is how the transaction is supposed to work. The California Apartment Association and its corporate landlord members do not need politicians to vote for them. They simply need politicians to not vote against them. The abstention is the product. The mailer is the receipt.
In California, the law governing independent expenditures allows outside groups to spend unlimited amounts on political communications as long as they do not formally coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. The CAA is experienced at operating within these rules. It has run independent expenditure campaigns worth millions of dollars in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and up and down the state. The Papan mailer is simply the latest version of a very old arrangement.
One Party, Two Factions, One Set of Donors
California is a one-party state in the most literal sense. Democrats control the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, a supermajority in the State Assembly, and a supermajority in the State Senate. There is no functioning Republican opposition capable of blocking anything the Democratic Party decides to do collectively.
Which means that when the Democratic Party fails to act on housing, there is no one else to blame. And it has failed, repeatedly, on housing.
What the AB 1157 vote revealed is that the party is not a unified institution. It is a coalition of two factions that are in open, if rarely publicly acknowledged, conflict with each other. Progressive Democrats, largely representing urban districts with dense renter populations, push for stronger tenant protections. Moderate Democrats, often representing suburban or coastal districts with significant homeowner and small landlord constituencies, resist those protections. Both factions run under the same banner. Both compete in the same primaries. And both are heavily funded by outside interests that have every reason to keep the fight unresolved.
The progressive wing has its own donors, primarily labor unions and tenant advocacy organizations. The moderate wing has its own donors, primarily corporate real estate interests and business lobbies. The two factions fight their battles in committee hearings and floor votes, rarely openly, usually through procedural maneuvers like a well-timed abstention. And then the donors reward whoever served them best, through direct contributions, independent expenditures, or a glossy mailer sent to your house.
This is not unique to Democrats. Republicans in other states run the same internal divisions with the same donor architecture, just with different industries writing the checks. What is notable about California is how invisible the conflict is allowed to remain. The state presents a unified progressive face to the country while quietly allowing its most powerful industries to shape policy from the inside, out of sight of the voters who thought they were electing people to represent them.
The People Caught in the Middle
While Sacramento plays these games, the people of California’s 21st Assembly District are dealing with a real housing crisis. San Mateo County, which Papan represents, has some of the highest rents in the United States. The median one-bedroom apartment in the county costs well over $2,000 a month. Working families, teachers, nurses, retail workers, and the people who make the peninsula function are being priced out of the communities where they work.
They received a mailer this spring. It told them their assemblymember is a hero of affordable housing. It was sent by the landlord lobby.
The people who depend on their elected representatives to stand up for them deserve better than this. They deserve legislators who vote on their behalf, who make their positions known, and who do not accept third-party thank-you campaigns from the industries they were supposed to be holding accountable. They deserve a political system honest enough to at least be clear about who is representing whom.
Once Again, Our Parties Have Failed Us
This particular story is set in California, but there is nothing uniquely Californian about it. The mechanics on display here, the donor money, the abstention as a product, the manufactured public image, the shell game between politicians and the industries that fund them, operate in every state, in both parties, at every level of government.
Republicans in state legislatures across the country do the same thing, protecting oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and private insurers through quiet procedural moves that never generate a negative headline. Democrats in California do it for the real estate industry. The names change. The structure does not.
What is being lost in all of this is something that used to be fundamental to the idea of representative government: the belief that the people you elect are actually working for you. That when you send someone to Sacramento or Washington or your state capital, their primary obligation is to the voters who put them there, not the donors who financed their campaigns or the industry groups who will reward their loyalty with glossy mailers and the promise of future support.
That belief has not disappeared entirely. It lives in the voters who packed that Judiciary Committee hearing room on January 13 and testified about what high rents are doing to their families. It lives in the reporters who called out five legislators by name for refusing to vote. It lives in the people who look at a political mailer from a landlord lobby and know, immediately and instinctively, that something is wrong with what they are seeing.
The question is whether we are willing to do something about it. Both parties have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they will not fix this from the inside. The donor relationships are too valuable, the incentives too well-established, and the accountability too weak.
The only force that has ever changed this calculus is an organized political movement that does not owe anything to either party’s donor network. That is not a fantasy. That is how political change has always worked in this country, when it has worked at all.
The clock is running. The center must hold.
That is the wave.
The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party.
Visit centercratic.party