I have interviewed dozens of Republican candidates running long-shot campaigns for statewide office in California over the past two decades. Every one of them had a fantastical theory about how they alone had cracked the code to crossover appeal, without having actually come up with an alternative to the same Republican platform voters kept rejecting. I think some of them even believed it.
Steve Hilton, the British expat and former Fox News host running for California governor in the November election, strikes me as one of those believers.
Oh, he knows it’s an uphill battle; he's seen the poll that put him 22 points behind Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden and California attorney general. And he knows that the endorsement of President Trump, who is deeply unpopular here, may have been a blessing in the primary but a curse in the runoff. In his mind, however, none of it is insurmountable.
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"The numbers aren't quite as daunting as that poll suggests," he told CNN's Laura Coates on Sept. 25, pointing to other polls in which he is trailing by a more narrow margin. More important, he says, are the majority of Californians — even some Democrats! — who say they are unhappy with the direction the state is heading and want something new. That "new" thing is presumably him: a wealthy recent European immigrant living in Atherton, the nation's most exclusive enclave, who is certain he knows how to run the world’s fourth-largest economy and help working people, despite having never held public office.
I could almost hear Garry South, a Democratic political strategist who has worked on California gubernatorial campaigns for decades, roll his eyes when I asked if fed-up Democrats are flocking to Hilton: No, he said, there’s no evidence of that, noting that double-digit polling gaps are normal for Republicans running in general statewide elections.
"Republicans come up with that every cycle, saying people are so pissed off at Democrats that they will now vote for Republicans," he said. But guess who put the Democrats in charge and continue to do so?
Hilton "is simply not viable," South said. Not in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican for governor for 20 years. (Or more than 30, if you consider Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 recall election win a fluke driven more by his superstardom and Kennedy family affiliation than party designation.)
Dan Morain
That's pretty much the assessment of Jon Fleischman, a Republican political strategist and former executive director of the state's Republican Party. No matter how you cut it, the math is against Hilton. With 4.7 million more Democrats than Republicans in California, as well as a gigantic pool of independent voters who lean liberal, he'd have to do everything right and Becerra do everything wrong.
"For a Republican to get elected, you'd need 98 percent of the Republicans, you'd need like 70 percent of the independents, and you'd still need 20 percent of the Democrats," Fleischman said. "That's a huge lift."
The burden is even heavier this year, with the deep unpopularity of the president. Like John Deaton, who is running a similarly long-shot campaign against Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, and other Republicans in blue and purple states, Hilton has taken steps to distance himself from the toxic Trump brand. "Can you be anti-Trump and still vote for me?" he asked in an ad that ran in California newspapers in July. (His answer: yes.) But for all his protestations, his platform is steeped in Trumpism: He wants to "Make California Golden Again," create a California version of DOGE, indiscriminately kill state agencies, eradicate regulations wholesale and open up forests to logging and mining, and oceans to oil drilling.
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Hilton has also embraced the Trump tendency to issue ridiculous promises, like $3-a-gallon gasoline (it's not even that low in Texas!). He wants to shut down the Department of Motor Vehicles so people don't have to stand in long lines. Instead, they can apparently wait in even longer lines at the unprepared state agency suddenly saddled with the task of issuing drivers licenses and car registration. He wants to make California's public schools, whose students are overwhelmingly Asian and Latino, "English only" — even though voters repealed a bilingual education ban in 2016.
In September, I attended a rally for Hilton and Gloria Romero, a former Democratic state legislator who abruptly switched parties two years ago to run for lieutenant governor on the GOP ticket. I wanted to see for myself if there was something to Hilton's claim that his campaign had something new to offer California voters.
But as soon as the audience took up chants of "USA, USA, USA," I knew that Hilton is not the person who is going to save the Republican Party in California this year.
This article previously appeared in the Boston Globe's Opinion section, where I am a contributor.
