- State & Local
- California
Maybe it’s time to add a third entry, after death and taxes, to life’s certainties: the outcome of California statewide contests for public office.
In this century alone, there have been fifty-one elections in six campaign cycles involving California’s seven principal state constitutional offices and its two US Senate seats (this excludes two gubernatorial recall elections in 2003 and 2021). The result: in fifty-one races, forty-nine Republican losses (the GOP wins both occurring in 2006).
Will that pattern change in November?
With Election Day now less than seven weeks way, the odds are it won’t—not at the top of the ticket, at least. The venerable Cook Political Report, which handicaps state and federal races, rates thirteen gubernatorial contests nationwide as “solid” Democrat.
California’s one of them—and it’s no mystery why: the last three times the Golden State chose a successor to a term-limited governor (elections in 1998, 2010, and 2018), the Democratic hopeful won by an average of nearly 19 points.
All of which is a long-winded way of asking: how does Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host now running for governor as a Republican, make this a competitive race?
Hilton’s strategy, so far, is to try to “out-populist” his Democratic foe, former state attorney general Xavier Becerra: abolishing California’s Department of Motor Vehicles while capping annual vehicle registration at a flat fee of $73; expanding California’s Paid Family Leave program from eight to twelve weeks (paid for by an annual $1 billion in state budget cuts).
And Hilton’s camp is banking on the public falling asleep on the race, helped in part by Becerra keeping a low profile since California’s June primary. The parallel here: California’s 2002 gubernatorial contest, when the incumbent, Gray Davis, a Democrat, managed a five-point victory in a race that did little to quicken the collective pulse of California’s electorate. (An interesting factoid about that election: Republican Bill Simon lost by 363,000 votes statewide, all but 5,000 of that deficit coming in Los Angeles County, which accounted for nearly one-fourth of the overall turnout.)
The problems with these scenarios: while Davis received only 47.3 percent support to Simon’s 42.4 percent back in 2002, an additional 10 percent of voters opted for a third-party candidate. That won’t be the case in 2026, as California law now bans third-party candidates who didn’t finish first or second in the primary from appearing on the November ballot.
As for polling, Hilton’s campaign can point to a mid-August survey it commissioned which had the Republican trailing by 8 points. But that came on the heels of a Berkeley IGS Poll that had the contest at 55 percent to 37 percent in favor of Becerra.
To the extent Hilton can breathe new life into the race, a key moment will come on the final day of this month, when the two candidates are scheduled to take part in a one-hour televised debate hosted by CNN (kudos to both camps for agreeing to do this before voters have received their mail-in ballots and on a Wednesday night in September, before the Los Angeles Dodgers’ postseason run and free from any conflicts with the NFL’s schedule).
Also worth watching when the two candidates debate: whether, that night, Hilton decides to channel the last Republican to win a California governor’s race: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
To the extent there’s a Schwarzenegger-Hilton parallel other than immigration and distinct accents (like Arnold, the London-born Hilton immigrated to America from Europe), it begins with cars—in the 2003 recall election, Schwarzenegger’s campaign dropping a wrecking-ball on a beat-up Oldsmobile to channel the public’s discontent with a recent increase in the state’s vehicle license fee.; twenty-three years later, Hilton going after California’s DMW.
However, there is a difference between the two: Schwarzenegger’s insistence on “action” to describe his approach to governing.
Back in 2003, that term made sense as a matter of brand consistency—Arnold, a cinematic “action hero,” marketing himself as an “action” governor who intended to get to work the moment he took office.
Which is what Schwarzenegger did: in his first hours as California’s thirty-eighth governor, signing an executive order repealing the “car tax” increase, signing off on another order to review his predecessor’s handling of regulations, and issuing proclamations calling for legislative special sessions to deal with workers’ compensation, a cap on state spending, and revoking driver’s licenses for undocumented residents.
As Schwarzenegger noted at the time: “[A] friend of mine asked me before I left Los Angeles, he said, ‘Are you going to miss the action in the movies?’ I said no, I am going to have enough action up in Sacramento. Well, this is action, not just dialogue, this is action.”
But whereas Schwarzenegger’s embrace of “action” addressed a vulnerability—the need to show he could take Sacramento by storm and deliver results—a Hiltonian variation of the same word would reflect a different reality: a lack of policy and policy options, should he pull off the upset.
Put another way: were Hilton to take office next January, he’d likely receive a frosty reception from a state Legislature in which Democrats are expected to continue with their supermajority control of both the Assembly and the state Senate.
So much for a legislative path forward.
The new governor could hold up the state budget, with the intent of trying to bring his rivals to the negotiating table. But as with legislation forwarded his way, that comes with a political risk: the possibility of a California governor having a veto overridden for the first time since then-governor Jerry Brown and lawmakers bickered back in the late 1970s.
What that leaves for Hilton: like Schwarzenegger in 2003, use of the executive orders and special sessions to either produce policy changes or put his partisan rivals on the defensive.
Would such a strategy be effective? It produced early results for Schwarzenegger (he got a deal on workers’ compensation the following April, but had to take the spending cap to the ballot—and ended up losing badly—when lawmakers resisted). But part of the narrative of year one of the Schwarzenegger administration was that of lawmakers intimidated by the governor’s political charisma. That dynamic changed after Schwarzenegger’s efforts to flip legislative seats in November 2004 ended in futility (not one of the 153 congressional and legislative seats at stake in that election changed party hands).
It’s a reminder of a different time in Sacramento.
And a different script—one where voters didn’t always know the ending in advance.
