Steve Hilton isn’t running against Xavier Becerra so much as against a machine — the one he says has run Sacramento for a generation. And in a long interview with RealClearPolitics, the former Fox News host described a campaign that is at least as focused on the mechanics of turnout as it is on the marquee debate ahead.
Hilton and Becerra are set to meet Sept. 30 in a CNN-televised faceoff, the first one-on-one debate of the race, timed almost exactly to when county elections officials begin mailing ballots to California’s roughly 23 million registered voters. For a Republican hoping to become the state’s first GOP governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger, that scheduling is not incidental.
An underdog’s answer to a turnout machine
Speaking with RCP last week, Hilton kept returning to a line bolted to an atrium wall at Stanford’s Institute of Design, where he taught after moving from England to the Bay Area in 2012: “The best way to do it is to do it.”
He applies that to ballot harvesting, the practice California Republicans long resisted on principle and Democrats built rules around. Hilton’s message to his own party is blunt and pragmatic: Democrats wrote the permissive rules, so Republicans should stop objecting and start using them.
His favorite illustration came out of the June primary. At a campaign event in Lancaster, a high-desert city north of Los Angeles, a volunteer arrived with armfuls of ballots. Her method, as Hilton tells it: she threw a ballot-harvesting pizza party, walked her friends through the process, and left with a stack of completed ballots to turn in. Hilton had her filmed explaining it, then turned the footage into a template for other volunteers.
That anecdote is the campaign’s turnout theory in miniature — less a top-down operation than a rolling effort Hilton describes as spreading across the state. He acknowledged the Democratic advantage directly: “You’re completely right that they’ve got this machine… There’s no question that that’s going to be springing into action. But we can’t just give up.”
Hilton points to a partnership with Carl DeMaio, the San Diego County assemblyman and longtime conservative activist who runs Reform California, on voter guides and organized ballot collection. Campaign spokesman Hector Barajas told RCP the effort includes a “faith-based operation and a statewide program with county and local chairs,” adding that the campaign understands the system and the rules and will fold the practice into its strategy. Hilton also claims this cycle has brought Republican turnout investment in California at a level not seen “in a long time.”
Robots, gladiators, and an ‘AI slop’ fight
The campaign has put its “people versus the machine” framing on screen. In July it released “The People vs. The Machine,” an AI-generated ad made by Charles Curran, the filmmaker behind the viral videos that powered Spencer Pratt’s Los Angeles mayoral bid. It casts a post-apocalyptic robot against an AI-animated Hilton; a gladiator-themed sequel followed days later, with ordinary Californians fighting the same mechanical monster.
Becerra’s campaign dismissed the spots as “AI slop” — but the imagery gave Hilton a visual to match his framing, and the phrase does double duty as a jab at Sacramento’s Democratic establishment and a reference to the corruption case that has trailed his opponent.
Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s longtime chief of staff, pleaded guilty this year to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, admitting he took roughly $225,000 from one of Becerra’s dormant state campaign accounts — funds funneled through Dana Williamson, a former chief of staff to Gov. Gavin Newsom — after complaining that his federal salary as Becerra’s HHS chief of staff didn’t match what he had made as a Sacramento lobbyist. Williamson also pleaded guilty.
Federal prosecutors have said no candidate for governor has been implicated in any charging document, and Becerra’s campaign has stressed that point repeatedly. Hilton says he doesn’t buy it, an argument former Rep. Katie Porter also made during a primary debate, and contends Becerra is “up to his neck” in the scandal with sentencing approaching. He pairs that with sustained attacks on Becerra’s record atop Health and Human Services during the Biden administration, citing whistleblower claims that well over 100,000 unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the border in that period remain unaccounted for. Becerra’s team has countered that he inherited the underlying crisis from the family-separation policies of the first Trump administration.
Wildfires, a bulldozer, and ‘climate extremism’
On California’s wildfire crisis, Hilton doesn’t reach for utility-regulation detail. He talks about a man with a bulldozer — an emblem of what he says should be common practice. He says he has now visited all 58 counties and describes what he saw as “heartbreaking and infuriating”: mega-fires he argues were preventable through controlled burns, fire breaks, and clearing the fuel load, rather than what he labels “climate extremism.”
He extends the criticism to the utilities, arguing money that could go toward undergrounding power lines or clearing brush is instead steered to EV-charging infrastructure and other climate priorities. The subject has only grown more charged as Newsom fights his own legislature over utility liability and insurance costs.
The DMV, the electric bill, and closing arguments
Elsewhere, Hilton’s instincts run toward the tangible. He wants to abolish the Department of Motor Vehicles outright, shifting its functions to local governments and private providers, and to replace the state’s vehicle-registration structure with a flat $73 annual fee. “This is what matters to people,” he said. “Californians are being gouged by the government.”
When Becerra proposed giving households free electricity during certain hours, Hilton’s campaign — according to RCP’s account — seized on the contrast as a cost-of-living fight, the throughline he intends to carry onto the debate stage just as ballots start arriving in mailboxes.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/hilton-channels-lasso-punches-hard-against-becerra/