Steve Hilton is doing something Republicans have struggled to pull off in California for two decades: he's winning. With less than six weeks until the primary election, the transplanted Brit, former Downing Street adviser to David Cameron, and onetime Fox News personality is leading most polls in a crowded race to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor of the nation's most populous state.
It's an improbable moment in a state where Democrats control the legislature by supermajority and outnumber Republicans two-to-one among registered voters. Yet Hilton and fellow Republican Chad Bianco have surged partly because the Democratic field remains fragmented, with no clear frontrunner emerging. A leading Democratic contender, Representative Eric Swalwell, was forced from the race last month following allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, which he has denied.
Hilton has capitalized on Democratic disarray while building genuine grassroots momentum. He has logged more individual campaign donors than any rival and ranks third in fundraising overall, behind self-financing billionaire Tom Steyer and centrist Matt Mahan. Notably, some of Mahan's high-profile backers, including Google founder Sergey Brin, have recently shifted support to Hilton.
Rather than rely on expensive television campaigns, Hilton has crisscrossed California in person, working what allies describe as low-key British charm alongside sharp rhetoric. He addresses crowds in casual single-button T-shirts, not suits, and speaks directly to farmers, suburban voters, and Latino small business owners. His core message is relentless: one-party Democratic rule has devastated the state, and only radical change can reverse it.
"Each day that goes by, I believe more and more that we can pull this off. There is a majority for change in California," Hilton told an energized crowd in Huntington Beach, the conservative surf town that has become his campaign's spiritual home and launching pad.
The economic discontent Hilton is mining is real. California ranks poorly on critical metrics: top-three unemployment, some of the nation's highest costs of living, and widespread poverty despite its vast wealth. Polling shows a majority of Californians believe the state is heading in the wrong direction, with housing affordability, inflation, and health care costs their chief concerns.
Hilton blames the Democratic Party squarely for these failures. At campaign stops, he portrays 16 years of Democratic governance as bloated and hostile to small business, burdened by red tape and excessive taxation that he claims sacrifice working people for Sacramento's budget excesses. The message resonates especially in places like Downey, a Latino-majority Los Angeles suburb that swung nearly 19 percentage points toward Trump in 2024.
At a brunch event in Downey, Hilton pitched the abolition of California's flat $800 annual business tax and promised aggressive action against worker compensation lawsuits, which he characterized as a scheme run by trial lawyers and their Democratic allies. One attendee, insurance executive Joe Murillo, responded enthusiastically, saying Hilton could perform a "Doge" on California's bureaucracy, referencing Elon Musk's controversial federal workforce purge under Trump.
Yet Hilton faces formidable headwinds. Trump's approval rating in California hovers around 25 percent, roughly ten points below the national average and a massive liability in a state where Democrat Gavin Newsom's approval stands at about 50 percent. Hilton has secured Trump's endorsement, but that may help him more with the Republican base than with the broader electorate.
The structural challenge is equally steep. Under California's open primary system, the top two vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election regardless of party. A Republican winning the governorship would be historic. The last Republican governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left office in 2011.
Hilton presents himself as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, pointing to his experience in Britain's coalition government under David Cameron. He emphasizes his ability to work across divides and his potential to attract federal resources and cooperation from a Trump administration. "My job as governor will be to deliver pretty pragmatic things, all focused on making your life easier and better," he says.
But his messaging shifts noticeably depending on his audience. In conversations with working people facing real economic hardship, Hilton is sympathetic and solution-focused. When addressing Republican faithful and evangelical crowds, his rhetoric hardens considerably.
At a conservative evangelical church and the Huntington Beach Republican Club, Hilton spoke warmly of his close friendship with Charlie Kirk, a polarizing Trump loyalist and campus activist known for promoting the "great replacement" conspiracy theory about immigrants. "He's with me every step of this journey," Hilton said of Kirk, who was killed in Utah last September. "We're going to save California, and we're going to do it for Charlie."
He also struck an accommodating note with vaccine skeptics in those crowds, calling it "outrageous" that schools require vaccination and declaring himself a strong believer in "medical freedom." He stirred both rooms with more combative language about Democrats. "It's over for these people," he said. "It's absolutely over." On Covid lockdowns, he added: "We mustn't let them forget what they did to us."
When asked directly who won the 2020 presidential election, Hilton declined to answer. "I can't stand that question," he said. "It's a game, and I don't want to play it. I just don't." He instead leveled charges that California Democrats made "an enormous number of last-minute changes" to mail-in ballot rules before the 2020 election, creating "huge distrust in the system." Election experts note that documented fraud attempts that year were rare and mostly thwarted by existing safeguards.
Hilton has embraced positions aligned with Huntington Beach's Republican leadership, including support for a ballot initiative requiring voters to present formal identification and prove citizenship at polls. Critics argue the measure addresses a non-existent problem and would suppress turnout among Latino and minority voters who may lack passports and fear Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Hilton is building a broader Republican slate designed to lift his own candidacy. He has named former state senator Gloria Romero, a onetime Democrat, as his informal running mate for lieutenant governor. He is also allied with Michael Gates, a former Huntington Beach city attorney running for state attorney general. Hilton calls this lineup a "golden ticket" and has signaled ambitions to erode Democratic supermajorities in the state assembly and senate.
Even if victory in November remains a long shot, Hilton has accomplished something tangible: he has energized California Republicans after decades of statewide defeat. State legislator Tony Strickland, a Trump champion from Huntington Beach, offered the party faithful a simple vision: "We're one leader away from prosperity here in California." The crowd erupted in chants, first of Strickland's name, then of Hilton's. Outside, Republicans pressed their faces against the bar's plate glass windows to catch a glimpse of the spectacle.
Author James Rodriguez: "Hilton's surge reveals genuine Democratic weakness, but whether a British ex-Fox host who refuses to say who won 2020 can actually crack California's blue wall is another matter entirely."
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