By Alexei Koseff | CALmatters
After more than a decade being exiled from the governor’s office in California, Republicans are eyeing growing voter frustration with the dominant liberal politics of the state as a launching pad for a comeback next year.
Though lacking the statewide profiles of a deluge of Democratic contenders, a pair of GOP hopefuls with devoted conservative followings has jumped into the open 2026 gubernatorial race in recent months, hoping to persuade voters that only a radical shakeup can fix California’s problems.
“I don’t think there’s any other way of describing California today, other than the sick man of America,” said Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host and onetime political adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron who officially announced his candidacy on Monday. “It’s just undeniable that we’re in a terrible, terrible mess in California and we have to change direction.”
Hilton is kicking off his campaign today with an event in Huntington Beach, the city that has remade itself over the past few years into the bulwark of conservative resistance in California. He follows Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a hero of the right for defying state mandates during the COVID pandemic, who entered the race to succeed termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom in February.
Both believe that voters have grown sick of a generation of one-party Democratic rule in Sacramento and are banking on appeals to cut taxes and regulations — which they blame for making California unaffordable — to reach across traditional partisan lines.
“We are being led down a path of complete government control and socialism,” Bianco said in an interview. “This is no longer Democrat versus Republican. We’re at a point where it’s sane versus insane.”
But conservative candidates face a steep climb in a state that has not elected a Republican to statewide office since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won a second term in 2006.
California Democratic Party Chairperson Rusty Hicks said the gubernatorial race is about more than just who can deliver for Californians. Voters know the governor has a powerful platform to stand up to the Trump administration and they won’t want a Republican in a role that is also critical to the future of the rest of the country and the whole world, he said.
“I certainly applaud them for continuing to try,” Hicks said. “But time and time again, we see California voters see their policies for what they are, which is not in line with the values of Californians.”
Slashing taxes and regulations
More than 20 people have already filed a statement of intention to run for governor in the 2026 primary as Republicans — though few will be serious candidates and some may never qualify for the ballot at all, which requires paying a filing fee or submitting thousands of signatures from registered voters.
Only two, including Bianco, have reported raising any money for their campaigns so far. While the first fundraising report of 2025 is not due until the end of July, major donations are filed with the state on a rolling basis.
Leo Zacky, a poultry farm heir and perennial candidate who received 1.3% of the vote in the 2022 gubernatorial primary and 0.1% in the 2021 recall election, seeded his campaign last month with $50,000 of his own money.
Meanwhile, since launching his campaign in February, Bianco has reported more than $380,000 in major contributions — enough to solidify himself as an early frontrunner for conservative voters, but a far cry from the millions that some Democratic contenders have already raised.
That leaves an opening for Hilton, 55, a native of the United Kingdom who moved to California in 2012 with his wife, a public relations executive for tech companies. Hilton has a built-in audience from hosting the weekly commentary program “The Next Revolution” on Fox News from 2017 to 2023, and Silicon Valley connections that could provide the money he needs to spread his message more broadly.
Hilton said his campaign will focus on practical solutions to rebuild a “ladder of opportunity,” so that every Californian can have a great job and a great home — though many of them are ideas that the Democratic supermajority in the Legislature is unlikely to ever support.
He would eliminate the state income tax for Californians below an unspecified income level. He wants to boost housing development by simplifying building codes, ending lawsuits under the infamous California Environmental Quality Act, and promoting construction of single-family homes. He believes the state needs mandatory phonics education and more accountability for teachers based on test scores to improve student achievement.
Though he has had a long career in politics, Hilton has never held elected office himself, which he argues is an asset.
“I would ask people, how good are the machine politicians in Sacramento who are involved in this one-party rule? How is that working?” Hilton said.
Bianco, 57, was a longtime sheriff’s deputy in Riverside County who ran for sheriff in 2018 out of frustration with what he called a “pro-criminal” approach to public safety in California. During his two terms as chief law enforcement officer of Riverside County, he has been a controversial but locally popular figure, refusing to enforce Newsom’s COVID lockdown orders or apologize for his brief affiliation with the far-right Oath Keepers militia.
He said he’s now running for governor because, like many Californians, he is tired of how the government has failed a state that people otherwise love. Many of his priorities align with Hilton’s: Bianco would like to completely abolish the state income tax, get rid of laws that he said are driving farmers and ranchers out of business, and leave environmental regulation to the federal government.
And echoing the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, Bianco said he wants to eliminate wasteful spending such as the high-speed rail project and multibillion-dollar programs that have not reduced homelessness.
“The number one job of government is public safety,” Bianco said. “All the rest of it is fluff.”
The anti-Trump bump
California Republicans have been jubilant since the November election, when they flipped three seats in the state Legislature as President Donald Trump increased his vote share in nearly every county. At a party convention in Sacramento last month, they strategized over how to build on the momentum by leaning into issues such as affordability and crime that appear to be helping them gain ground, particularly among Latino voters.
“That tells us that Californians, on the local level and when it comes to the laws that are being passed in Sacramento, they’re looking to Republicans,” Corrine Rankin, the newly elected chairperson of the California Republican Party, said in an interview. “They’re rejecting the failures that are coming out of the Capitol by the Democrats.”
In a February survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, only 48% of likely voters said the state is going in the right direction, compared to 51% who said it’s going in the wrong direction — underwater, albeit the highest approval in two years.
To win the governorship next year, Rankin said the state GOP would eventually unite behind a candidate who can help Californians understand how that dissatisfaction is driven by what Democrats in charge of the state are doing.
“We need change here in California. Californians expect change and we’re positioned to deliver,” she said.
But the modest advances of the last election belie a GOP that is still far from competitive in California. Trump only received about 38% of the vote, losing to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by more than 20 percentage points, and Republicans lost three U.S. House seats.
The 2026 midterms, in which Democratic anger at the Trump administration could produce an even more liberal electorate, will be a difficult political environment for the California GOP to snap a statewide shutout that dates back to 2010. In 2022, no Republican candidate for statewide office came within 10 percentage points of victory, and most lost by about twice that margin.
Andrew Acosta, a Democratic political consultant who is not working on the governor’s race, said there are substantive problems in California for serious conservatives to campaign on. “The Republicans have a lot of fodder if they did it the right way,” he said.
But candidates so closely tied to Trump are unlikely to overcome the deep anti-Trump sentiment in the electorate and win the governorship next year, Acosta added. “There’s zero chance of these Republicans.”
Both Hilton and Bianco are vocal Trump supporters. Hilton’s campaign even references the MAGA movement with a “make California golden again” slogan, and he rolled out an endorsement on the first day from Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the architects of Trump’s DOGE initiative.
Though some Democratic candidates are already tapping into the fury at Trump to fuel their campaigns, Hilton said the focus is misplaced.
“None of that helps a single person in California,” he said. “These are real issues. So if Democrat candidates want to deflect from that and become national political commentators, then good luck with that.”
Bianco said Democrats have done “outstanding psychological warfare” for decades convincing people that Republicans cannot win in California, which has suppressed conservative participation in elections. But things have finally gotten so bad, he said, that those frustrated voters will turn out next year and elect a Republican governor.
“We can’t blame Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t have anything to do with California and the laws that have been passed in the past 20 years,” he said. “I believe that the majority of people, of hard-working Californians, have conservative leanings.”