For flustered California Republicans, does breaking the Democratic stranglehold on statewide elected offices require a change in style and substance (and a British accent)?
Academics have long looked at Ronald Reagan’s political rise as something of a chicken-or-the-egg question. In Reagan’s case, which came first: a telegenic ex-entertainer who turned out to be a skilled communicator, or a set of conservative ideas and principles predating Reagan’s first run for public office that helped catapult him to eight years as California’s 33rd governor, followed by (six years later) two terms as America’s 40th president?
More recently, the same question was applied to Arnold Schwarzenegger – were his two gubernatorial wins (2003’s recall election, followed by re-election to a full term in 2006) a product of the “governator’s” celebrity status, or his innate ability to read the electorate?
Such is the quandary facing California’s Republican Party as it looks ahead to 2026 and potentially another round of frustration. Not since 1990 has California elected a non-incumbent Republican governor (the same for the U.S. Senate dates back to 1982). Going back to 2002 and excluding Schwarzenegger’s re-election, GOP candidates have a record of one win and 47 losses in regularly scheduled contests for California’s eight statewide officers.
Which takes up back to the chicken or the egg question . . .
In order to elect a non-incumbent as California’s governor for the first time in 36 years, does the Golden State’s GOP need to think more about “the man” (“individual”, for those concerned with gender identity) or “the moment”?
Or, is it easier – with a nod to realpolitik – for the party of the anagram that is Ronald/Arnold to acknowledge a likely defeat at the top of the Republican slate and turn to more feasible races further down the ballot?
Though the 2026 election is still the better part of two years away, speculation about the next slate of gubernatorial candidates is well underway. On the Republican side, that includes Riverside County Chad Bianco – not surprisingly, touted as a law-and-order candidate. And, more recently, talk of Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host and senior policy and strategy advisor to British prime minister David Cameron, entering the field.
Let’s take a closer look at Hilton and revisit the question of “man” or “moment”.
Hilton would enter the 2026 race as an unconventional candidate – atypical in that he’s lived in California for only a dozen years (Hilton became a U.S. citizen in 2021), eschews dress shirts for t-shirts, dabbles in tech (he founded the political start-up Crowdpac), academia (lecturing at Stanford University) and poultry (tending to chickens roosting at his home in Atherton, one of America’s priciest ZIP codes and a short drive from the Stanford campus).
But would Hilton be the right candidate coming along at the right time?
It’s a fair question to ask on a week that includes the third anniversary of a statewide recall election that failed to unseat California governor Gavin Newsom, the second such gubernatorial referendum in the Golden State less than two decades.
The leading vote-getter in that election, in a field that included nearly three dozen candidates all hoping to replace Newsom: talk-show host Larry Elder – like Hilton, a product of the conservative media industry.
On the one hand, Elder received an impressive 48.4% of the popular vote on the second of the two recall questions – the first being whether Newsom should go, followed by whom his replacement should be (Schwarzenegger received 48.6% of the popular vote in a 2003 recall contest that included 135 candidates).
But while Elder won the battle (the leading vote-getting in the replacement question), he lost the war in that the nearly 62% of Californians voted to keep Newsom in office, as opposed to the 55.4% who did the opposite – bidding goodbye to the recently reelected governor Gray Davis.
Why did Elder come up short? One could argue guilt by association – Newsom’s team doing its level best to tie Elder to an unpopular Donald Trump (Elder, at one point, sounding decidedly Trumpian on the eve of the election when suggesting that he could be a victim of election fraud).
But Elder suffered in at least one other regard: contentious matters that make for spicy talk radio coming back to haunt him come election time. For Elder, that included the topic of COVID – the candidate promising that one of his first acts as governor would be to eliminate a mandate for state workers to get vaccinated or face weekly testing.
Herein lies the challenge for conservative candidates in California, especially those with a penchant for “hot takes” who frequent talk radio and social media.
It’s not as if California lacks for right-of-center hobbyhorses. Consider a few recent events in the Golden State that sound like the stuff of Fox News evening programming:
- California’s state legislature, late last month, approving a bill making undocumented immigrants in the Golden State eligible for first-time homebuying loans – a measure that Newsom vetoed late last week.
- Newsom, in July, signing a law making California the first U.S. state to bar school districts from notifying parents of their child’s gender identification change (a school district in Southern California is suing Newsom for his decision).
- Earlier this month, a San Francisco 49ers rookie shot in broad daylight in San Francisco’s upscale Union Square shopping district – leaving it to the city’s district attorney to decide whether she’ll ask a judge to try the accused, age 17, as an adult for attempted murder, assault with a semi-automatic firearm and attempted second-degree robbery.
- On the same weekend the football player was shot in San Francisco, a protest at California’s State Capitol over lawmakers’ refusal to bring a pair of slavery reparations bill to an Assembly floor vote for fear of a Newsom veto (“This type of betrayal cannot go unanswered,“ responded the pro-reparations Coalition for a Just & Equitable California. “There must be a political price to pay. Gone are the days when politicians of any race or party can disrespect Black Americans and expect no political consequences").
As one can see, that’s plenty of conservative red meat for a gubernatorial hopeful to serve. The question is: is there a more pragmatic way to go about campaigning in a state in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by a nearly two-to-one margin, with the state GOP barely ahead of independents (“no party preference”) in terms of voter registration?
Indeed, it might be a focus on less pulse-racing issues – economic and pocketbook concerns. Here, a California candidate doesn’t lack for material. At the end of August, state regulators gave Allstate the green light to raise its California homeowners insurance premium by an average of 34% beginning in November.
Such is the state of unaffordable housing in the Golden State that the New York Times bothered to list what could be had for $800,000 or slightly more in some parts of California (none of the four featured homes surpassed 1,270 square feet).
If that’s too rich for a Californian’s blood, there’s the one-bedroom home outside Los Angeles that recently listed for $500,000 – investors lining up to bid on the property even though it’s missing a roof and walls thanks to a pine tree that came crashing down on the house (the blessing in disguise: as a tree-falling is considered an “act of God”, the natural disaster spares the buyer from a city review of the demolition process).
Perhaps Hilton, were he to actually run for governor, understands the need for nuanced, problem-solving campaigning. Which may be one reason why he created Golden Together, a policy shop whose declared mission is to “develop and advocate positive, practical policy ideas to help solve California’s problems” (among its advisory board members: Hoover fellow Lanhee Chen, who ran for state controller in 2022 and the answer to the question of which Republican nationwide received the most votes in that election year).
Golden Together’s policy realm: “business climate, universal housing affordability, “wildfire management”, “parental empowerment and home visiting” (breaking poverty cycles by emphasizing individual humanity over government bureaucracy), and “water abundance”. You’ll notice the absence of other topics traditionally favored by conservatives in California and elsewhere: guns, abortion, taking an axe to government.
Developing a policy menu with broad-based appeal is a reminder of one of the overlooked aspects of California’s 2003 recall election: the creation of a so-called “Schwarzenegger University” both to tutor the candidate and to clarify how Arnold would govern if elected.
The endeavor was ambitious (about 150 individuals steeped in California volunteered their time), nor was it strictly a behind-the-scenes undertaking (Schwarzenegger chaired policy summits on the economy and state budget, plus another on the state’s education woes, leading up to a forum in Sacramento in which he outlined would-be executive orders and budget priorities).
Will another such policy “university” emerge by the 2026 campaign – or in a “Hotel California” run by a Hilton? Time will tell if that’s possible, especially in a land where construction can run notoriously slow.
