President Donald Trump has a type, at least when it comes to political candidates. They tend to be brash, razor-tongued mold-breakers, hardliners who want to own the libs, political newcomers unhindered by norms or niceties.
Then there’s Steve Hilton, a Republican who has a shot at being California’s next Governor. Hilton’s resumé reads like the opposite of what you’d expect for the next leader of a state that backed Kamala Harris over Trump by 20 points. A British-born dual U.S.-U.K. citizen since 2021, Hilton was once a member of Margaret Thatcher’s political machine and a senior adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government before becoming a Fox News personality. In most other blue states, Trump’s endorsement would be the kiss of death. But under California’s jungle primary system, the top two vote-getters get to face each other in a head-to-head contest in November, regardless of party. If the latest polls bear out, Hilton is well-positioned to advance.
On a half-hour call with me this week, Hilton sees his competitiveness as one of many signs that Californians are rejecting the hold-the-line liberalism that has defined California politics for a generation.
“We've had 16 years of one-party rule, and the results are in. And it's a massive disappointment on every front,” Hilton says. “People are sensing that there's an energy for change this year. You can feel it in the energy around Spencer Pratt's campaign [for Mayor] in L.A. You can feel it around the response that we're getting up and down the state.”
Helping Hilton be seen as more than just another Trump loyalist is a campaign approach emphasizing measured promises to make life easier at the granular level and pledges to work with the state’s Democratic majority. That’s all helped Hilton remain in the pretty settled first tier of candidates, alongside Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra and billionaire activist Tom Steyer. It breaks with Trump’s push for pushy disruptors—and is ringing true with voters who think the Democratic stranglehold of the nation’s biggest economic driver needs a reset.
So far, liberally aligned candidates like Becerra and Steyer have been fighting each other more—and splitting the Democratic vote in the process—rather than bothering with Hilton. That would change in a head-to-head-matchup when the issues where Hilton is closer to Trump’s position would move to center stage. A year after ICE raids in Los Angeles sparked mass protests and Trump deployed National Guard soldiers to the city, Hilton says he would work to have California work better with Trump on immigration. A challenge to the state’s sanctuary spaces law, passed in 2017, is underway, but Hilton says “I can’t just delete that” on his own. Instead, he wants to use provisions in the law—criticized by liberals at the time—that allow narrow collaboration with the feds. “We’ve got to lower the temperature. I think that we’ve had far too much confrontation. It’s unnecessary,” he says. “No one wants to see anything like what happened in L.A. last summer or, let alone, Minneapolis.”
‘The Fix is Pretty Straightforward’
It’s been quite the unexpected slog through a field of candidates so numerous that all of their names don’t even fit on a single page of the ballot. Democrats in California have held the governor's mansion, state House, and state Senate for almost two decades and unrest about that trifecta out West is real. The traditional political alliances are frayed, at best, with socialists backing a billionaire and Trump supporting an immigrant. A sex scandal tanked the hopes of a leading candidate, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and Trump’s endorsement of Hilton all but sidelined tough-on-crime Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco. It’s why Hilton, who moved to California in 2012, is in the mix in a race that is set to test assumptions about party loyalty, candidate partisanship, and money’s power. And it carries massive consequences about who will be the de facto CEO of the fourth-largest economy on the planet, between Germany and Japan, and a major player on the national political stage. This is not some backwater local election.
“It's just very obvious that it hasn't worked, this experiment in progressive governance where Democrats have had total control, able to do everything that they want. They've had two-third majorities in both chambers in the Legislature, all the statewide offices, all of the big cities, in the counties. The state Supreme Court has a 6-to-1 Democratic majority. This incredibly powerful Democrat machine that's been able to do exactly what it wants, and the results are really bad.”
Hilton, 56, has a point that is reflected in the data. In a Public Policy Institute of California survey earlier this year, most Californians reported an unflattering view of the state: 54% think that things in California are generally going in the wrong direction and 69% think that the state will have bad times financially in the next year. It’s grounded in some hard truths that Hilton has been serving in his well-polished interviews.
“It’s not just the visible things that you can see and anyone across the country can: the homelessness and the squalor of the big cities and smash-and-grab videos of crime rampant and all those things. But actually just the basics of life,” Hilton says. When I ask him about the solution, he says, his north star would be practicality: What can work and how quickly?
“The fix is pretty straightforward: stop doing stupid things and just lift this massive burden that everyone is laboring under in California, this bloated nanny-state bureaucracy.”
It’s a line that others—including Democrats—have used in their campaigns. Hilton is definitely tapping into an anti-Establishment mood, one California Gov. Gavin Newsom might want to note as he plots his all-but-certain 2028 presidential campaign. Hilton’s populism is grounded in an argument less about feelings than about objective fact. “There's a certain place for righteous rage. It's institutions that're letting people down, but you can do it with a smile on your face,” he tells me.
Working With the California Legislature
But even if elected, Hilton will inherit a Democratic Sacramento unlikely to back most of his campaign promises. With the exception of two blips, Democrats have held the Legislature there since 1958. But the Governor controls the cogs of government through thousands of appointments to boards and commissions. In his own way, Hilton is plotting how to out-maneuver the so-called Deep State at the agency level.
Hilton is clearly a planner and player, stemming from his days as a top aide in the United Kingdom’s first coalition government running Number 10 since 1945—working with the Liberal Democrats. He even shared an office next to the Cabinet Room with his counterpart who advised coalition partner deputy PM Nick Clegg. It’s a skill that has more than a few Democrats in California paying attention to a technocratic pitch from the former London restauranteur.
So what does Hilton promise? No more state income tax for the first $100,000 of income, gas down to $3 a gallon, electric bills cut by half, small-business taxes reduced. He plans to achieve much of that through slashing the state’s nation-leading efforts on climate change and consolidating bureaucracy with an aggressive eye on downsizing. He even has branding for his platform: “Californable.”
The accountants, though, will have their issues. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last budget, in 2010, was $122 billion. Newsom’s most recent budget? $349 billion. Hilton’s plan would dramatically change this math.
“There’s nowhere better than California, but we’ve just been really badly governed,” Hilton says.
And when the California Legislature says not-so-much? Hilton knows he can’t override them lawmakers. But he wants to make them prove they actually think the vote is worth defending. In fact, Hilton is envisioning vetoes putting lawmakers on record; the last time a session in Sacramento overrode a veto was in 1979.
“At the very least,” Hilton tells me, “I can slow it all down and stop the problem [from] getting worse.”
That slight tweak—far from the grandiose promise of political revolution—might find power in the voters’ verdict. It’s one that echoes the grumblings in Washington after Trump’s win in 2024. “The election of a Republican Governor will change the dynamic,” he says. “People voted for change. My platform was very clear, very specific. … These are not controversial things. You could disagree about the means of getting there. I’m sure we will.”
First, though, he has to get past Tuesday’s first round of voting.
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