Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton arrives at a town hall meeting in San Francisco on July 10.

California is arguably the bluest of blue states and is leading the fight against Donald Trump. That makes it easy to forget that the state was also home to a conservative movement that produced Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Proposition 13.

Rumblings of that conservatism are evident in Republican Steve Hilton’s gubernatorial campaign and his 2025 book, “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State,” in which he blames many of the state’s problems on the liberal environmental policies of “climatists.”

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