Steve Hilton's California Governor Platform

At a rally this fall, someone printed out every bill the California legislature passed last year and stacked the pages next to the candidate for governor. The pile came up to twice his height. That candidate is Steve Hilton, a British-born tech entrepreneur turned Republican gubernatorial hopeful, and the stack was his prop for a simple point: Sacramento passed 1,118 bills in a single session (05:32), and he doubts even Governor Gavin Newsom has read them before signing them.

Hilton moved to California in 2012 and says the state has always represented something larger than itself.

"California means to America what America means to the world." (Steve Hilton, [01:47])

That is the frame for his campaign: a place with unmatched advantages, ruined by the people running it. He points to sixteen years of one-party Democratic control (03:02) and a set of rankings that would embarrass any incumbent. California has the highest poverty rate and highest unemployment rate in the country, according to Hilton, along with the highest cost of living and highest housing costs (03:02). Chief Executive Magazine has ranked the state fiftieth out of fifty for business climate for more than a decade running (03:22). Starting a business here, Hilton claims, carries a ninety percent chance of ending up in litigation (05:07). The median home price is nearly a million dollars against a median individual salary of $65,000 (09:58), a gap that used to run the other way when California had the highest homeownership rate in the country.

His explanation for how a party once associated with "peace and love and permissiveness" became, in his words, the rule police is structural rather than ideological. One-party rule, he argues, always curdles into an insular elite answerable to donors, unions, and trial lawyers rather than to voters (04:08). The fix he is proposing is concrete: cut the state's regulations from more than 420,000 to under 200,000 by the end of a first term, which he says would make California's regulatory burden competitive with the rest of the country (06:20). He would exempt the first $150,000 of individual income from state tax, funded by canceling high-speed rail, cutting government headcount by ten percent, and finding further savings elsewhere (14:37). On gas, he says hidden charges, the low carbon fuel standard and the Cap and Invest program, add about $1.50 to every gallon (15:28), and repealing them could move prices from roughly $6 toward $3 a gallon, in line with other states (15:07). He would also abolish the DMV outright and cap vehicle registration at a flat $73 a year, down from the $800 to over $1,000 many Californians currently pay (15:51, 16:20).

Whether any of this survives contact with Sacramento is a separate question from whether Hilton can win. Betting markets put his odds at five percent; public polling shows a gap that has narrowed from thirty points on primary night to eight points in the latest survey (12:04). His own internal numbers show 89 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of independents, but under 10 percent of Democrats (12:04). The persuadable slice, about 26 percent in his campaign's polling, skews toward non-college-educated voters focused on the cost of living rather than party loyalty (12:49).

The Machine

Hilton's preferred word for the system he is running against is "the machine," a phrase he shares, half-jokingly, with Spencer Pratt, the reality television figure who ran for Los Angeles mayor and lost his home in the Pacific Palisades fire. Pratt prefers a harsher noun. Where Hilton sees a self-dealing elite, Pratt describes something closer to organized crime.

Pratt's own race supplies his evidence. He says he was celebrating his position as the clear number two on election night while his opponent, Nithya Raman, was losing by ten percent, and then watched a third-place candidate close the gap over the following days on the strength of mail-in ballots (25:19). Of roughly 43,000 late ballots, Pratt argues the math does not require anyone to have literally invented votes, because California's ballot-harvesting rules make the process nearly impossible to audit. A single witness can collect an unlimited number of mail-in ballots and sign for them with something as informal as a smiley face or an X (26:33), and once ballots reach the counting facility they are separated from their envelopes, severing any link between a ballot and the person who witnessed it (39:32).

"The system is designed, so what we think is cheating is not cheating." (Spencer Pratt, [26:33])

Pressed directly on whether he believes he lost because of fraud, Pratt says no, he does not have the evidence, and volunteers a more mundane explanation: roughly 200,000 registered Republicans in Los Angeles simply did not vote (24:14, 44:30). What he wants instead of a recount is voter ID, comparing it to the identification required to shop at Commie Momdami's (46:10).

The same legal architecture, in his telling, explains a story Hilton picked up independently. A Latino couple who have run a shoe store in South Central Los Angeles for fourteen years walked Hilton down two city blocks of sidewalk vendors selling shoes and apparel, paying no rent, no taxes, and no licensing fees, all legal since a 2018 state bill barred cities and counties from banning street vending (31:02). "We have become a state where if you do the right thing, you're punished, and if you do the wrong thing, you're rewarded," Hilton says of the arrangement (31:23), and Pratt adds that Los Angeles has separately approved half a million dollars to buy vending carts for some of the same unlicensed sellers (32:33).

What Burned

Pratt's harshest material concerns the fire that destroyed his home. He says a fire break around the Pacific Palisades, roughly 300 yards of cleared brush, would have cost under $500,000 to build (48:06), a fraction of the billions in damage that followed. He blames decades of unmanaged dead brush on state parks land bordering the community, brush that residents are legally barred from clearing themselves because it shelters a protected plant, the milk vetch (48:31). He says the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was fined $1 million for cutting brush around a downed pole in the same protected land (48:42).

Pratt has filed a mass tort on behalf of what he says are 10,000 victims, arguing that state park staff spotted a smoldering fire on New Year's Eve, eight acres in size, failed to monitor it as their own manual requires, and let it carry into a wind event that arrived days later on January 6th and 7th (49:29). He says depositions have produced photographs of park employees documenting the smoking hillside without acting, because, in his account, they told investigators they were "not firefighters" (49:54).

Neither man's numbers have been independently verified here, and both are, transparently, campaigning. But the throughline connecting a printed stack of bills, a smiley-face signature on a ballot envelope, and a half-million-dollar fire break not built is a single argument: that California's problem is not any one policy but a system built, deliberately or not, to reward the people who work it and punish everyone who does not. Whether voters in a state Democrats have controlled for sixteen years agree closely enough to change it will be decided in seven weeks.