“I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left,” Steve Hilton tells the lunch meeting of Southern California Republican Women. Knives and forks rattle on porcelain as the perfectly coiffured ladies down cutlery to clap. Remarkably, Hilton, director of strategy under former British prime minister David Cameron, has topped virtually every poll for governor of California since he launched his campaign in April last year.
Hilton has leant into the West Coast aesthetic and spirit. Once the rebel of Downing Street in T-shirts and stockinged feet, today he sports a tech-bro beard, more bracelets and beads on his wrists than Prince Harry, and has the top three buttons of his white shirt undone. British by birth, he has renounced his citizenship and become an American.
California, he tells me as I follow him on the campaign trail, is “where I’m meant to be”. Britain is now “run by socialists,” afflicted with a “bureaucratic bloat” that makes it “impossible to do anything”.
In part, he blames Britain’s Conservative party. “The real disaster for the UK that I just find inexplicable is that most of this seems to have set in in the second half of the Conservative years,” he says. “Keir Starmer has only been Prime Minister for two years – it’s not suddenly deteriorated, although he is obviously making it much worse.”
The economy of California, the home of Silicon Valley, is bigger than Britain’s. Yet the state is also in sharp decline thanks to poor leadership.
‘California reminds me of 1970s Britain – we need to elect people who are not puppets of the unions,’ Hilton told a town hall in Santa Ana
At least ten million residents have left in the past 15 years. Businesses and jobs are going, too. The Democrat Gavin Newsom, who now has his eye on the White House having served the maximum two terms as California’s governor, threw $37 billion at the homelessness problem, yet 187,000 people live on the streets. California has the highest poverty rate in the country (tied with Louisiana), the highest unemployment rate and the highest cost of living.
Hilton wants to make California “Califordable” by cutting taxes, bringing down the cost of gas, reversing green policies, boosting house building and slashing regulations and fraud.
“How can a Democrat win with this record of calamitous, total failure on every front?” he asks. “From day one I knew we could win this race despite what everyone may assume about California – that it’s so Democrat and there’s no chance of a Republican winning. I believe very strongly that there’s a certain logic to elections, and people generally get the right result. And it’s so obvious that California needs change.”
To win, and follow in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger in becoming the Republican governor of California, Hilton needs first to progress through the “jungle primary” on June 2. Only two candidates will make it to November’s full election.
While Hilton is in the lead, the polls give second slot – and sometimes first – to another Republican, Sheriff Chad Bianco. The three Democratic front-runners are all damaged goods. Congressman Eric Swalwell is known most of all for having had a relationship with a Chinese spy. Former congresswoman Katie Porter faces a host of bullying allegations. And eco-billionaire Tom Steyer is accused of hypocrisy over his fossil fuel investments.
Still, Democrats account for 45 percent of registered voters in the state while Republicans make up 25 percent. If he faces a Democratic candidate in the final two, Hilton will have to appeal to the remaining 30 percent who are registered as independent or members of other parties. “For me to win will be difficult, but not impossible,” he insists.
As we drive to his next appointment, a TV interview in Huntington Beach, Hilton says he doesn’t have time to follow British politics. He has met Tory leader Kemi Badenoch – “I really like her” – and knows the Reform leader Nigel Farage. “I really like Nigel.” He says “Trump was obviously right” to lash out at Starmer for his refusal to allow US forces to use bases on British territory. “It’s what you’d expect from Starmer, pathetic, wishy-washy, lack of clarity. Trying to continue to suck up to Trump but also to appease his party and, as usual, making himself look weak, insipid and utterly useless.”
The West, he says, has “let down” the Iranian people in the same way that it betrayed his own Hungarian family after the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. “You had all this big talk from the West about fighting communism, but… nothing happened. On a gut level, I found the way in which the President said [to Iranians] ‘Help is on the way’ and then delivered on that to be the kind of moral clarity and leadership that’s been wholly lacking. There’s the argument ‘Oh, this isn’t what we were promised, you said no more endless wars’. That is not what’s happening here. Who thinks for one second that Trump is trying to invade Iran? Everyone’s been very ideological about it, and the thing that I’ve always appreciated about Trump is that he’s a pragmatist.”
