Campaigns & Elections

Maybe it’s time to add a third entry, after death and taxes, to life’s certainties: the outcome of California statewide contests for public office.

In this century alone, there have been fifty-one elections in six campaign cycles involving California’s seven principal state constitutional offices and its two US Senate seats (this excludes two gubernatorial recall elections in 2003 and 2021). The result: in fifty-one races, forty-nine Republican losses (the GOP wins both occurring in 2006).

Will that pattern change in November?

With Election Day now less than seven weeks way, the odds are it won’t—not at the top of the ticket, at least. The venerable Cook Political Report, which handicaps state and federal races, rates thirteen gubernatorial contests nationwide as “solid” Democrat.

California’s one of them—and it’s no mystery why: the last three times the Golden State chose a successor to a term-limited governor (elections in 1998, 2010, and 2018), the Democratic hopeful won by an average of nearly 19 points.

All of which is a long-winded way of asking: how does Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host now running for governor as a Republican, make this a competitive race?

Hilton’s strategy, so far, is to try to “out-populist” his Democratic foe, former state attorney general Xavier Becerra: abolishing California’s Department of Motor Vehicles while capping annual vehicle registration at a flat fee of $73; expanding California’s Paid Family Leave program from eight to twelve weeks (paid for by an annual $1 billion in state budget cuts).

And Hilton’s camp is banking on the public falling asleep on the race, helped in part by........

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