Why Californians May Have Two Democrats Running for Governor in November
For the first time since Schwarzenegger’s quasi-Republican tenure as governor, which ended in 2010, there is a real possibility a Republican can be elected to the top office in California. But voters still may not have a chance to make that choice, because there may not be a Republican on the final November ballot.
California has a so-called “jungle primary” system, where voters, regardless of their party registration, can vote for any candidate. There are 61 gubernatorial candidates on the June 2 primary ballot: 24 Democrats, 12 Republicans, 1 Libertarian, 1 Peace and Freedom, and 23 running with no party affiliation.
For a brief moment in March, polling suggested that two Republicans could end up on the November ballot, excluding the Democrats. This was always an illusion, but for GOP voters it was an appealing fantasy. Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco were both polling at not quite 20 percent each, and eight determined Democrat candidates were splitting the remaining vote, with none of them even breaking into the teens. The biggest percentage was, and is, undecided voters at over 20 percent.
The illusion, and the math, swiftly stopped working. The latest major poll, conducted by CBS News on April 27, shows Hilton 16 percent, Steyer 15 percent, Becerra 13 percent, Bianco 10 percent, Porter 9 percent, Mahan and Villaraigosa at 4 percent each, and 26 percent undecided. The Democrat Party machine has gone to work, winnowing down the field. The previously surging Democrat candidate, Eric Swalwell, was swamped by allegations of sexual misconduct that savvy party insiders knew would surface in a general election. He was swiftly eliminated. The party machine has also pulled away from Antonio Villaraigosa, Tony Thurmond, and Betty Yee. Serious Democrat candidates have narrowed from eight in March to only four today.
Of those four, Katie Porter and Matt Mahan are most vulnerable. Porter’s well-documented struggles with anger management, including multiple allegations of initiating violence against her former husband and more recent tirades against staff and reporters, have made it less likely she will survive the next round of thinning. Mahan, despite valiant attempts to present himself as the moderate, common-sense candidate and despite substantial backing from his base in Silicon Valley, has failed to break out of low single digits in the polls.
This leaves only two candidates likely to garner a substantial share of the Democrat and independent voter support in the June primary: Tom Steyer and Xavier Becerra. Steyer, a billionaire who, as of April 23, had already burned through over $100 million of his own money, has bought his way from being an unknown to hitting 15 percent in the polls. He has hired one of the best campaign teams in America. He is not only saturating the air and the internet with ads touting his own virtues; he’s paying for ads attacking his principal rivals.
Which brings us to Xavier Becerra. The machine is comfortable with him. His resume reveals a lifetime in Democrat politics. He was elected to the State Assembly in 1990, then to the US Congress in 1993, then as California attorney general in 2017, and then he served as Biden’s secretary of health and human services from 2021 to 2025. Becerra is perceived by Democrats as a safe, electable choice for governor. Crucially, many Republicans who don’t think a Republican can ever win a statewide office again also view Becerra as the safest choice.
This is the political landscape that Hilton and Bianco traverse, with primary ballots in the mail to every registered California voter as of May 4. Imagine Porter and Mahan don’t fall off completely, bearing in mind that Democratic candidates reliably attract 60 percent of voters in statewide elections. You will have 10 percent each for Porter and Mahan, and 20 percent each for Steyer and Becerra.
That is the absolute best case Republicans can hope for, and before assuming the GOP’s worst case is 20 percent each for Hilton and Bianco, you have to take into account the nature of the jungle primary. There will still be 55 other candidates on the ballot, and in aggregate they could attract 5–10 percent of the vote. This means Hilton and Bianco are not likely to split 40 percent of the vote but 30–35 percent of the vote. This lower-than-average percentage is also made more likely by the apparent success of Democrats to blame all of California’s problems, including $6-per-gallon gasoline, on Trump and, by extension, on all Republicans.
This is why what, back in March, was a GOP dream scenario has now turned into a GOP nightmare scenario. It goes something like this: Mahan and Porter both sink into the single digits, while Steyer and Becerra remain virtually tied. Hilton and Bianco both gather significant support, splitting GOP voters, and the final outcome is Steyer and Becerra both over 30 percent, with Hilton and Bianco splitting 35 percent of the vote and neither pulling far enough ahead of the other to beat either of the top two Democrats.
A Steyer victory would be a disaster for California. Steyer is a hard-left oligarch, and he would bring to his administration the worst of both worlds. He would shamelessly push for higher taxes in all forms (property, wealth, and income); punitive new restrictions on conventional energy along with every other mandate and regulation attendant to the “climate emergency”; single-payer health care; and absolute pandering to the teachers’ union. Steyer, the oligarch, has constructed a campaign that caters to California’s substantial far-left voting bloc. It is a brilliantly cynical strategy; it reeks of hypocrisy, and it’s working.
Ironically, it’s also working for Becerra. A bipartisan moderate consensus is forming to stop Steyer. It is based on the premise that a Republican simply cannot win in California and therefore the pragmatic choice is to undermine every other Democratic candidate and to withhold support from Hilton or Bianco even if they are preferable to Becerra.
It’s probably too late to convene the proverbial smoke-filled room to accomplish there what a jungle primary precludes. In earlier decades, even when primaries guaranteed a representative from every political party would appear on the general election ballot, the party bosses would convene behind the scenes way before Election Day and agree on which candidate would represent them. Donations would swing over to the anointed one. No split vote. No chance for the party to consume its resources in a divisive primary contest.
Right now in California, a 21st-century version of that would not be a bad idea. Hilton and Bianco, along with their principal backers, would meet to negotiate who will withdraw and who will remain. While Hilton has the edge in performance in the polls, depth of policy expertise, donations, and, probably, electability in November, nonetheless, these men have complementary strengths. If one of them, after agreeing to step aside, were to aggressively campaign side by side with the remaining candidate, it would accomplish two things:
First, it would eliminate any chance for two Democrats to advance to the general election. Second, and more important, it would greatly improve the chances for the surviving Republican to have a realistic chance to win in November. It would help increase Republican turnout. And as both Hilton and Bianco have repeatedly asserted, Democrats have made a mess, and no amount of finger-pointing at Trump should enable them to dodge that accountability. The state budget has exploded, and taxes have relentlessly increased, and yet everything that budgets and taxes are supposed to help manage has only gotten worse: homelessness, housing, affordability, crime, education, poverty.
If there was ever a time when Californians might support something new, it’s now. But it’s unlikely either Hilton or Bianco will step aside for the other. The probability of seeing a GOP candidate on the November ballot has been reduced to a coin toss. Stay tuned.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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