STATE: Governor

UNDER CONSTRUCTION – DO NOT SHARE!

(gvwire) “Hilton’s American political renaissance has bemused his former colleagues and rivals in Britain. His alter ego on “The Thick of It,” Stewart Pearson, was portrayed as a clownish figure who tries to push “thought circles” on bewildered Tories and utters pablum like “knowledge is porridge.” The real Hilton became a larger-than-life figure, infamous among colleagues for walking the corridors of Downing Street shoeless and in shorts and proposing idiosyncratic ideas that made headlines, such as using cloud-bursting technology to make Britain sunnier and abolishing maternity leave. (He disputed how both ideas had been previously characterized.)..

Cameron won a general election in 2010 but without a majority, forcing him into a coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats. Some of that party’s advisers were not impressed.

One of them, Giles Wilkes, said Cameron knew “that of Steve’s 20 ideas, only one of them will be good and the rest will be stupid.” He added, “It was policy by mouth feel. If it sounds good coming out of your mouth and it passes the speech test, or surviving the questions in Parliament test, then it’s good policy.”

Note: This post is “IN PROCESS” and will be periodically updated! (05/27/26)

VOTER GUIDE – QUICK LINKS TO:

Governor – Vote for (1)

This is where we remind people that we are not marrying these candidates. We are making the best choice we can with the available candidates. DO NOT SIT THIS RACE OUT BECAUSE BECERRA ISN’T PERFECT! That

Xavier Becerra (D) – Voting Rights Attorney

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RECOMMENDATION: Not our top choice, not a progressive. We also feel that he’s always been the “back room guy,” not the leader (no knocks there – we’re backroom peeps too). But there has been some other issues that Becerra’s diehard fans need to take seriously.

  • CHEVRON: He has taken the maximum campaign donation allowable from Chevron for this campaign. It is not a surprise that there are ZERO endorsements from ENVIRONMENTAL organizations in our grid below. California Environmental
    Voters even issued a notice why they didn’t. “Voters are demanding a Governor who is not influenced by corporate special interests, because they know that it’s corporate polluters driving the affordability crisis and skyrocketeding energy, insurance, gas, grocery, water bills and more.” (Read the whole statement here)

  • RECEIPTS FROM OUR ENEMIES: From RL Miller: “Chevron just gave $500K to the pro-Becerra IE with the deceptive name, NOT to be confused with the $39,200 it already gave directly to Becerra. Also NOT to be confused with the $500K to the same pro-Becerra IE coming from California Resources Corp (Occidental Petroleum).”
    This is the same pro-Becerra IE that has taken in $12,620,200 (not counting Chevron’s latest) from Facebook, AirB&B, Healthnet, police officer unions, etc. But not the anti-Steyer IE that has taken in an entirely separate $30,325,005 from PG&E, Chamber of Commerce, the Realtors, and similar.”
  • CHEVRON IS NOT JUST ANOTHER ENDORSEMENT:
  • THE DOJ‘S BECERRA BEAR TRAP: A scandal with two of his underlings diverting campaign funds that will sink us if he’s the only Democratic choice on the ticket against a GOP candidate in November. For you die-hard Becerra fans who think this will just die down if we just ignore it and he keeps saying “Case closed.” – NOT A CHANCE IN HELL!
    • Steve Hilton (R): “You shouldn’t be in this race. You should be preparing your criminal defense.”
    • Katie Porter: “What the quote was, was that you had not been mentioned in the charging documents. But as you know, that does not preclude, because you are also a trained attorney, you know that does not preclude an indictment from being issued against you. We do not know what Dana Williamson said about your involvement, and the government will have the ability to reveal that later.”
    • The GOP is probably already making buttons with him in an orange jumpsuit and Trump’s DOJ is assuredly calculating the best time to spring their own trap on him. Innocence doesn’t matter. They indicted a former FBI Director Jame Comey for spelling out 86 47 with seashells. Does anyone image that they’re not going to flood the zone if Becerra becomes our only Democratic candidate on the ticket?

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWIjf9qKrgY)

Sample endorsements below:

California Young Democrats
dem. party of san fernando

and Steyer
equality CA
SALUD CARBAJAL
Leiu

Speaker
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTRAL CALIFORNIA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE NETWORK 
Nayamin Martinez		CO-DIRECTOR, LEADERSHIP COUNSEL FOR JUSTICE & ACCOUNTABILITY 
Phoebe Seaton		EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE LATINO EQUITY, ADVOCACY & POLICY INSTITUTE 
Rey León
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, JUST TRANSITION ALLIANCE 
José T. Bravo		FOUNDING PRESIDENT & CEO, GREENLATINOS 
Mark Magaña		FOUNDER, LATINO OUTDOORS 
José González
international warehouse-socal
Liana
UFCE 770

Steve Hilton (R) – Former Fox New Host – Small Business Owner – TRUMP APPROVED!

