By Paul Kiernan and Max Colchester

Former Fox News host Steve Hilton has a message for Californians: If you think the Golden State is headed in the wrong direction, don't put another Democrat in charge.

Hilton, a U.K-born Republican and former top aide to a prime minister, is selling himself as an unlikely replacement. During his time in buttoned-up Westminster, Hilton became known for wearing T-shirts and strolling around Downing Street in just his socks. He pitched radical ideas for reforming Britain's welfare state, such as abolishing maternity leave and all consumer-rights legislation. He was satirized on a popular British sitcom, and has won the endorsement of President Trump.

That makes his political rebirth in California all the more improbable -- even if it owes largely to the state's unusual election rules. The top two vote-getters in California's "jungle" primary advance to the general election, regardless of party. Thanks to a crowded Democratic field, Hilton was clinging to second place as of Friday evening, with 26.3% of ballots.

The race remains too close to call, with an estimated 32% of votes yet to be tallied and recently counted votes benefiting Democrats. If Hilton qualifies for the general election, he'll face Xavier Becerra, a California native who served as the state's attorney general and in President Joe Biden's cabinet. The Associated Press said Friday Becerra secured a place in the general election.

That leaves Hilton locked in a close battle with Tom Steyer, a Democratic billionaire who had 21.1% of votes as of Friday evening.

Even if he makes the cut, Hilton remains a long-shot candidate in deep-blue California, where no Republican has won a statewide race since former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger secured a second term 20 years ago. Early ballots show little evidence that the GOP is gaining ground from past elections that it has lost by huge margins.

Hilton, 56, sees an opening to succeed two-term Gov. Gavin Newsom, even if political scientists do not. Voters who are unhappy with astronomical housing costs, widespread homelessness and potholed roads should blame the party that has governed the state for the past 16 years, Hilton says.

"The problems afflicting California are caused by Democrat policies, and more of the same Democrat policies can't possibly solve them," he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Hilton has won the support of billionaires including Tim Draper, Chris Larsen and Rupert Murdoch, all of whom contributed the individual maximum $39,200 to his campaign. Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal and Fox News through his family trust's controlling stake in News Corp.

If elected, Hilton says he would aim to abolish state income taxes for people earning less than $100,000 and impose a flat 7.5% tax rate on income above that threshold. California's income taxes currently top out at 13.3% for individuals earning more than $1 million. The drop in revenues, Hilton says, would be paid for by returning state expenditures to prepandemic levels. He opposes a high-profile, controversial proposal to tax the state's billionaires.

He also says he would bring gasoline prices down to $3 a gallon by easing regulations on California's oil refineries and allowing more drilling--though he specifies no timeline for hitting that target. To improve California's business climate, he says he would make regulations vanish unless they are explicitly renewed.

Hilton is trying to capitalize on Californians' growing frustrations. A mid-May poll by the California Public Policy Institute found that 57% of adult residents think the state is headed in the wrong direction, and 76% expect bad economic conditions in the coming year. On both measures, Californians are more pessimistic than in 2022, when they re-elected Newsom by an 18-point margin, or in 2024, when Vice President Kamala Harris beat Trump by 20 percentage points in the state.

California's state budget has grown 92% over the past decade, 2.5 times faster than inflation. Outside government, healthcare and education, the state has shed jobs since 2022. Its roads are among the roughest in the nation, its public schools are mediocre, and California is tied with Louisiana for the country's highest poverty rate, after accounting for living costs and government assistance.

Still, Republican candidates are on track to win fewer than 40% of total votes in the gubernatorial primary, versus Democrats' 60%.

Newsom and other Democrats often boast that California has the world's fourth-largest economy, with gross domestic product that has outpaced the rest of the country for 13 of the past 15 years. Hilton says that mostly reflects the growth of Silicon Valley tech giants like Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Nvidia.

"You're talking about a very concentrated part of the economy there, a very small number of companies generating enormous revenue but not creating very many jobs," he said.

Hilton, whose parents immigrated to the U.K. from Hungary, made his name in the early 2000s advising Britain's Conservative party to become more socially liberal. He became the party's director of strategy after Prime Minister David Cameron was elected in 2010.

When pressed on how some of his more outlandish ideas might be implemented, Hilton's answers sometimes irked his former colleagues.

"I would ask, 'So how does that work then?,'" Cameron's then-director of communications, Andy Coulson, later wrote. "If I got an answer at all, it was along the lines of, 'It'll be fine -- just you see.' That was mildly irritating, as it was my team who would have to get out and sell the latest product from Steve's dream factory."

Hilton quit Cameron's government in 2012 and followed his wife, a senior Google executive, to the Bay Area. His time in Downing Street was later immortalized in the hit British political sitcom "The Thick Of It," in which a character inspired by Hilton would hold "thought circles" and say catchphrases like, "Let's imagineer the narrative."

Once in the U.S., Hilton continued to weigh in on British politics. He eventually clashed with Cameron by urging the U.K. to quit the European Union. Cameron was forced to resign after Brexit in 2016. Hilton renounced his British citizenship in 2025.

Dan Schnur, a professor at the University of Southern California who served as spokesman for former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, in the 1990s, said Hilton displayed impressive political skills during the primary.

"But this is California," Schnur said. "It's going to be a long, long shot for anyone with an R after their name."

Meanwhile, the force that propelled Hilton beyond his main GOP rival in the primary -- Trump's enthusiastic endorsement in April -- is poised to become a general-election challenge.

Around three-fourths of Californians disapprove of Trump, polls show. His immigration policies are particularly unpopular in a state where 27% of the population is foreign-born and an estimated 3.3 million residents live with at least one family member who came to the U.S. illegally. Raids by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles last year sparked violent protests.

Hilton has done little to distance himself from the president or his policies. In a CNN debate last month, he said California farmworkers who came to the U.S. illegally could expect to be deported if he becomes governor. He had long refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election but, in a local radio interview Friday, said Joe Biden won.

In his interview with the Journal, Hilton declined to identify any topics on which he disagrees with the president.

"I'm not always looking for points of disagreement with people," he said. "I think it's going to be very helpful to have a governor who's got a good relationship with the federal administration."

Write to Paul Kiernan at paul.kiernan@wsj.com and Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 05, 2026 21:57 ET (01:57 GMT)

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