As Californians dawdle about casting ballots before Tuesday’s primary, the leading candidates hoping to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom crisscrossed the state making their closing arguments to voters.
With Democrat and former Biden Cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra surging in recent polls, the two candidates battling to win the second spot in this week’s primary and advance to the November election highlighted the strategic reasons why they believe voters ought to support them.
Republican Steve Hilton — a former conservative commentator who rocketed past his main GOP rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, after President Trump endorsed him in April — urged voters to back him to avoid the possibility of two Democrats facing off in November.
“I want us to fight like we are third. We aren’t going to let this slip away,” Hilton told a few hundred people at the Santa Monica Hilton Hotel & Suites on Sunday.
Steve Hilton surged ahead of his GOP rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, after receiving an endorsement from President Trump.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The former British political strategist once led the polls but has slipped slightly behind Becerra. Not far behind Hilton is Democrat Tom Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund founder turned climate change activist.
During his hour-and-a-half appearance, Hilton veered between his oft-repeated criticisms about 16 years of Democrat-led rule in California to take jabs at the top Democrats in the race.
Steyer’s nonstop advertising blitz is “one reason alone to defeat him,” while Becerra is the “living embodiment of more of the same.”
“Our secret weapon? The Democrat candidates,” Hilton said to chuckles.
Asked why voters shouldn’t back Bianco, Hilton said it was simple math. Only the first- and second-place finishers in the June 2 primary will advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation.
“Every vote for Chad Bianco is a vote for two Democrats in the top two,” he said.
If a GOP gubernatorial candidate fails to make the November ballot, it would depress the Republican vote, harming the party’s down-ballot candidates, as well as handicap a Republican-led ballot initiative that would require voters to show government-issued ID to cast ballots.
California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, a Democrat, takes a picture with a volunteer during a Get Out the Vote rally at Los Angeles Trade Technical College on Sunday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Steyer, who has spent a record-breaking $216 million of his wealth on his gubernatorial bid, argued that he is the only candidate in the race who is not beholden to special interests. He hammered Becerra for the support he has received from corporations including Meta, Airbnb, Uber and Chevron. Steyer argued that Becerra, if elected governor, would be more responsive to special interests than financially strapped Californians.
“We’ve seen it in this race. Chevron cuts you a check and you look the other way when they hike prices at the pump. Meta gives you money and your AI plan starts sounding like ChatGPT,” Steyer, sporting a ball cap labeling himself a “class traitor,” told more than 500 supporters at a community college near downtown Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. “That’s the story of Xavier Becerra.”
Corporations, along with labor unions and interest groups including the California Assn. of Realtors, had spent more than $18.7 million to boost Becerra as of Sunday, according to the election spending tracker California Target Book.
“These companies may be selfish, but they’re not stupid. They don’t give hundreds of thousands of dollars to get someone elected unless they know he’s going to be on their side,” Steyer said.
Though Steyer earned his fortune in part through past investments in private prisons, fossil fuels and private equity, his supporters described him as a reformed billionaire who stepped away from those industries more than a decade ago.
Francesca Fiorentini, a comedian and podcaster, compared Steyer to Charles Dickens’ fictional miser Ebenezer Scrooge.
“At the end of ‘A Christmas Carol,’ nobody turns to Ebenezer and is like, ‘No, I’m not gonna accept your gifts.’ No, they welcome him. They might clown him a little bit, but we need to welcome someone like Tom Steyer,” Fiorentini said. “Tom Steyer is actually listening, he actually cares, he’s actually changing his belief system and he’s acting accordingly.”
After Steyer spoke to UCLA Democrats on Monday, senior Ronen Wenderfer said he is leaning toward voting for Steyer because he is endorsed by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Hollywood’s largest crew union. The 22-year-old plans to pursue a career in broadcast audio.
“I appreciate that he took the time to sit down and speak with us. He seemed to take our concerns seriously,” Wenderfer said. “At the end of the day, there are lots of acceptable Democratic candidates even though one hasn’t been amazing.”
He added that the vast amount Steyer has spent self-funding his gubernatorial bid “could have been better spent in other races” both in California and around the country.
Though he mainly went after Becerra, Steyer also made sure to criticize Hilton.
“You are not voting for who’s on the ballot, you’re voting for the California that comes after,” Steyer said. “The California that Steve Hilton is running on sounds exactly like what Trump wants: higher prices, lower wages, and less freedom.”
