Is California Ready to Vote Red? | 3.30.25
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Is California ready to vote Republican in 2026?
A recent poll showed 48% of Californians are considering voting Republican in the next gubernatorial election. In this episode, we speak to entrepreneur and bestselling author Steve Hilton about what went wrong in California and why it's ripe for political change. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, March 30th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now to discuss the pent-up frustrations fueling the California political shift is entrepreneur, author, and podcast host Steve Hilton. Steve, thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you very much.
Good to be with you. So, Steve, a variety of polls right now are showing that voters are not happy with Democrats, including in deep blue California. Do you think there's a chance a conservative candidate could actually win in 2026 for the governor's race?
Yes, 100%. The poll you're talking about, there's been a couple, actually, in the last few days. One had 50% of Californians open to voting for a Republican candidate for governor. Another one had 48%. And the feeling that we can't go on like this in California has been building now for such a long time. You saw a real move forward in the right direction, as I would see it, in the elections last year, in November. Ten counties flipped. from blue to red, including major counties like Fresno County in the Central Valley, the fifth biggest city in California. So 10 counties shifting from Democrat to Republican. We actually only don't have that many counties in California. It's 58. So that's nearly a fifth. That's a big deal. We saw a massive positive vote for Proposition 36. which was the one that, as its supporters, including me, we used to talk about it as making crime illegal again. Prop 36 was undoing the terrible damage of the Prop 47 that Kamala Harris pushed many years back, which basically legalized theft under $950 a day.
You saw defeats for George Gascon, the Soros-backed DA in Los Angeles County, the recall of the mayor in Oakland and the DA there. You saw the defeat of the mayor of San Francisco. So actually, there really is change building. And all of that was before the terrible wildfire catastrophe in Los Angeles, which really woke people up to the scale of the Democrat extremism and incompetence that has just given us such terrible outcomes on every measure. That's what I've written about In my book, Califalia, which is based on every measure that matters, every single one. California, under this one party rule that we've had for so long from Democrats, we're literally the worst in America, not just in the middle somewhere. We have the highest rate of poverty, the highest taxes, the highest cost for housing, gas, electricity, water. We have the worst business climate 10 years in a row. It's a complete failure on every front.
And I think finally people are waking up to it.
Now, I want to unpack some of the things that you touched on. But first, just wondering, you said 50 percent of Californians said they're open to voting for a Republican. How much of a swing is that from baseline? I mean, has a poll like this been done in the past?
So it's a really great question because one of the things that I've been really trying to convey to people is, is that when people say, oh, California is such a deep blue state, no chance of ever electing a Republican, forget about it. What I've been pointing out for years is that it's already and has been for years a much more Republican state than people think. I did the math on this. The last time Republicans won an election statewide was 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election. Since then, Republicans haven't won. But if you take the average share of the vote across all statewide elections since then, the number you get to is 41.7%. So that's not 50, but it's a lot more than people think. Let's call it 40% is the baseline. That is a higher base than a lot of people think.
And so it's not out of reach, especially when you just see the total collapse of confidence in the state's leadership in the form of Karen Bass or Gavin Newsom in relation to the wildfires, and just the accumulating pain of the economic cost of these far-left policies.
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