Few political aspirations have proved extra futile over the previous twenty years than working as a Republican for statewide workplace in California. But Steve Hilton – transplanted Brit, erstwhile enterprise entrepreneur, a former Downing Road adviser to David Cameron and a former Fox Information host who says he’s buddies with half of Donald Trump’s cupboard – is having a remarkably good time of it.
With lower than six weeks to go earlier than a major election that has proved to be each dramatic and wildly unpredictable, most polls put Hilton narrowly forward of a fractured subject of Democrats within the race to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor. It’s an astonishing flip of occasions in a state the place Democrats take pleasure in supermajorities within the state legislature and a two-to-one benefit over the Republicans in voter registration.
Hilton and a second Republican polling within the prime tier, Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco, have been boosted partly by disarray within the Democratic ranks, the place no candidate has emerged as a transparent frontrunner in a crowded subject and one main contender, Eric Swalwell, was drummed out of the race and out of politics final month following sexual assault and misconduct allegations. Swallwell has strongly denied the claims.
However Hilton additionally has the most important variety of particular person marketing campaign donors and ranks third in fundraising behind the free-spending, self-financing Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer and the Silicon Valley backed centrist Matt Mahan. A few of Mahan’s donors, together with Google founder Sergey Brin, at the moment are shifting over to him – partly, Hilton says, due to Mahan’s poor polling numbers.
Hilton’s marketing campaign stops are typically crowded and energetic. He has bucked the standard knowledge that claims California campaigns are fought and gained on the airwaves. As a substitute, he’s visited virtually each nook of the state, working his low-key British appeal and his knack for a pithy flip of phrase to woo everybody from farmers to suburban mothers to Latino small enterprise homeowners with the argument that one-party rule by the Democrats has been disastrous and it’s time for a dramatic change.
“Every day that goes by, I imagine increasingly that we will pull this off. There’s a majority for change in California,” he instructed a pumped-up crowd final weekend in Huntington Seaside, a browsing city whose native authorities has itself bucked the Golden State’s liberal status with a pointy flip to the Donald Trump-loving proper.
In some ways, Hilton is in search of to harness the identical political power as he did when he helped rebrand the Conservative occasion in its wilderness years twenty years in the past. Then as now, he dislikes fits and ties, preferring to speak to voters in single-button T-shirts. He has a expertise for dressing the hard-right positions of his buddies within the Trump administration within the language of widespread sense and compassion for working folks.
Victory in November nonetheless looks like a dizzying lengthy shot, however the state Democratic occasion’s leaders have definitely fretted over eventualities during which they by some means lose management of the richest, most populous US state for the primary time since Arnold Schwarzenegger solid a path from Hollywood to the governor’s workplace in 2003.
Beneath a Schwarzenegger-era reform, the state not picks one Democrat and one Republican to duke it out within the normal election however fairly holds an “open” major during which the highest two vote-getters advance no matter occasion. There’s a slim probability Hilton and Bianco will advance and shut out the Democrats altogether, but it surely’s not an opportunity Hilton is betting on.
Fairly, he’s in search of what he calls a “political revolution” – a watershed second when Democratic voters dispense with occasion allegiance in decisive numbers due to the pinch they really feel from the state’s excessive value of residing and poverty charges, its top-three unemployment charge, and the basement scores it receives for financial alternative.
Hilton is definitely proper to say persons are sad about this stuff. In line with one revered ballot, a majority of Californians assume their state is heading within the mistaken path, with inflation and the price of housing and well being care uppermost amongst their considerations.
Hilton’s Democratic rivals are taking these points severely, too, and describe California as being unaffordable and in disaster. However the way in which Hilton sees it, they’ve solely themselves in charge as a result of it has been their occasion in cost. At marketing campaign stops, he portrays the final 16 years of state authorities beneath the Democrats as bloated, overly excited about taxing small companies and weighing atypical working folks down with guidelines and purple tape, successfully sacrificing the widespread good for what he describes with undisguised contempt as a “bottomless cash pit” in Sacramento, the state capital.
That message resonates in locations like Downey, a workaday Los Angeles suburb generally referred to as the “Mexican Beverly Hills” due to its dynamic Latino enterprise class, which noticed an 18.8 percentage-point swing away from the Democrats in direction of Trump within the 2024 presidential election. Attendees at a brunch organized for Hilton in a neighborhood shopping center have been thrilled by his guarantees to abolish a flat annual $800 enterprise tax and his vow to crack down on employee compensation lawsuits that he stated have been a racket orchestrated by trial legal professionals and their political proteges within the Democratic Occasion.
“Hopefully he can do a Doge with all of the paperwork and fraud in California,” stated one brunch attendee, insurance coverage govt Joe Murillo, referring to the controversial purge of federal staff that the White Home’s particular appointee, Elon Musk, orchestrated within the opening months of Trump’s second presidential time period.
The query, although, is whether or not such sentiments, and the candidate who champions them, stand an opportunity of breaking by California’s dauntingly excessive blue wall in what is anticipated to be a tough yr for Republicans nationally. One important downside for Hilton is that he has been endorsed by Trump in a state the place the president’s approval ranking hovers round 25%, roughly 10 factors decrease than the nationwide common. Newsom’s approval ranking, in contrast, stands at about 50%.
Hilton calls himself “a pragmatist, not an ideologue” and factors to his expertise in coalition authorities beneath Cameron’s premiership as proof that he can work nicely with folks whose politics don’t align together with his. He sees the truth that he will get together with Trump and his cupboard as a possible asset, a manner of attracting federal {dollars} and different types of cooperation from Washington that, he hopes, will decrease the temperature after greater than a yr of feuding and name-calling between Trump and Newsom.
