Republican Steve Hilton is advancing in the November gubernatorial race

from Jeanne KuangCalMatters

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Republican Steve Hilton will continue to the November general election in the California governor’s race, setting up a race against Democrat Xavier Becerra in which he has promised to cut spending and regulations if elected.

hilton, British American, former Fox News anchor, secured about 25 percent of the vote in the June 2 primary election, with about 88 percent of the votes counted as of Tuesday evening.

His opponent, Becerra is a former attorney general and US Secretary of Health and Human Services, who emerged from a large field of Democratic candidates.

Hilton’s victory knocked billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer out of the race after he spent $215 million of his own money to boost his populist campaign and flood the airwaves with ads. That would make the general election a traditional partisan battle in a midterm election year that Democrats will treat as a check on President Donald Trump’s administration rather than the intra-Democratic showdown that Steyer’s supporters had hoped for. California uses primary system of two best; the two candidates with the most votes advance to the November ballot, regardless of party.

with a crowded field of Democrats with everyone competing for votes, Hilton led in the polls for most of the race, charging conservative voters with promises of income tax cuts and gas taxboost oil drilling and roll back environmental regulations such as state mandates to reduce greenhouse gases.

He sold his candidacy as an opportunity for cost-crunched Californians to end “16 years of one-party rule.” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last Republican to lead California, left office in 2011.

“The people of California have been truly generous in giving the Democratic Party an opportunity to show that their ideas work,” Hilton said last week, announcing the victory earlier at a news conference in Sacramento. “I think patience is really wearing thin.”

He faces an uphill battle in November.

California Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one. Although Hilton says it provides a chance for the state to go in a different direction, for the past two decades there has been a GOP candidate in the general election for governor in every race — and aside from Schwarzenegger’s tenure, Democrats have won them all.

He is also supported by Trump, whom Californians disapprove by a wide margin.

But he doesn’t downplay the endorsement.

“I think it will be very helpful for Californians to have a governor who has a good working relationship with the president and his team,” he said.

Hilton’s campaign promise is to eliminate income tax on the first $100,000 of earnings and introduce a flat tax rate above that; he said last week that his campaign would consider raising the cap after conducting an economic analysis of California’s cost of living. Both options would represent a huge reduction in state revenue, which Hilton said he expects to offset by cutting a third of state spending.

He has not said how, if elected, he would get such a proposal through the Democratic supermajority in the state legislature.

Hilton was born in London, the son of Hungarian immigrants to the United Kingdom. He began his politics working for the British Conservative Party and was instrumental in the rise of Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. He moved in 2012 to Silicon Valley, where his wife was a Google executive, and dabbled in startups before launching a weekly Fox News show in 2017 during Trump’s first presidency. The show, The Next Revolution, continued into 2023.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.