After years of leadership failures, California voters may flip the state Republican in 2026. Entrepreneur, author and now candidate for Governor Steve Hilton reveals his road map for saving the state. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. You can find Steve Hilton’s book here: Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State
Chapter 1: What recent polling data shows California voters considering Republicans?
A recent poll showed that 48% of Californians are considering voting Republican in the next election after years of failed leadership from Democrats.
Chapter 2: Who is Steve Hilton and what is his political background?
In this encore episode of Morning Wire, we speak to entrepreneur and best-selling author Steve Hilton, who has just thrown his hat into the ring for California governor. At the time of this interview, he had not yet announced his candidacy. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Saturday, April 26th, 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 is a chance a conservative candidate could actually win in 2026 for the governor's race?
Chapter 3: Is there a real chance for a Republican governor to win in California in 2026?
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.
Chapter 4: What recent political shifts and election results suggest change in California?
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.
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Chapter 5: How has California’s one-party Democratic rule impacted the state’s economy and quality of life?
And I think finally, people are waking up to it.
Now, I wanna unpack some of the things that you touched on, but first, just wondering, you said 50% 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?
It's a really great question because one of the things that I've been really trying to convey to people 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 percent. So that's not 50, but it's a lot more than people think. Let's call it 40 percent 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.
Now, the most recent stress test of this, it's not exactly apples to apples, but Rick Caruso ran for mayor as a conservative Democrat, but he failed to win in Los Angeles. So do you think that the ticket to win is to run as a Democrat and just be to the right of the more progressive candidate? Or do you think you can come out and actually win under the GOP banner?
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Chapter 6: What is the historical baseline for Republican support in statewide California elections?
No, how can a Democrat be the answer to the problems of California? It's the Democrats who caused them. I think you've got to be very clear about that. The only way to get the change we need in California is to elect a Republican. And I think that the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates...
wherever they position themselves on the spectrum, they're tied in to some of the structural factors that have driven these terrible policy outcomes. For example, the dependence on the unions, the way that the Democratic Party, regardless of where people stand on the spectrum, are completely in hock.
to the activists who drive the Democratic Party and basically determine its ideological positioning. You just saw this, by the way, revealed from Rick Caruso just the other day on my podcast, The Steve Hilton Show, Nicole Shanahan, who I'm working very closely with on the Karen Bass recall in Los Angeles. She was, of course, Bobby Kennedy's running mate. And Rick Caruso,
who's a Democrat now, just came out against the recall of Karen Bass. And Nicole, who's been working to get that up and running, spoke to him and said, well, why? Why are you against this? When he actually gave his public remarks, It was all going, oh, this is a time for unity and blah, blah, blah. But actually, he revealed the real reason. He didn't want to be labeled a racist.
That's what he said, which shows you the power of this kind of Democrat machine. You know, people don't want to go up against it. We have to go up against it. only way we get the change we need is to actually defeat the Democrat machine. And that's why I would say the only hope for bringing sanity back to California is a Republican election victory.
Look, the state legislature has a Democratic supermajority. They have more than two thirds. So I think the argument would be to Californians, look, it's time for a bit of balance. It's not healthy to have one party rule with these terrible ideas being implemented at every level of government.
Now, something you touched on earlier was that the fires opened the eyes of a lot of people. Just this week, there was a release that said four million Californians live in fire danger zones. Just wondering, because you might have more information on this than me, is that a policy failure or is that just the reality of the climate in California and where some of these homes are built?
No, it's completely avoidable. Like so many of the problems in California, they're preventable. Because what you've seen is the dominance of climate extremism. And that has driven a terrible approach to managing the fire risk.
Because whether that is the overgrown forests in the Sierras, where you see a lot of the really big wildfires, or as we tragically saw in Los Angeles, the brush that's on the coastal mountain ranges, they haven't been cleared. They haven't been managed. We used to do it. It used to happen.
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Chapter 7: Can a Republican candidate win as a Republican or do they need to run as a moderate Democrat?
