Two decades have passed since California last elected a Republican governor, but GOP candidate Steve Hilton points to 6 million reasons why he believes it’s possible to do so again.
Those are the number of votes President Donald Trump won in California in 2024, despite losing the state to Kamala Harris by 20 points. Yet it was 1.6 million more votes than Trump earned there during his first presidential bid in 2016, a rare sign of growth in a deep-blue Democratic bastion.
One month before the California primary, a spirited free-for-all has broken out in the race for governor, with a half-dozen Democrats and two Republicans among the leading contenders vying for the top two positions that will advance to the November election. There are 61 total candidates who will be on the nonpartisan primary ballot.
If the Democratic candidates split the vote among their supporters, it’s hardly a far-fetched scenario that the Republican hopefuls – Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – could emerge as the top two winners in the June 2 primary.
“It’s a perfect opportunity,” former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, told CNN. “The mismanagement of Gavin Newsom and such a weak field gives voters a chance to actually look at somebody new and better for California.”
While Democrats concede that such an outcome is mathematically possible, they argue it’s not politically probable in the era of Trump, toward whom disdain and disapproval run deep among the state’s electorate.
But even the prospect of an all-Republican general election is enough to rattle Democratic leaders who are trying to bring order to an unwieldy contest to succeed Newsom after his eight years as governor.
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