Few political aspirations have proved more futile over the past two decades than running as a Republican for statewide office in California. Yet Steve Hilton – transplanted Brit, erstwhile business entrepreneur, a former Downing Street adviser to David Cameron and a former Fox News host who says he is friends with half of Donald Trump’s cabinet – is having a remarkably good time of it.

With less than six weeks to go before a primary election that has proved to be both dramatic and wildly unpredictable, most polls put Hilton narrowly ahead of a fractured field of Democrats in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor. It is an astonishing turn of events in a state where Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the state legislature and a two-to-one advantage over the Republicans in voter registration.

Hilton and a second Republican polling in the top tier, Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco, have been boosted in part by disarray in the Democratic ranks, where no candidate has emerged as a clear frontrunner in a crowded field and one leading contender, Eric Swalwell, was drummed out of the race and out of politics last month following sexual assault and misconduct allegations. Swallwell has strongly denied the claims.

But Hilton also has the largest number of individual campaign donors and ranks third in fundraising behind the free-spending, self-financing Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer and the Silicon Valley backed centrist Matt Mahan. Some of Mahan’s donors, including Google founder Sergey Brin, are now moving over to him – in part, Hilton says, because of Mahan’s poor polling numbers.

Hilton’s campaign stops tend to be crowded and energetic. He has bucked the conventional wisdom that says California campaigns are fought and won on the airwaves. Instead, he’s visited almost every corner of the state, working his low-key British charm and his knack for a pithy turn of phrase to woo everyone from farmers to suburban moms to Latino small business owners with the argument that one-party rule by the Democrats has been disastrous and it’s time for a dramatic change.

“Each day that goes by, I believe more and more that we can pull this off. There is a majority for change in California,” he told a pumped-up crowd last weekend in Huntington Beach, a surfing town whose local government has itself bucked the Golden State’s liberal reputation with a sharp turn to the Donald Trump-loving right.

In many ways, Hilton is seeking to harness the same political energy as he did when he helped rebrand the Conservative party in its wilderness years two decades ago. Then as now, he dislikes suits and ties, preferring to talk to voters in single-button T-shirts. He has a talent for dressing the hard-right positions of his friends in the Trump administration in the language of common sense and compassion for working people.

Victory in November still seems like a dizzying long shot, but the state Democratic party’s leaders have certainly fretted over scenarios in which they somehow lose control of the richest, most populous US state for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger forged a path from Hollywood to the governor’s office in 2003.

Under a Schwarzenegger-era reform, the state no longer picks one Democrat and one Republican to duke it out in the general election but rather holds an “open” primary in which the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party. There’s a slim chance Hilton and Bianco will advance and shut out the Democrats altogether, but it’s not a chance Hilton is betting on.

Rather, he is looking for what he calls a “political revolution” – a watershed moment when Democratic voters dispense with party allegiance in decisive numbers because of the pinch they feel from the state’s high cost of living and poverty rates, its top-three unemployment rate, and the basement ratings it receives for economic opportunity.

Hilton is certainly right to say people are unhappy about these things. According to one respected poll, a majority of Californians think their state is heading in the wrong direction, with inflation and the cost of housing and health care uppermost among their concerns.

Hilton’s Democratic rivals are taking these issues seriously, too, and describe California as being unaffordable and in crisis. But the way Hilton sees it, they have only themselves to blame because it has been their party in charge. At campaign stops, he portrays the last 16 years of state government under the Democrats as bloated, overly interested in taxing small businesses and weighing ordinary working people down with rules and red tape, effectively sacrificing the common good for what he describes with undisguised contempt as a “bottomless money pit” in Sacramento, the state capital.

That message resonates in places like Downey, a workaday Los Angeles suburb sometimes called the “Mexican Beverly Hills” because of its dynamic Latino business class, which saw an 18.8 percentage-point swing away from the Democrats towards Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Attendees at a brunch organized for Hilton in a local shopping mall were thrilled by his promises to abolish a flat annual $800 business tax and his vow to crack down on worker compensation lawsuits that he said were a racket orchestrated by trial lawyers and their political proteges in the Democratic Party.

“Hopefully he can do a Doge with all the bureaucracy and fraud in California,” said one brunch attendee, insurance executive Joe Murillo, referring to the controversial purge of federal employees that the White House’s special appointee, Elon Musk, orchestrated in the opening months of Trump’s second presidential term.

The question, though, is whether such sentiments, and the candidate who champions them, stand a chance of breaking through California’s dauntingly high blue wall in what is expected to be a rough year for Republicans nationally. One significant problem for Hilton is that he has been endorsed by Trump in a state where the president’s approval rating hovers around 25%, roughly 10 points lower than the national average. Newsom’s approval rating, by contrast, stands at about 50%.

Hilton calls himself “a pragmatist, not an ideologue” and points to his experience in coalition government under Cameron’s premiership as proof that he can work well with people whose politics do not align with his. He sees the fact that he gets along with Trump and his cabinet as a potential asset, a way of attracting federal dollars and other forms of cooperation from Washington that, he hopes, will lower the temperature after more than a year of feuding and name-calling between Trump and Newsom.

