Steve Hilton, the barefoot former Downing Street adviser turned Fox News host, is running for governor of California as a Republican in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one. Polls put him 20 or more percentage points behind Democratic rival Xavier Becerra. The campaign is, by any conventional metric, a lost cause. But Hilton is treating it as a laboratory for a particular theory of Republican viability in deep-blue territory — one worth watching regardless of whether it works in November. Hilton's policy output is prolific and deliberately eclectic. Abolish the DMV. Cut gas to $3 a gallon. Build 10 new cities from scratch. Launch a free-tuition business school in East Los Angeles. Eliminate state income tax on the first $150,000 of earnings — a proposal that echoes progressive Democrats more than GOP orthodoxy. Create a California version of Elon Musk's DOGE. Kill the high-speed rail project he calls "the bullshit train to nowhere." The strategy is volume and range: throw enough proposals that no one can pigeonhole you, and hope that voters see pragmatism rather than incoherence. The political biography is genuinely unusual. Hilton worked as a senior adviser in David Cameron's coalition government, moved to California because his wife Rachel Whetstone became a major tech PR executive in Silicon Valley, wrote books on "positive populism," hosted a Fox News show, and is now trying to resuscitate the California GOP from outside its traditional infrastructure. He describes his campaign DNA as a fusion of Bernie Sanders's class populism, Rand Paul's libertarianism, and John Kasich's happy-warrior style. That triangulation tells you everything about the contradictions he's trying to hold together. The core tension is Trump. Hilton earned Trump's endorsement in the primary, talks about being friends with half the cabinet, and won't discourage MAGA faithful at town halls from airing grievances about stolen elections, gun rights, and January 6 prosecutions. At a recent San Gabriel event, he milked applause lines for these supporters. His formula: "I've never said anything I don't believe. I just don't say everything that I believe." Simultaneously, he took out full-page ads in the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle telling voters they don't have to like Trump or become Republicans — just stop voting the same way and expecting different results. It's a two-audience strategy that works only as long as neither audience compares notes too closely. Hilton's strongest argument is real: California has seen net domestic outmigration for years, a trend predating the current administration. He frames it sharply — "Are they fleeing Trump? I don't think so. Most of them are fleeing to states run by Republicans" — and connects it to housing costs, gas prices, homelessness, and healthcare access. The affordability crisis is genuine, and his target demographic — working-class, non-college-educated, often Latino voters — feels it acutely. He won close to 25% in the June primary, enough to finish second in a crowded field. The problem is that getting from 25% to 50%+1 in a state this blue requires winning over voters who associate his party with the man in the Oval Office. The campaign's ground-game bet is notable. Hilton is doing small-scale retail politics — sitting with groups, listening to complaints about regulations and gas prices — in a state where political consultants insist television and internet ads are the only viable strategy for reaching 39 million people. Whether this reflects genuine strategic insight or simply the budget constraints of a campaign with no realistic path, it does generate the kind of testimonials and local coverage that at least builds a brand for whatever Hilton does next. The honest read: this campaign is less about winning the governorship than about proving a concept. If Hilton can overperform his polling floor — getting, say, 40% in a state where Republicans typically get crushed — it validates a particular flavor of Republican crossover politics. If he gets 30%, the experiment fails and the California GOP stays where it's been: irrelevant statewide. Either way, the policy menu he's assembling — libertarian economics, populist aesthetics, selective progressive borrowing — is a template other Republicans in hostile territory will study.