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RECOMMENDATION: NO, NO, NO! Another problematic Stephen? Tiny twins from different continents? Is there a third continent where we can send them both?

Didn’t anyone ask his former co-workers what he was like?

  • Stephen Hilton
  • Age: 56
  • City of residence: Atherton
  • Occupation: taught at Stanford University, hosted a Fox News show called “The Next Revolution”
  • Education: –
  • Funding:
  • Website: https://stevehiltonforgovernor.com
Donald J. Trump
4 stars! Not good.

He doesn’t talk about very much about the hard-right culture war stuff unless pinned down, but you can see that he did disturbingly well on the Election Forum questionnaire, (posted below) which is all about that stuff. He’s running as a MAGA-GOP in the time of Trump for a reason.

Didn’t anyone think to check with his previous employers? THEY ARE TRYING TO WARN US!

(guardian,com) “Hilton would reportedly pad the halls of Downing Street in socks, ordering civil servants to enact his latest hare-brained scheme, a quirk parodied in the BBC political satire The Thick of It. He also, according to those who worked with him, pushed to scrap maternity leave.

Now he wants to be a politician proper, rather than an aide working behind the scenes. Some are sceptical of how this will work.

The former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, who served in Cameron’s coalition government, was unenthusiastic at the prospect. “I think of him as ideologue rather than doer, gadfly not a serious politician,” he said. “His big idea, the ‘big society’, was a disappointment.” Cable believes Hilton can only get elected “by freak accident”.

“He would be terrible!” said one government adviser who worked in No 10 at the same time as Hilton. “He is someone who was very quickly insanely frustrated with how government works in reality. He comes in with these incredibly wild ideas, wants them all to happen instantly, isn’t interested in compromise, and when it doesn’t happen he throws his toys out the pram.”

His behavior directly inspired the character Stewart Pearson on a BBC political satire “The Thick of It.”

That’s because, under his posh British accent, he’s just another MAGA con artist.

Exhibit 1 – The man described as “terrible” for California is intent on infesting our state with Cal DOGE, his version of a failed and corrupt program that came nowhere near it’s $2 trillion dollar spending target, but still managed to harm millions of people. (Death toll tracker from USAID here)

  • POLLUTION FOR EVERYONE! No surprises here: His solutions include getting rid of regulations, including “stripping [CARB]’s climate policy authority. That’s cool! Dirtier air, water, food, and soil for us, more profit for corporations! Nowhere does his CalDOGE suggest suggest breaking up and municipalizing private-equity monsters like PG&E.
  • HEALTH CARE: How about doing something REALLY HELPFUL – like championing universal health care? Then CA businesses can compete on an equal footing with countries who already have it, and people can become more entrepreneurial without risking their families’ access to health care. Nah, he’s doubling down on a “free-market solution,” like the shit we had to deal with before the Affordable Care Act..
    • RE-ARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS: NOTHING on health care in his website other than somehow shifting money from eliminating Medi-Cal for undocumented people to poor citizens. No word how he’s going to do that and what hospital emergency wards think of his brainy idea.. Savings would all dissipate into his mandated “free-market” drug/alcohol treatment plans.
    • SHIPPING CA’s DOCTORS OFF TO “DEATH PENALTY” STATES: Also, in case you missed it, he would extradite California telemedicine abortion providers, if an out-of-state jurisdiction (such as Louisiana) issued warrants. Hey Steve, you would be violating California Penal Code § 13778.3, which explicitly shields healthcare providers in California from prosecution, arrest, and extradition for performing or facilitating legally protected reproductive health care, including telemedicine abortion services.
  • CUTTING TAXES FOR THE RICH! He says he wants to eliminate state income tax on the first $100,000 of earnings, and impose a flat 7.5% rate above that. GREAT! Oh, wait! The richest people in California currently pay a 12.30% tax on whatever earning their accountants feel is prudent to declare.

    Let’s check out what this would look like in real life – Hey, this is a surprise!!!!

It looks exactly like the RICH WOULD GET A SUBSTANTIAL TAX CUT!