“My job [as governor] might be to ship fairly pragmatic issues, all targeted on making your life simpler and higher,” he says. “I’m an affordable one that may be very targeted on sensible modifications.”
That self-description is most believable when Hilton listens sympathetically to plumbers, restaurant homeowners and real-estate brokers describing their day-to-day struggles and life experiences. He talks much less now than he did a yr in the past about California’s failures and the way horrible all the pieces is, and extra about how a lot he loves and admires the state’s stressed artistic power and needs just for higher political management to convey that power to the fore.
The messaging is paying homage to Hilton’s work for Cameron when he was instrumental in shaking the Tory occasion’s austere picture and promising a “massive society” imaginative and prescient, nodding to the environmental motion by switching the occasion brand from a torch to a tree, and ensuring Cameron and different key figures felt approachable, not distant – what on the time was described because the Tories’ “hug a hoodie” second.
There have been questions even then about how average Hilton’s views have been – he went on to embrace Boris Johnson’s Brexit marketing campaign – and people questions come up once more now, particularly when Hilton comes head to head with a extra partisan Republican crowd.
At two occasions instantly following the enterprise brunch in Downey, the primary at a conservative evangelical church and the second addressing the Huntington Seaside Republican Membership at a preferred sports activities bar, Hilton talked about his shut friendship with Charlie Kirk, the polarizing Trump loyalist and campus activist who embraced the speculation that immigrants are coming to American to “substitute” white Christians amongst different excessive positions earlier than being shot useless in Utah final September.
“He’s with me each step of this journey,” Hilton stated of Kirk. “We’re going to save lots of California, and we’re going to do it for Charlie.”
Hilton responded positively to questions from vaccine skeptics, saying he thought it “outrageous” that kids wanted to be vaccinated as a situation of attending public faculty and that he was a powerful believer in “medical freedom”.
He stirred up each crowds with guarantees not simply of a brand new politics however of some type of payback. “It’s over for these folks,” he stated of California’s Democrats. “It’s completely over.” At one other level, speaking concerning the Covid pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 – a supply of continuous resentment amongst Trump Republicans who noticed face masks and enterprise closures as an affront to their private freedoms – he stated: “We mustn’t allow them to neglect what they did to us.”
When requested by the Guardian who gained the 2020 presidential election, Hilton refused to present a straight reply. “I can’t stand that query,” he stated. “It’s a recreation, and I don’t wish to play it. I simply don’t.”
As a substitute, he accused California Democrats of constructing “an unlimited variety of last-minute modifications which have triggered large mistrust within the system” within the run-up to the 2020 election – a manner of casting his personal shade on a race that vote tallies, dozens of court docket rulings, and the US Congress all say Trump clearly misplaced to Joe Biden. The modifications he was referring to have been to California’s mail-in poll guidelines within the wake of the Covid pandemic, however experiences of tried dishonest that yr have been uncommon and got here to gentle largely as a result of they have been thwarted by safeguards throughout the system.
On this and different points there seems to be little daylight between Hilton and the hard-right Republican management in Huntington Seaside, which has cried foul about California’s electoral system for years with out producing proof of substantive issues.
At most, election consultants say, their complaints have picked up on procedural points like signature verification and vote counts that may linger weeks previous election day and used them as a pretext to accuse Democrats of foul play. Within the identify of poll safety Huntington Seaside’s Republicans have now sponsored an initiative that, if accredited, would require voters to supply formal identification and show their citizenship on the polls.
Critics say the initiative is an onerous resolution to a non-existent downside and would depress turnout, particularly amongst Latinos and different minorities who might not have passports and are terrified of falling into the clutches of Trump’s immigration and customs enforcement police. Hilton, although, has leapt on it as a chance to spice up Republican voter enthusiasm in November, and with it his possibilities within the governor’s race.
Huntington Seaside is the place Hilton launched his gubernatorial marketing campaign in April 2025, and he has taken a number of different strategic leaves from the native management’s playbook, together with the thought of working a slate of candidates who can assist elevate one another up.
Hilton has an ideological associate he calls his “working mate”, former state senator (and former Democrat) Gloria Romero, who’s vying to develop into lieutenant governor. He has additionally shaped an alliance with Huntington Seaside’s former metropolis lawyer, Michael Gates, who’s working for state lawyer normal. Hilton calls this casual lineup a “golden ticket”, and he has ambitions to make use of it not simply to raise himself however to attempt to break the Democratic supermajorities within the California meeting and senate.
The slate’s existence might not alter the grim math for Republicans statewide, however the promise alone of a brand new strategy and recent management is energizing the occasion devoted and giving them actual hope after a long time within the wilderness. Tony Strickland, the tip of the spear of the Trump revolution in Huntington Seaside now serving within the state legislature, stated of Hilton: “We’re one chief away from prosperity right here in California.”
The room erupted in chants of “Tony! Tony!” as he spoke these phrases, and the chants quickly switched to “Steve! Steve! Steve!” as Hilton made his entrance, high-fiving proper and left. Exterior, the faces of Republicans turned away from the occasion pressed up in opposition to the bar’s plate glass home windows.
“It’s like there’s a strip membership opening in there or one thing,” a person in a Los Angeles Lakers basketball cap remarked. In surf-crazy, Trump-loving Huntington Seaside, that passes as the very best of compliments.
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