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Steve Hilton has a favorite sign. Not a campaign sign – a sign from his old life, bolted to the atrium wall of Stanford University’s Institute of Design, where he taught for a couple of years after moving to the Bay Area from England in 2012. It’s a simple line with a simple goal: The best way to do it is to do it.

“It’s kind of true,” the former Fox News host told RealClearPolitics in an interview last week. “You just have to do it – take that first step, take the action.”

It is also a very Ted Lasso type of sentiment – the kind of relentless homespun optimism that made the fictional soccer coach and his hand-painted “BELIEVE” sign a cultural touchstone – even though Hilton himself says he’s never watched the show. He’s too busy crisscrossing the state and rolling out policy proposal after proposal, which he pledges will help California become “golden again.”

Talking about the nuts and bolts of his campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation – organizing volunteers, cutting instructional videos, building “templates” for door-knocking and ballot collection – Hilton kept circling back to the same instinct: Stop worrying about being the underdog and start doing.

“We’ve just got to get better at it than we have been,” he said of California Republicans’ ballot-harvesting efforts and attempts to compete with a Democratic turnout machine that has dominated California elections for two decades.

Ballot-harvesting blitz

It may be the least glamorous but most consequential piece of Hilton’s long-shot bid to outpace his frontrunner opponent, former Health and Human Services Secretary and state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, to become California’s first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The clock on that project is now running short. Hilton and Becerra meet Sept. 30 for their first one-on-one debate, a nationally televised CNN faceoff scheduled to take place just as county elections officials begin mailing ballots to California’s roughly 23 million registered voters.

Hilton’s favorite illustration of the philosophy in action came from the June primary. A volunteer showed up to one of his campaign events in Lancaster, a high-desert city outside Los Angeles, carrying, as Hilton described it, “armfuls of ballots.”

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

Her answer: she’d thrown a ballot-harvesting pizza party. Invited her friends over, walked them through the process, and left with a stack of completed ballots to turn in. Hilton had someone film her explaining how she did it and turned it into a template his campaign could hand to other volunteers.

It’s a quaint anecdote, but one that captures how Hilton talks about his entire turnout strategy: less a top-down machine, more of rolling referendum to fix California’s myriad........

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