Show Notes
California Republican Steve Hilton knows he faces an “uphill climb” in the state’s gubernatorial election but believes the state is ripe for change. State polls show he has closed a 30-point gap to within about 10 points during the summer months by attacking the record of his Democratic opponent, Xavier Becerra.
Now, as the gubernatorial campaign gets into high gear, Hilton tells the On Background podcast he senses that California’s deep blue voters are ready for a change away from the Democrats’ hammerlock on state politics.
“We’re up against a very well financed, corrupt machine in California,” Hilton tells host Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics and co-host Eric Eggers of the Government Accountability Institute. “My opponent basically took the summer off, didn’t do anything, didn’t talk to the press, didn’t do any campaigning, and refused to debate.” Hilton notes that Becerra’s campaign did finally agree to one debate later in the Fall.
Hilton, an entrepreneur and former Fox News talk show host, has specifically highlighted Becerra’s failure as President Joe Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services to locate and protect huge numbers of unaccompanied migrant children who crossed into the US from Mexico border during the Biden administration. A 2023 New York Times report highlighted Becerra’s policies that HHS managers said increased labor trafficking and prioritized speed over the safety and welfare of the children.
Becerra ran HHS throughout the Biden administration, during which time 480,000 unaccompanied migrant children crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and were taken into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS division responsible for caring for migrant children, according to a New York Post report from this year.
“Thousands and thousands of children, because of his actions, were sent into the hands of child sex and labor traffickers,” he says. “We’ve been explaining that story. It’s complicated and not most people didn’t know about it.”
On the campaign trail this summer, Hilton unveiled new whistleblower allegations over child labor and sex trafficking of children as young as six, quoting a former senior adviser to the HHS who criticized Becerra’s lack of oversight and claimed at least 130,000 children were still missing out of 480,000 the agency was responsible for protecting.
Becerra’s campaign staff told the Fresno Bee that he had inherited the crisis from the first Trump administration due to child separation policies.
He remains optimistic, he tells the hosts, because of the optimism of the people he encounters at his campaign rallies, the number of Democrats coming to his events, and the urgency they have.
“People don’t say ‘good luck’ to me. They say ‘You have to win,” he says. “There’s something very intense about them. There’s a sense that we are really facing a real collapse of California if we don’t change direction.”
Eggers notes that for this election cycle, Republicans have registered 350,000 more new voters than the Democrats. Nevertheless, Democrats hold a massive overall registration advantage in the state — 45 percent to 25 percent for Republicans, with just under 23 percent of registered voters expressing no party preference. The Democrats have dominated the state’s elections for more than 20 years.
Among Hilton’s policy ideas is a push to abolish the state-run Department of Motor Vehicles, shifting many of its services to local governments and private providers. He wants to replace California’s current vehicle registration structure with a flat annual fee of $73 per vehicle.
“Sophisticated political people may look down their noses and say that’s very simplistic, but this is what matters to people,” Hilton says. “Californians are being gouged by the government.” He notes, “you get a sense of the questions people are asking and what they are focused on. Many of the things I’m talking about have come from the people in that sense.”
Becerra’s campaign proposes to give free electricity to millions of California households during a part of each day, arguing the plan could help lower-income residents save money while encouraging energy use when solar power is most abundant. Electricity affordability has become a major issue in California, where energy bills have risen nearly 40% in the past six years, according to the Haas Energy Institute at UC Berkeley.
“We had a great [artificial intelligence] ad that spoofed that,” Hilton told Crabtree, adding that his campaign advertising has relied more heavily on social media campaigns like that instead of spending enormous sums on TV advertising in California’s very expensive markets.
With Labor Day past, Hilton remains an underdog as election season accelerates. Still, he is hopeful the currents of change and demands for accountability he is hearing from voters will help him to win in November.
“The real choice in an election is not ‘whose promises do I prefer?’ That’s part of it,” Hilton says. “The real choice is, ‘What kind of person are you putting there? What are the instincts and the values of the person that you’re putting there?’”