  • AUSTERITY (PRE-PANDEMIC) BUDGET/SPENDING CUTS TO MATCH THE TAX CUTS FOR RICH PEOPLE. And since we have Prop. 13, he won’t be able to raise property taxes like Texas does. Steve is experienced in creating antidemocratic austerity politicies, which structurally transfer resources from the working majority to the 1 percent of the population that subsists mainly off capital ownership (i.e., stock dividends, rents, and interest). In other words, austerity is not about spending less but about spending in the “correct” way — in favor of the economic and financial elite and to the detriment of the majority of the population.” 
    • LOOK AT THE DAMAGE HE DID IN THE U.K. “Given that Hilton wants to realize a version of [his “Big Society”] in America, a question naturally presents itself: What happened when it was implemented in the U.K.? He elides this question, and no wonder, because the Big Society in practice was a vicious mess, demonstrating only the cruelty of its designers and the vacuity of its promise to somehow disentangle an idea of community from economics. The facilities he identifies as the constituent parts of a community—public libraries; neighborhood parks; youth clubs— all need money to function; the Britain he presided over provides an object-lesson in what happens when they‘re deprived of it. Since 2010, over 600 public libraries have been shuttered, along with more than 500 youth centers. Uncountable green spaces have been concreted over and sold off to property developers. Austerity was the only real policy the coalition had: everything else was decorative, and the Big Society was the gaudiest bauble of all, a vast shiny distraction from the brute fact of 110 billion pounds in spending cuts.“
  • HE WAS KNOWN FOR OTHER STUPID IDEAS AS WELL: “Hilton suggested that one of the United Kingdom’s biggest problems was too much cloudy weather—“Why can’t we fly planes over the eastern Atlantic,” he suggested, “to drop chemicals on the clouds and force them to break up, and get rid of their rain before they get to our shores?”
  • STUPID STATISTIC GAMES: “In a state as big as California, where just 5% of the land is developed, there’s plenty of room to build the housing we need. They call it “sprawl.” I call it the California Dream, and I will do everything I can to restore it.”
    • Steve’s only been a citizen since 2021. He apparently knows NOTHING about how Californians care about open space, our SOAR initiatives, the already large losses of agriculture and grazing land and our issues with water.
    • Yes. 90% of our population lives on 5% of the land. That sounds crazy, right! But if Steve had done 5 minutes of research, he’d have learned that: more than 27% of CA is agricultural land. Approximately 46% of the state’s land is federal land, which includes mostly national forests, national parks and wildlife areas and military areas. People can’t build homes there. Our state also have this mountain range taking up a huge amount of space, and deserts where there is no access to water. “The only places that are “empty”, and is not tall mountains or impossible deserts of federal forest or park land or productive agricultural land is extremely far away from any infrastructure.” (https://www.quora.com/If-there-is-so-much-empty-space-and-desert-in-California-why-dont-they-just-build-a-bunch-more-houses)
    • We invite Steve to “spread out” from from his current home in Bay-area Atherton, maybe to a place like Modoc County for example. It’s only a five hour commute to Sacramento! It’s been losing people for 30 years and could certainly use your cheerleading!

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BE A PROBLEM FOR HIM: (abc7) “Hilton is a former Fox News host and a vocal supporter of Trump. He was born in the UK where he served as director of strategy for former Prime Minister David Cameron, and then moved to California in 2012. He became a U.S. citizen in 2021.

Hilton blames climate change policies for the housing and affordability crisis in California, saying the policies have made it more costly to build. He added that he doesn’t believe climate change played a role in last year’s destructive and deadly wildfires.”

FAKING IT: (latimes) “He “[Hilton] stopped by the Original Del Taco off 1st Avenue on Saturday after a town hall with lieutenant governor candidate and Barstow native Gloria Romero. His campaign posted a short video on social media of him standing outside the spot — the oldest operating Del Taco — while holding something that looked like a melted Frisbee.

…Hilton gleefully wielded the crunchy mass with one hand as he pointed to the Original Del Taco sign with the other. “My Barstow street taco, I’m going to enjoy,” he concluded in an accent from his native England, while giving a thumbs-up. “See you soon.”

He didn’t take a bite.”

The social media blowback exploded like a digital Montezuma’s revenge...

…But Hilton disappoints again and again. He launched his campaign in Huntington Beach, enamored of politicians there who seek to silo their city from the rest of California and humiliate liberals at every opportunity. His embrace of Trump‘s endorsement and refusal to admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election expose him as a toady…

… Instead of offering a bold vision for the future, he offers a return to a past that will never happen again and that wasn’t as great as people make it out to be.