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democratic candidate for California governor, speaks at a Get Out the Vote event in Long Beach on Sunday.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Becerra appeared confident about his chances but said nothing should be taken for granted.
“We have to cross the finish line, run through the tape and bring as many voters as we can through because you just never know,” he said after handing out danishes at a Planned Parenthood office in Sacramento on Monday. “But I do believe we will going to be in this runoff.”
Becerra also hit back at a slew of negative ads recently released by Steyer, and said his campaign would consider all legal recourse options.
“If Tom Steyer decides to distort the record, I guess that’s on him,” Becerra said. “I didn’t realize that’s what makes you progressive, to be a liar about other people when you are campaigning. But I guess when you have unlimited funds, and you can spend over $200 million, you can say pretty much everything you want.”
At a raucous rally the previous evening,
Becerra seemed in awe as he rallied more than 1,000 supporters in Long Beach.
“Look around this room. One of our opponents has a billion dollars in a checkbook,” he said. “We have something better. … We don’t have the money, but we have the movement. We don’t have the money, but we’ve got the momentum. And in this state, if you’ve got the momentum, you run across the finish line, and you win, baby, you win.”
Becerra also released a new video that ostensibly attacks Hilton as “Trump’s favorite” — a thinly veiled effort to prop up Hilton among Republicans to ensure he finished ahead of Steyer in the primary. Given that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by almost 2 to 1, Becerra would much rather face Hilton than Steyer in the general election.
Newsom’s campaign employed this strategy to boost GOP businessman John Cox in the 2018 gubernatorial election, as did then-Rep. Adam Schiff against Republican Steve Garvey in Schiff’s successful 2024 U.S. Senate race.
Steyer has argued that he is the only candidate not beholden to special interests.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Steyer launched an ad this weekend titled “Risky” that implies Becerra could face criminal charges related to the acts of two former advisors who have plead guilty to federal charges related to stealing campaign funds from a dormant Becerra campaign account.
Becerra’s campaign called the ad defamatory in a cease-and-desist letter sent to the Steyer campaign on Saturday.
Steyer dismissed the legal threat. “People have been worried that Xavier Becerra could get indicted after the fact and that could throw this race in a bad way for Democrats. That’s all that ad says,” he told reporters Monday at UCLA.
Some organizers and elected officials of color who are supporting Becerra wrote an open letter Sunday to Steyer’s campaign, calling for an apology for portraying Becerra as a criminal in the ad and for “mocking … outreach to Latino voters with the dismissive one-liner ‘Chevron es mi familia.’” The tweet posted by Steyer’s campaign has since been deleted.
Becerra, Hilton and Steyer, the front-runners in the race, barnstormed the state in the final days before the June 2 primary. They devoted much of their attention to voters in Southern California, which is home to many of the state’s 23.2 million registered voters. Lower-polling candidates also stumped in the Southland — San José Mayor Matt Mahan greeted diners at Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, and former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter kicked off a union canvassing event in Orange on Saturday.
Unlike recent contests to lead the nation’s most populous state, this year’s gubernatorial contest failed to energize the electorate. Despite a crowded field of candidates with notable resumes, as well as record-breaking spending by Steyer and independent-expenditure committees. Californians only recently tuned in.
Political experts of both parties believe voters malaise was due to fatigue about the nation’s political polarization, as well as Trump administration policies such as federal tariffs that drove up prices everywhere and some that disproportionately affected California, such as immigration raids. Southern Californians were also reeling from the devastating wildfires in t Pacific Palisades and Altadena and last year’s special election to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries.
Earlier this year, Democratic leaders worried that their voters would splinter among their candidates, creating a scenario where two Republicans advanced to the general election. They controversially urged their party’s candidates to assess their viability, effectively urging several low-polling candidates to drop out of the race.
Democratic turnout also prompted concerns. As of May 22, mail ballots returned by Democrats were 9.2% lower compared with the 2022 gubernatorial primary, while ballots returned by Republicans were 11.6% higher, according to Political Data Intelligence. But the return rates are shifting — as of Friday, Democrats were 7% behind their 2022 return rate, while Republicans were 6.8% higher.
The most recent polls suggest that the prospect of two Republicans advancing to the general election is nonexistent, and there is now a slim chance that two Democrats win the top two spots in the June 2 primary.
Times staff writer Katie King contributed to this report.
