In summary
Hilton advances to the November general election, where he’ll face longtime politician Xavier Becerra.
Republican Steve Hilton will advance to the November general election in the race for California governor, setting up a longshot contest against Democrat Xavier Becerra in which he’s promised to slash spending and regulations if elected.
Hilton, a British American former Fox News host, secured about 25% of the vote in the June 2 primary, with about 88% of votes counted as of Tuesday evening.
His opponent, Becerra, is a former state attorney general and U.S. Health and Human Services secretary who emerged from a large pool of Democratic candidates.
In a statement, Hilton said he would “lead the movement for change” in California and called Becerra the embodiment of the same decade and a half of Democratic control.
“My mission is clear: to go to Sacramento, clean up the corruption, cut your costs, help your business, and fix our schools,” he said. “We can’t keep voting the same way and expect different results.”
Hilton’s win knocks billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer from contention after he spent $215 million of his own money to boost his populist campaign and blanket the airwaves with ads. It will make the general election a traditional partisan matchup during a midterm election year that Democrats will treat as a check on President Donald Trump’s administration rather than the intra-Democratic Party brawl that Steyer supporters had hoped.
California uses a top-two primary system; the two candidates with the most votes advance to the November ballot regardless of party.
Steyer conceded in a statement Tuesday evening and endorsed Becerra for the November election. He said he was proud to have made “enemies” of the state’s utilities, tech companies and Big Oil, and didn’t blame Californians who “just couldn’t stomach voting for a billionaire.”
“It is absolutely essential that (Trump’s) handpicked candidate does not hold the keys to California,” he said, referring to Hilton.
With a crowded field of Democrats all competing for votes, Hilton led in the polls for much of the race, energizing conservative voters with promises to cut income taxes and the gas tax, boost oil drilling and overturn environmental regulations such as the state’s greenhouse gas reduction mandates.
He’s sold his candidacy as an opportunity for Californians crushed by high costs to end “16 years of one-party rule.” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last Republican to lead California, left office in 2011.
“The people of California have really been generous in giving the Democratic Party the opportunity to show that their ideas work,” Hilton said last week, declaring victory early at a press conference in Sacramento. “I think the patience is running out, really.”
He faces an uphill battle in November.
California Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. Though Hilton says he’s presenting the chance for the state to go in a different direction, there has been a GOP candidate in the general election for governor in every race in the past two decades — and besides Schwarzenegger’s tenure, Democrats have won them all.
He’s also endorsed by Trump, whom Californians disapprove of by high margins.
But he has not downplayed the endorsement.
“I think it’s going to be very helpful to Californians to have a governor who has a good working relationship with the president and his team,” he said.
Hilton’s signature campaign promise is to eliminate the income tax for the first $100,000 in earnings and institute a flat tax rate above that; he said last week that his campaign will consider raising that cap after conducting an economic analysis of the California cost of living. Either option would represent an enormous reduction in state revenue that Hilton has said he expects to offset by cutting a third of state spending.
He has not said how, if elected, he would get such a proposal through the Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature.
Hilton was born in London, the son of Hungarian immigrants to the United Kingdom. He got his start in politics working for the British Conservative Party and played a prominent role in the rise of Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. He moved in 2012 to Silicon Valley, where his wife was a Google executive, and dabbled in startups before launching a weekly Fox News show in 2017 during Trump’s first presidency. The show, The Next Revolution, ran through 2023.