AI Overview

Steve Hilton, former UK political strategist and director of strategy for Prime Minister David Cameron, became notorious in England for eccentric policy ideas and anti-bureaucracy rants. His casual, barefoot-in-No. 10 style and management concepts inspired the satirical TV character Stewart Pearson in The Thick of It. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Eccentric Policy Ideas

  • Slashes to Employment Protections: Floated stripping back core workplace regulations and employment rights under the guise of boosting “hustle” and enterprise. [1]
  • Reducing Maternity Leave: Secretly pushed to scale back statutory maternity leave requirements to deregulate businesses, triggering heavy backlash within Whitehall. [1]
  • The “Big Society” Vague Vision: Championed Cameron’s flagship localism policy, which critics and parliamentary committees dismissed as an ill-defined, confusing smokescreen for austerity and cutting state grant funding to local charities. [1, 2]

Controversial Statements & Views

  • Bureaucracy Rants: Claimed that 70% of government work was pointless paper-shuffling and that “bureaucracy masters the politicians,” earning eye-rolls from seasoned civil servants for oversimplifying the realities of governing. [1]
  • Equating Policy to Tech Products: Argued that government should be disrupted like a startup—ignoring warnings that failed public policy ruins lives permanently, unlike a failed commercial gadget.[1, 2]
  • Tough Choice on Trump vs. Hillary: Publicly stated in 2016 that picking between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was a “really tough choice,” praising Trump for “shining a spotlight” on political corruption. [1]

(Jefferson public radio) Now, in his latest rebrand, Hilton has taken on a different tone. After moving to Silicon Valley permanently in 2012 and running a political tech startup, he landed a Fox News show, “The Next Revolution,” in 2017. Over six years on the network, he aligned himself closely with the Trump circle, calling for an audit into the 2020 election that President Joe Biden won, promoting the conspiracy theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci was responsible for the pandemic and railing against American colleges for spreading “the woke mind virus.”

(oaklandreviewofbooks.org) The loudest applause comes when this guy, best known as a Fox News personality, offers up his agenda in the form of catchy, if utterly banal talking points. As governor, he plans on “putting California on the path to common sense,” he says. “The best way to protect workers is to have a job in the first place.” 

He gets more substantive talking about “affordability”: His plan to bring down costs involves more “common sense” changes, as he calls them, which turns out to be the same simple-minded obsession with the conversion of nature to capital and tax breaks that characterizes Republican thinking today. However, instead of cutting taxes on “job creators” or some other code for the ultra-rich, his more populist approach is to eliminate taxes on the first $150,000, along with adopting Trump’s no tax on tips rule at the state level. A few of his other ideas are fancifully connected to California’s natural resources. By opening up more land to development, we could bring down the cost of land for starter homes, he says, and by managing our forests better we could produce more timber to build them. His flier also includes a vow not to raise property taxes. “Protect Prop 13!” it says.

After Hilton hears out the man’s rambling query about recalling district attorneys, he offers an equally disjoined response about crime, a subject he’s more comfortable speaking on. Hilton doesn’t have any kids, he says, but a parent knows kids have to believe the threat of enforcement. It’s the same with crime, he says, and now that the state is closing prisons, ostensibly “because prisons are racist,” the threat is diminishing. The matter of reducing crime requires some more “common sense” policy changes, he says, before summarizing his own proposal as “more prisons, less crime.” 

Literature on the seats before the rally
“Great Kids” is Hilton campaign shorthand for “standardized tests as a pretext for firing teachers” (Alex Park).

Old, reactionary ideas that were never good and last popular thirty years ago, spiced up with a fresh dose of resentment about how the woke people in charge have made it all impossible. This is the Steve Hilton way.

Of course, the candidate goes on, Oakland exemplifies how a once-fine city has given way to lawlessness. It’s his first acknowledgment of the place he’s speaking in. He lives “on the other side of the Bay,” without saying anything more specific. (Hilton is a resident of Atherton, it turns out, currently the second wealthiest zip code in the United States.) Yet one night, not long ago, he tells us, he chose to leave his palatial estate to meet a friend for drinks. 

The crowd leans forward in their chairs. Did he get carjacked? Robbed? Bipped, at least? He doesn’t say, but he doesn’t have to. The whole experience of being in Oakland felt like a “dystopian movie.” The whole place was gripped with a “sense of menace.” Somewhere between the freeway exit and the gathering spot that night, he wants us to know, he passed a homeless encampment. I guess he saw it from the car window. 

Speaking of which, Hilton says he’ll instruct state law enforcement to sweep up every and all encampments by 2027 and send the homeless to either prison or rehab. How’s that for a bold idea?) 

On the other side of the room, another audience member stands and says that drugs are only part of the homelessness problem. There’s also the matter of trailer parks closing and a general lack of affordable housing to take people. The man speaks gently, as though he’s trying to help the candidate understand the layers of the matter that he’ll have to parse to bring about some material change. What will Hilton do to that end? He asks. The candidate says something again about opening up more land to development.