An attorney general’s race featuring a pair of well-known and well-heeled Democrats and two GOP longshots heads the list of down-ballot contests in the June 5 California primary.

Former Los Angeles Rep. Xavier Becerra, who was appointed attorney general after Kamala Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, faces Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones in a high-profile Democratic matchup.

Steven Bailey, a retired El Dorado County judge, and Eric Early, a Los Angeles attorney, are the Republicans in the race, but neither has anything like the campaign cash or the name identification of the two Democrats. As of mid-April, state financial reports showed that Bailey had about $13,000 on hand and Early had $76,000, while Becerra and Jones each had more than $3 million.

But in California’s primary system, the top two finishers, regardless of party, move to the November ballot. Bailey or Early could sneak into the second spot if one of them unites enough Republicans and conservative independents while Jones and Becerra split the Democratic vote.

That’s one reason Jones has begun attacking Bailey, whom he views as the GOP front-runner.

The candidates come from a range of backgrounds. Becerra is a Sacramento native and the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a Stanford law graduate who joined the attorney general’s office in 1987, was elected to the Assembly in 1990 and moved to Congress two years later.

As attorney general, much of the 60-year-old Becerra’s work has involved fighting President Trump on such issues as immigration, the environment and health care.

“I want to fight for your rights from start to finish — until we put every dangerous idea and policy six feet underground,” he said last year.

Jones, 56, grew up outside Chicago, received his law degree from Harvard and a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He worked as a legal aid attorney in California and spent three years in the U.S. Justice Department during the Clinton administration.

He was elected to Sacramento City Council in 1999, went to the Assembly in 2004 and was first elected state insurance commissioner in 2010.

Jones has said he will deal with every aspect of the attorney general’s job.

“There’s a lot more to the attorney general’s office than suing Donald Trump,” he said during a March debate.

Bailey, 66, was born in Yuba City, graduated from Sacramento State University and received his law degree from Lincoln University in Sacramento. He worked as a legislative assistant in both the Assembly and the Senate and was deputy director for legislation for the state Department of Social Services. He worked as an attorney handling criminal and administrative law from 1990 to 2009, when he was elected to the Superior Court in South Lake Tahoe. He retired in 2017.

Bailey has promised to change many of Becerra’s policies and work more closely with the federal government.

“California has problems of its own,” Bailey said. “Suing the federal government over the likes of whether we ought to have a border wall was frivolous ... (and) is, quite frankly, disturbing.”

Early, 59, is managing partner of a Los Angeles law firm and spent time in the entertainment industry, working on animated productions, including “G.I Joe,” “Transformers” and “Jem and the Holograms.” He graduated from the New York University School of the Arts and received his law degree from Southwestern University in Los Angeles.

He has called for a tougher state stance on crime, including enforcement of the death penalty, and says he will fight “unconstitutional rules and regulations” that “shackle our citizens with taxes and regulations.”

Secretary of state

Democrat Alex Padilla of Los Angeles is running for re-election, and his main challengers are Democratic businessman Ruben Major of Oceanside (San Diego County) and Walnut Creek election attorney Mark Meuser.

Padilla, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, cites his commitment to modernizing the secretary of state’s office, increasing voter registration and protecting voter rights. He sponsored the Voters Choice Act, which changes the way ballots are cast in the state, and helped persuade the Legislature to move the 2020 presidential primary to March in an effort to boost the state’s national clout.

For Meuser, the secretary of state’s office hasn’t kept up with changing times, neither in running elections nor in registering California businesses.

In elections, he would replace signatures with individualized PIN numbers to cut the number of rejected mail ballots. He also says he would work harder to purge voter registration lists of people who have died or moved.

Major, who owns a company that provides training and continuing education for emergency medical technicians, contends that California elections are vulnerable to hackers. By moving to publicly owned open-source election software, the state “can improve the security and transparency of our elections and restore the trust of the public,” he said.

As of April 21, five other candidates on the ballot had not raised enough money to file a financial report with the state.

Treasurer

Democrats Fiona Ma, a member of the state Board of Equalization, and Vivek Viswanathan, an adviser in Gov. Jerry Brown’s office, are the leading candidates to replace John Chiang, who is running for governor. Three other candidates, including Republican Greg Conlon, who lost to Chiang in 2014, have not raised the $2,000 that would require them to file a financial report with the state.

Ma, a former San Francisco supervisor and assemblywoman, says her experience with state finances will enable her to safely invest public money, arrange financing for projects and keep California in good fiscal shape.

Viswanathan wants to raise state revenue by expanding the sales tax to services. He also wants to provide public financing for all state-level campaigns and provide Medi-Cal coverage to every eligible person in the state, regardless of immigration status.

He’s raising money for his campaign by running 500 miles across California “to show that someone like me can win without a dime of corporate or special-interest money.”

Controller

Democrat Betty Yee is running for re-election. The San Francisco native was formerly a member of the state Board of Equalization. She’s running on her experience dealing with the state’s financial matters and says she will maintain California’s “fiscal and financial integrity and accountability.”

Republican Konstantinos Roditis is Yee’s main challenger. An Orange County resident making his first run for elective office, Roditis is calling for new, locally focused leadership in Sacramento. The key to his campaign is what he calls his “trickle-up taxation” plan, eliminating the state income tax and replacing it with a county income tax. A percentage of that county money would then flow up to the state and down to local cities, he says.

Mary Lou Finley, a Peace and Freedom Party candidate, has raised less than $2,000 in contributons for her campaign.

Insurance commissioner

Two Democrats and an independent are seeking to replace termed-out Democrat Dave Jones.

Tech businessman Steve Poizner is running as an independent, but he was a Republican in 2006 when he was elected insurance commissioner. He left the post in 2010 for an unsuccessful run for governor.

Poizner says he will concentrate on prosecuting insurance fraud and improving coverage for natural disasters.

Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County) promises to stand up to insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms and fight President Trump’s efforts to cut back on health care.

Lara, who grew up in East Los Angeles, was the author of SB562, a bill designed to make California the first state with a single-payer health care system. It passed the Senate in 2017 but stalled in the Assembly.

Poizner opposes the single-payer idea.

Asif Mahmood, a Los Angeles County physician, is making his first try for elective office. A native of Pakistan, he has lived in California since 2000. He says he would push the Legislature to pass single-payer. He has called for more efforts to deal with insurance problems linked to such things as self-driving cars and cyber-security threats.

Nathalie Hrizi, a Peace and Freedom Party candidate, has not raised enough money to file a campaign finance report.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth