A barefoot-wandering British spin doctor who used to work for David Cameron, then pivoted to Fox News, is now running for governor of California on a platform that includes abolishing the DMV, capping gas at $3 a gallon, and building ten brand-new cities from scratch. He is losing by 20 points. He does not seem to care.
The Guy Behind the Guy, Now the Guy
Steve Hilton is a genuinely strange political creature, and he would probably take that as a compliment. According to The Guardian, the man spent years as a senior adviser to David Cameron in the British Conservative government, then followed his wife, tech PR powerhouse Rachel Whetstone, to Silicon Valley, wrote a couple of policy books nobody outside Washington think tanks read, landed a Fox News show, and eventually decided that what he really wanted to do was run for governor of a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.
For many years, The Guardian reports, Whetstone was considered the power in the couple. This is relevant context for understanding Hilton's entire political identity, which seems to be built partly around proving he is not simply an appendage to someone else's career. Running for governor of California as a Republican is a wild way to make that argument, but here we are.
Hilton describes himself as 'un-pigeonhole-able,' which is either a real word or something he invented, and frames his campaign style as a mashup of Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, and John Kasich. If you are struggling to picture that Venn diagram, you are not alone. Those three men agree on almost nothing. That's the point, apparently.
The Policy Blizzard
Hilton throws out policy proposals the way a toddler throws spaghetti. Some of it sticks. Most of it hits the wall and slides down slowly. The Guardian documents the recent greatest hits: abolish the DMV, cut gas to $3 a gallon, build a free business school in working-class East Los Angeles, launch a competition among California's 58 counties to construct ten entirely new cities from the ground up.
He also wants to kill the state's high-speed rail project, which he has publicly described as 'the bullshit train to nowhere.' That line will cost him zero votes he was ever going to get anyway, and it probably plays great at his rallies, so fine. He wants a California version of DOGE. He wants to gut environmental regulations, including one requiring more energy-efficient tires, which he opposes so much he nicknamed the energy commissioner who proposed it a 'tire-rant.' That is, genuinely, a pun.
The more interesting proposals are the ones that don't fit the standard Republican mold. Eliminating state income taxes on the first $150,000 of earnings is actually closer to what some of the progressive challengers in the Democratic primary were floating. Free tuition for lower-income students at his proposed new business school. These aren't Fox News talking points. They're something else. Whether that something else adds up to a coherent governing philosophy is a separate question.
The Math Is Not Mathing
The Guardian reports Hilton is trailing Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee and former California attorney general, by 20 percentage points or more in current polling. He finished second in the primary with roughly 25% of the vote, which he has apparently decided is a launchpad rather than a ceiling. The guy has either found a genuinely new electoral theory or he is very committed to an expensive hobby.
California's registered voter breakdown makes this even more daunting. Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one statewide. The political environment for Republicans nationally is, as The Guardian charitably puts it, 'rancid' right now, with Trump's second term weighing down GOP candidates across the country. Hilton himself refuses to say the president's name, referring only to 'the president whose name begins with T,' as though Voldemort has moved from Hogwarts to Mar-a-Lago.
The name-avoidance strategy is both politically rational and quietly telling. Hilton knows Trump is toxic in California. He's built his entire pitch around being a different kind of Republican. But he still belongs to a party that has completely surrendered its identity to the guy whose name starts with T, and California voters are not exactly confused about what that party now stands for.
What He's Actually Selling
Strip away the circus of the individual proposals and Hilton is running on a version of an argument that has real resonance in California right now: that 16 years of single-party Democratic control has produced a state that is increasingly unlivable for ordinary people. Housing costs that are genuinely obscene. Gas prices that make filling a tank feel like a financial event. Homelessness visible on every major city block. Healthcare that is getting harder to access.
The Guardian notes that Hilton is a 'savvy and appealing communicator' who understands what frustrates everyday Californians, and that he led the polls for much of the primary campaign before Becerra pulled ahead. That's not nothing. A lot of Californians, including a lot of Democratic-leaning Californians, are genuinely furious about the cost and quality of life in the state.
The problem is that being right about the frustration is not the same as being trusted with the solution. Especially when your party spent the last decade actively working to make federal governance worse, and especially when your cure for California's ills involves importing the same DOGE energy that is currently gutting federal agencies and making life measurably harder for millions of people. The diagnosis might land. The treatment plan is where it falls apart.
The Dingo Take
Twenty points down in California, running under a party brand that is essentially radioactive in the state, and this guy is out here proposing to build ten new cities and abolish the DMV like he's got a mandate and a transition team standing by. You have to respect the sheer commitment to the bit, even if the bit makes no electoral sense.
Hilton is not stupid. He is, by most accounts, genuinely creative and politically sharp. His refusal to say Trump's name is not an accident. His cross-ideological policy grabbing is not random. He is trying to build a permission structure for California voters to vote Republican without feeling like they are voting for the current Republican Party, which is a project roughly as realistic as building ten new cities from scratch in a budget cycle. The idea is interesting. The execution runs directly into the fact that he is, in fact, on the ballot as a Republican in 2026.
What Hilton's campaign really is, underneath all the barefoot policy wandering and the bullshit train jokes, is a test of whether there is any version of California Republicanism that can survive contact with the modern GOP. The early polling suggests the answer is no. But stranger things have happened in California politics. Not many. But some.
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