Dan Walters

Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. At one point in his career, at age 22, he was the nation’s youngest daily newspaper editor. 

He joined The Sacramento Union’s Capitol bureau in 1975, just as Jerry Brown began his governorship, and later became the Union’s Capitol bureau chief. In 1981, Mr. Walters began writing the state’s only daily newspaper column devoted to California political, economic and social events.

In 1984, he and the column moved to The Sacramento Bee and in 2017, Mr. Walters and his column shifted to CALmatters.org, a non-profit organization devoted to California public policy issues. He has written more than 9,000 articles and his column appears in dozens of California newspapers.

Mr. Walters has written about California and its politics for a number of other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, and in 1986, his book, The New California: Facing the 21st Century, was published in its first edition. The book later underwent revisions and became a widely used college textbook about socioeconomic and political trends in the state.

He is also the founding editor of the California Political Almanac and the co-author of The Third House: Lobbyists, Money, and Power in Sacramento, published by the University of California. Mr. Walters frequently appears on CNN, Fox, and other networks, commenting about political developments in California.