California’s governor’s race has narrowed sharply in the space of a few weeks, at least according to polling paid for by one of the candidates. A survey commissioned by Republican Steve Hilton’s campaign and conducted by pollster David Wolfson on Oct. 1–2 puts Democrat Xavier Becerra ahead by just 5.6 points — 45.7% to 40.1%, with 14.1% of the 1,020 voters surveyed still undecided.
That is a far cry from the last Hilton-commissioned poll, which showed Becerra leading 52% to 37%, a 15-point gap. Reporting on the new figures in American Thinker, Monica Showalter describes the shift as dramatic — and notes the context that makes it striking: California Democrats hold a roughly two-to-one voter registration advantage over Republicans, a structural headwind that would normally make any Republican gain in the single digits noteworthy on its own.
The obvious caveat is that both polls came from the same source: the Hilton campaign. Partisan internal polling is not neutral data, and a campaign has every incentive to release numbers that suggest momentum. That said, the movement between the two surveys is large enough that even a skeptical reading has to ask what, if anything, changed between them.
The debate and its aftermath
Showalter’s answer is the candidates’ first debate, which she says Becerra lost badly. Her evidence includes a poll of CNN debate viewers who, she writes, favored Hilton 74% to 20%. She also points to Becerra’s difficulty explaining his record as Health and Human Services secretary, specifically the department’s failure to account for some 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children during the Biden-era border surge. Showalter’s piece quotes a New York Post account of testimony from a migrant girl who described being sent to traffickers and abused after HHS vetting procedures were dismantled — testimony that a social media post quoted in the piece frames as “I was sexually abused because of Xavier Becerra.”
Showalter also acknowledges she didn’t watch the debate herself, speculating that Becerra’s personal style may have turned voters off. Whatever the cause, the practical consequence arrived days later: Becerra pulled out of a Los Angeles Times debate scheduled for this week, a move Hilton’s campaign greeted with a statement noting that Becerra had promised multiple debates in August and now, having lost the first, was “back in hiding.”
That accusation — that Becerra is taking voters for granted — is the emotional core of the conservative case against him, and it fits a broader pattern the right has been pushing since Kamala Harris’s abbreviated 2024 run: that a candidate elevated by party machinery rather than a competitive primary is a candidate who never had to earn the public’s trust and doesn’t know how to keep it.
There’s a second line of attack running alongside the first. Showalter flags Becerra’s stump speech claim to have been an immigrant baby born to an undocumented mother who arrived with $12 in her pocket — a story she says is unraveling as reporting establishes he was born in Sacramento. If that framing collapses, it would undercut one of the more personal parts of his biography.
Why California may resist the national tide
Showalter offers a theory for why a Republican might be competitive in a state that hasn’t elected one statewide in years. Socialism, she argues, is making inroads elsewhere in the country precisely because it is new there; in California, where Democrats have held power for more than three decades, voters have already lived under it. What they get instead from candidates, in her telling, is phoniness dressed up as moderation — radicalism without the novelty.
Whether that argument holds up in November is a different question from whether it’s a useful way to read the polling. A 5.6-point deficit with 14% undecided is not a lead, and Hilton’s own pollster still has him losing. But it’s a competitive number in a state where Republicans usually aren’t, and Showalter is candid that she can’t tell whether the trend is enough for Hilton to actually close the gap.
What she does highlight is the advertising and organizing side of the campaign, which she argues has been unusually effective. She points to Hilton’s messaging on the roughly two million people who have left California in recent years for places like Austin and Nashville, with a pitch built around making the state livable for young people again now that ballots are out. She also notes, with some surprise, that Hilton’s engagement has risen tenfold and that he’s drawing audiences he previously wasn’t reaching — including, apparently, some former critics.
All of which leaves the race in an odd place. The Democratic frontrunner is sitting on a lead that has shrunk by two-thirds in a matter of weeks, according to numbers produced by his opponent. The Republican is gaining, per those same numbers, but still trails. And the single most concrete development of the week — Becerra skipping a debate he’d previously committed to — is the kind of thing that either looks like smart risk management or looks like hiding, depending entirely on which poll you believed before it happened.
Showalter’s conclusion is unapologetically partisan — “keep fighting, Steve” — but the underlying observation is one that applies to any candidate in any race: the more voters see of you, the more they have to work with, for better or worse. Becerra, by his own scheduling choices, appears to have decided that less is more.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/poll-shows-california-gubernatorial-canddiate-steve-hilton-gaining-on-xavier-becerra/