“My job [as governor] will be to deliver pretty pragmatic things, all focused on making your life easier and better,” he says. “I’m a reasonable person who is very focused on practical changes.”

That self-description is most plausible when Hilton listens sympathetically to plumbers, restaurant owners and real-estate agents describing their day-to-day struggles and life experiences. He talks less now than he did a year ago about California’s failures and how terrible everything is, and more about how much he loves and admires the state’s restless creative energy and wishes only for better political leadership to bring that energy to the fore.

The messaging is reminiscent of Hilton’s work for Cameron when he was instrumental in shaking the Tory party’s austere image and promising a “big society” vision, nodding to the environmental movement by switching the party logo from a torch to a tree, and making sure Cameron and other key figures felt approachable, not distant – what at the time was described as the Tories’ “hug a hoodie” moment.

There were questions even then about how moderate Hilton’s views were – he went on to embrace Boris Johnson’s Brexit campaign – and those questions arise again now, especially when Hilton comes face to face with a more partisan Republican crowd.

At two events immediately following the business brunch in Downey, the first at a conservative evangelical church and the second addressing the Huntington Beach Republican Club at a popular sports bar, Hilton talked about his close friendship with Charlie Kirk, the polarizing Trump loyalist and campus activist who embraced the theory that immigrants are coming to American to “replace” white Christians among other extreme positions before being shot dead in Utah last September.

“He’s with me every step of this journey,” Hilton said of Kirk. “We’re going to save California, and we’re going to do it for Charlie.”

Hilton responded positively to questions from vaccine skeptics, saying he thought it “outrageous” that children needed to be vaccinated as a condition of attending public school and that he was a strong believer in “medical freedom”.

He stirred up both crowds with promises not just of a new politics but of some sort of payback. “It’s over for these people,” he said of California’s Democrats. “It’s absolutely over.” At another point, talking about the Covid pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 – a source of continuing resentment among Trump Republicans who saw face masks and business closures as an affront to their personal freedoms – he said: “We mustn’t let them forget what they did to us.”

When asked by the Guardian who won the 2020 presidential election, Hilton refused to give a straight answer. “I can’t stand that question,” he said. “It’s a game, and I don’t want to play it. I just don’t.”

Instead, he accused California Democrats of making “an enormous number of last-minute changes that have caused huge distrust in the system” in the run-up to the 2020 election – a way of casting his own shade on a race that vote tallies, dozens of court rulings, and the US Congress all say Trump clearly lost to Joe Biden. The changes he was referring to were to California’s mail-in ballot rules in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but reports of attempted cheating that year were rare and came to light largely because they were thwarted by safeguards within the system.

On this and other issues there appears to be little daylight between Hilton and the hard-right Republican leadership in Huntington Beach, which has cried foul about California’s electoral system for years without producing evidence of substantive problems.

At most, election experts say, their complaints have picked up on procedural issues like signature verification and vote counts that can linger weeks past election day and used them as a pretext to accuse Democrats of foul play. In the name of ballot security Huntington Beach’s Republicans have now sponsored an initiative that, if approved, would require voters to produce formal identification and prove their citizenship at the polls.

Critics say the initiative is an onerous solution to a non-existent problem and would depress turnout, especially among Latinos and other minorities who may not have passports and are fearful of falling into the clutches of Trump’s immigration and customs enforcement police. Hilton, though, has leapt on it as an opportunity to boost Republican voter enthusiasm in November, and with it his chances in the governor’s race.

Huntington Beach is where Hilton launched his gubernatorial campaign in April 2025, and he has taken several other strategic leaves from the local leadership’s playbook, including the idea of running a slate of candidates who can help lift each other up.

Hilton has an ideological partner he calls his “running mate”, former state senator (and former Democrat) Gloria Romero, who is vying to become lieutenant governor. He has also formed an alliance with Huntington Beach’s former city attorney, Michael Gates, who is running for state attorney general. Hilton calls this informal lineup a “golden ticket”, and he has ambitions to use it not just to elevate himself but to try to break the Democratic supermajorities in the California assembly and senate.

The slate’s existence may not alter the grim math for Republicans statewide, but the promise alone of a new approach and fresh leadership is energizing the party faithful and giving them real hope after decades in the wilderness. Tony Strickland, the tip of the spear of the Trump revolution in Huntington Beach now serving in the state legislature, said of Hilton: “We’re one leader away from prosperity here in California.”

The room erupted in chants of “Tony! Tony!” as he spoke these words, and the chants soon switched to “Steve! Steve! Steve!” as Hilton made his entrance, high-fiving right and left. Outside, the faces of Republicans turned away from the event pressed up against the bar’s plate glass windows.

“It’s like there’s a strip club opening in there or something,” a man in a Los Angeles Lakers basketball cap remarked. In surf-crazy, Trump-loving Huntington Beach, that passes as the highest of compliments.