Steve Hilton, the unlikeliest of Republican candidates for governor of California, was just getting warmed up.
The sun had broken through the clouds last week in Huntington Beach, and Hilton had begun an extended riff on how voters often swing dramatically by choosing leaders who are wildly different from their predecessors. Think: George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and Obama to Donald Trump.
That led to Hilton noting the contrast between his own bald pate and the rather impressive mop atop the head of his favorite foil, Gavin Newsom. “I think going the other direction is a pretty good idea,” he said to general applause and more than a few anticipatory chuckles. “I think we need a governor with less hair.”
It took me the length of a short flight to cross a vast cultural chasm when I traveled last week from deep-blue San Francisco to blood-red Orange County to watch Hilton, a Fox News personality and former political operative in the United Kingdom, launch his bid for governor. By mid-morning on Tuesday, I found myself sitting on the concrete steps of a makeshift amphitheater next to Huntington Beach’s town pier, surrounded by people in MAGA hats and Jesus-themed T-shirts.
I had come hoping to answer a straightforward question: Would middle-of-the-road, Trump-loathing Californians like me, who almost always vote Democratic but would gladly entertain the idea of a centrist in the mold of Arnold Schwarzenegger, support someone like Hilton?
Having never met Hilton nor seen him on Fox News, where he was a host and still appears, I was intrigued. A 55-year-old Briton who has been a citizen of the U.S. for all of four years, Hilton has a reputation in state political circles for being whip-smart and engaging. As The Standard’s Josh Koehn reported in February, he has a detailed, right-leaning policy agenda ranging from affordable housing to “creating a new timber and logging industry to reduce wildfires.” And he thinks he could be the first Republican governor since Schwarzenegger was reelected in 2006, because Californians are so fed up with Democrats — particularly Kamala Harris, a potential opponent whom Hilton would love to face.
Judging strictly by Hilton’s performance Tuesday, I’d say he’s off to a bad start — at least by my metric of his ability to win over non-Republicans. He selected Huntington Beach for his opening-day rally because of its recent success in flipping its City Council from a Democratic majority to a Republican-only power base. It’s the kind of place, in short, that taunted the state into suing it over its housing policies and proudly declares itself not a sanctuary city. Hilton’s campaign features a California-appropriate palette of golden yellow and pale blue, and a cheeky slogan, “Make California Golden Again.” It’s as if he’s suggesting MAGA adjacency rather than the fully caffeinated version.
And yet, a Republican hoping to woo Democrats by launching in Huntington Beach is a turnoff. It’d be like a Democrat trying to peel off Trump voters by starting on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.
If nothing else, Hilton exudes confidence. “This is day one of a 15-month campaign,” he told me in an interview after the rally. “I’m just at the beginning of what I know will be a very high-energy, highly positive campaign to show that change is possible.” Implication: First win the base, then win the people who need convincing.
Hilton knows politics. He was an adviser to David Cameron, the Tory prime minister of the United Kingdom. Though Hilton was educated at Oxford University, his background isn’t posh: His parents emigrated from Hungary in the 1950s, and his upbringing was working class.
Stylistically, he’s a convincing speaker: glib, funny, smooth, and camera-ready. At the same time, his rambling, rally-style chatter mimics the current president, with repetitive put-downs that won’t convince anyone that he’s just a smart, positive guy trying to get things done.
He uses the Fox News-approved adjective “Democrat” rather than “Democratic,” referring to Huntington Beach, for instance, as a former “Democrat-run city.” It’s a tick the MAGA faithful love — and one that annoys me like a tiny pebble in my shoe. And although Hilton is cerebral in a way our 45th and 47th president is not, the Brit is equally capable of vulgarity. After an edgy bit on California’s high-speed rail debacle, he metaphorically broadened the argument. “It is time to stop the Democrats’ bullshit train,” he shouted gleefully.
I found myself wishing this clearly skilled orator had written and delivered a well-crafted speech, the kind he used to write for the British prime minister, instead of the rile-’em-up cant the right-wing masses, trained by Trump, obviously prefer. Hilton was preceded onstage by a warmup ensemble of local politicians, Southern California pastors, and assorted gadflies. The most establishment support he mustered was a livestreamed chitchat with Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio and mostly rambled about himself.
In our 10-minute chat after the crowd had dispersed, Hilton told me he thinks his promise to improve the business climate in California will have broad appeal. He lamented that even the state’s industry-leading companies are investing outside of it. “You have a company like Nvidia, a California company, investing in Texas and Arizona, because it’s impossible to build anything in California,” he said.
When I pointed out that some of the world’s most important AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, not to mention Sierra, the well-funded startup recently joined by his wife, Rachel Whetstone, the former chief communications officer of Netflix — are in San Francisco, Hilton produced a Kamala-worthy word salad.
“I’m incredibly proud that California is leading the next wave of technological innovation with AI,” he said. “We’ve got to keep that going. But here’s the way to think about it. You have incredible economic success and innovation still going on, thanks to our innovation economy in the private sector, despite the government, despite the regulations, and so on. But this new wave of innovation, even more than the previous wave of technological innovation, is very light on jobs. It doesn’t employ that many people.”
It’s a fair, if dated, point. It has been well understood for years that the tech industry hasn’t come close to dominating U.S. employment, despite its value creation, the way the auto sector did two generations ago.
Hilton’s solutions revolve around making it easier to do business in California and reducing the power of public-sector unions, which he sees as accounting for the twin sins of runaway governmental spending and overregulation.
These are laudable goals I’d support — particularly if I thought Hilton had a chance of prevailing in a race dominated by Democrats who are lined up behind the unions. He said he’s “pro worker” and wants to work with unions to build more housing, for example, which will create jobs.
He said he’s well suited to reaching across the aisle, having done so in the U.K. when Cameron’s government shared power with the centrist Liberal Democrats. His Liberal Democratic counterpart at the time, Polly Mackenzie, validated Hilton’s advocacy for Cameron’s outreach to her party. “There’s truth to him being open-minded,” she told me by phone a few days after the rally. She mentioned a line Hilton wrote for a Cameron speech of his “big, open, and comprehensive offer” to the other party. “It was authentic,” she said.
I’m not convinced the British experience of the 2000s translates to contemporary U.S. polarization. Still, on their merits, many of Hilton’s policies are appealing. For instance, though he puts them in more strident terms, his policies on homelessness aren’t that different from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s. Both focus on approaching homelessness holistically, offering a range of housing options and a less permissive policy toward drug use. In contrast to Lurie, who avoids name-calling that will antagonize opponents, Hilton condemns a “housing first” approach that emphasizes permanent housing and calls out the “homelessness industrial complex” in San Francisco, whose budgets Lurie is very likely about to trim.
“Steve’s a centrist,” said Edward Ring, a water and energy analyst with the California Policy Center who cowrote Hilton’s policy papers as well as his new book that serves as a campaign manifesto, “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State.” “He’s really searching for solutions that will fix some of the things that have gone haywire in California.”
As I flew home, retracing California’s version of the Mason-Dixon Line, I found myself believing Hilton’s sincerity about wanting commonsense solutions but doubting his ability to transcend the unctuous Trumpist messaging and behavior he has embraced. Based on many recent conversations with even liberal Democratic friends, I don’t doubt for a moment that the right kind of Republican could prevail over the wrong kind of Democrat in the non-presidential-year election in 2026.
But is Hilton that candidate? At first blush, I would say that my answer is no. But he has a year and change to convince me and millions of other California voters that he offers more than Trumpism with a British accent.