You talk to people who live in Southern California, it was a regular site for them to see controlled burns on the hillsides or people going and managing the brush. Residents wanted to do it. But it's the California Air Resources Board, which has been implementing an extreme climate agenda that has prevented this from happening.
So there are ways that we can live happily and safely in our beautiful environment in California and experience the number of homes we build right across the state. We have a massive housing shortage. That's why we have the highest housing costs in the country. But we need to abandon this extreme environmentalism, this climatism, if we're going to actually make that happen.
Now, California also announced a nearly $1 billion deficit last week. It's pretty stunning considering that we think of California as an extremely wealthy state with a huge tax base. They have Silicon Valley, for example. So where is all that money going?
That's the question that people are asking all the time. By the way, that $1 billion deficit, that's not California. That's the city of Los Angeles. It's not even Los Angeles County. It's the city of LA, which is one of 80 or so cities in the county of Los Angeles. So $1 billion just for the city deficit. Absolute joke. And as you say, that's the question. Where's the money going?
Because we pay the highest taxes in the country. The budget of the state of California has nearly doubled in the last 10 years, even while everything gets worse. And the answer to the question, where's all the money going, is it's going to the luxury pensions and health care that have been given to the government unions that fund the Democratic Party. That's a huge part of it, those contracts.
And that's basically total corruption. That's the cronyism, which is another factor I look at in my book, Califalia. It's going in total corruption with the homeless issue. I mean, if you look at the audits that have been done, I think it's up to $38 billion just in the last few years that have been I don't even want to say spent, like completely wasted. They can't keep track of it.
Homelessness has simply gone up. It's gone into the pockets of homeless nonprofits, connected crony developers who build so-called permanent supportive housing for the homeless people at $700,000, $800,000 per unit with absolutely no requirement for sobriety or job training or any kind of services or treatment. So it's just this complete mess. And because the Democrats...
felt like they have it all to themselves. They haven't had a real political challenge. They assume that Democrats are always going to be in charge. So you get a total complacency, corruption, lack of new thinking. That's what's been going on. And so the fact that we have this massively bloated government
presiding over catastrophically failing services and outcomes is a really big part of the argument for why we need change. And we need to get some balance into California government because you're not going to get the Democrats sorting all this stuff out.
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Chapter 8: Are California’s wildfires a policy failure or an unavoidable natural risk?
But the theory was a lot of people said that actually the no party preference, the independents who are registered as such, they're really Republicans, but they can't bring themselves to say that publicly. Now, in the last couple of years, Republicans' vote registration has actually overtaken NPP. So now Republican registration is second.
And it seems to me that some of this shift is coming from independents who now feel more comfortable saying they're Republicans. They're a really big group. And I think the really important part of the conversation we can't leave out is the demographics of the state. The largest group in California now are Latinos. Forty percent of the state is Latino.
And if you look at what's happening across the country with the Latino vote, particularly, of course, with President Trump in this recent election, that is a massive opportunity for Republicans because the working class Latino vote, those are the people who are most being hammered by the Democrats' policies.
And that is the opportunity, I think, for Republicans to say, look, we are the party that can give you that promise of the California dream and a better life.
Now, I want to talk to you about your book. It's hard to distill it down, but what would you say are the top two, three, five things that California could do to change their trajectory?
So I think that the true answer to that is... The overall size and scope and bloat of government that makes it impossible to do anything. That's a sort of broad answer. But actually, if you dive into each of the policy issues, which is what I've been doing, whether that's housing or the fact that we don't have reliable, affordable electricity and the gas prices are too high.
And if you're in the Central Valley and you're trying to make a living as a farmer, they're taking away your water. All of this is driven by this massive bloated economy. regulatory onslaught, this harassment of anyone who tries to do anything.
I mean, I used to back in the day in England, I ran restaurants and I love talking to restaurant owners because it's such a good kind of barometer of what's actually going on at the community level. I just don't know how anyone does it in California.
Just the endless regulations and the labor regulations, the minimum wage going up, the harassment from the tax authorities, the environmental regulations I mentioned, the permits and the endless bureaucracy. So I think that is the number one factor.
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