Like Trump, Hilton plans to rule by executive order because the California legislature is overwhelmingly controlled by the Democrats who hold a two-thirds super-majority in the Assembly and the Senate. With executive orders, Hilton says he “can appoint people, fire people and direct them in a certain ways.” To fend off the inevitable lawsuits from “unions, climate extremists and far left activists,” he is running on the same ticket as prospective Attorney General, Michael Gates. “My legal opinions juice his executive orders and they also come to his defense when he gets attacked because the courts are going to ask ‘what is the Attorney General’s legal position on whether his orders are proper?’” Gates said. “And that’s a big deal.”
Hilton is calling it the “Golden Ticket.” He is also running alongside Gloria Romero, the former Democrat majority leader of the California Senate, who is standing for Lieutenant Governor. “Steve was the first person I called when I left the Democrats.” She says the party lost her over crime, gender and Covid. Hilton adds “This is a really serious, credible, qualified government in waiting. The fact that we’re together and will help each other increases our chances of getting elected. We’re like the Avengers.”
Hilton’s focus is domestic not foreign. He hopes to emulate the example of Margaret Thatcher and smash California’s powerful unions. “California reminds me of 1970s Britain – we need to elect people who are not puppets of the unions,” he told a town hall in Santa Ana. “The most powerful force in California is not oil or tobacco, it’s the teachers’ union.”
Some believe that Hilton’s Britishness will hold him back. But a former Kamala Harris supporter who attended the town hall says his accent sounds “classy” and “smart”. She has no love for Trump, but is sick of the fraud and homelessness in California: “I feel very neglected by the Democrats. We need a change and that’s why I think he’ll win.” Another supporter, a retired Boeing engineer, predicts Hilton will cause “an earthquake through this country”.
Although keen to stress that he appreciates what Britain gave him, Hilton is a passionate California convert and says his family is settled: “From early on I felt really at home here, in a deep way. There’s a sense of energy and optimism and dynamism and hustle and the rebel spirit.”
Some believe that Hilton’s Britishness will hold him back
The move to California in 2012 was, he says, “a family decision” after his wife, Rachel Whetstone, accepted a job at Google. “We moved here not necessarily intending to stay.” He taught at Stanford, co-founded Crowdpac (a Silicon Valley startup), and then hosted his own show on Fox News. Last year he cut the final ties with the old country by renouncing his British citizenship for £492 ($656). Although he became an American citizen in 2021, he held dual nationality. An administrative oversight, he says.
On the campaign trail Hilton is charming, plausibly appearing to remember everyone who says they’ve met him before. He hugs a lady who says her five-year-old son has been wrongly taken by the family courts. And he aims to outwork his opponents – his last engagement today, a fundraising event, finished at 10:30 p.m. “We’ve been either leading or second in pretty much every poll and more recently, we’re pulling ahead. I think it’s because I’ve really been working hard. I’ve been to nearly every one of our 58 counties.”
A work ethic that some say eclipses his GOP rival: Stetson-wearing, mustachioed sheriff Chad Bianco. “People like Steve because he’s the real deal,” supporter Susan Doan said. “There are so many phonies in California. Steve’s got so much energy and passion for California. Chad is much less energetic. I just can’t really work him out.” Bianco has taken heat for taking a knee at the height of the BLM protests, for having the worst crime solving record in the state and for a surge in jail deaths on his watch. An Uber driver calls Bianco “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Wherever Hilton goes, people stop him to say they back him. He tells me he wants to win “for his friend Charlie” – Kirk, the charismatic right-wing activist who was assassinated at Utah Valley University last year. “He believed that he could win on college campuses with a new generation of young conservatives and he did it,” says Hilton, as he shows me his Charlie Kirk wristband. “Now I’m going to win in the same way in California.” Sadly, I can’t see anyone under 50 at his event. But California, like much of America, is all about daring to dream.
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