There is a particular kind of political theater that only California can stage, and on Tuesday, it raised the curtain again. Out of a field of sixty-one — sixty-one! — the voters of the nation’s largest state narrowed their choices to two men who could not be more different in pedigree or promise.
Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra are now headed toward a November contest to replace the term-limited Gavin Newsom, and the early-morning returns suggested neither man intends to be modest about it.
For Hilton, the moment carries the weight of history, or at least the hope of making some. No Republican has won the governorship of California since Arnold Schwarzenegger took his second term in 2006, which in political years is something close to an epoch.
“Change is coming to California, and it’s long overdue,” Hilton told the faithful gathered in Orange County, and you could hear in the line the old conservative ache — the sense that the state had drifted somewhere its people never quite voted to go.
He is an interesting figure, this Hilton. A former British political strategist, a former Fox News host, backed by President Trump, and now running on the most elemental of grievances: that life in California has simply gotten too expensive.
“Everything is too expensive in California. We’re going to cut people’s costs,” he said afterward, and there is a reason such plainness travels. It asks nothing of the voter except that he check his own grocery receipt.
Becerra, for his part, reached for something grander. The former state attorney general and former Biden Cabinet secretary cast his campaign as the next chapter in California’s long habit of breaking barriers. A win in November, he noted, would make him the first Latino governor of California since 1875 — a number that lands like a small thunderclap when you sit with it.
“This is more than a Hollywood ending. More than a milestone,” he told his supporters. “That’s the everyday miracle of living in a state that makes the improbable seem inevitable.”
It is a lovely sentence. Whether it is also a winning one is the question the next five months will answer.
The night’s real drama, though, belonged to a man who will not be on the November ballot.
Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental activist, spent more than $200 million of his own fortune and finished, as of the latest count, in third. There is an old American lesson buried in that figure, one the country keeps having to relearn: money buys a great deal in politics, but it has never been able to buy the thing it most wants, which is to be liked.
More than $80 million in outside spending poured in as well, making this one of the costliest gubernatorial primaries the state has ever seen, and still the voters did what voters do: decide for reasons of their own.
The casualty list was long and notable — Sheriff Chad Bianco, former Rep. Katie Porter, Mayor Matt Mahan, former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Superintendent Tony Thurmond — names that in another year might have led the field, swept aside in this one by the state’s jungle-primary system, which throws everyone onto a single ballot and lets the top two survive.
Hilton ended his evening with a flourish that was pure showmanship and, one suspects, pure sincerity too. He opened his blazer to reveal a lining of the American and California flags, a gift of advice from Schwarzenegger himself, who had told him years ago to wear it. “Arnold, I did that for you,” he said. It was the kind of gesture that either charms you or doesn’t, which is to say it was perfectly Californian.
So the state has set its terms. Come November, voters will choose between a Democrat woven tightly into the establishment that has governed Sacramento for a generation and a Republican promising to take a wrecking ball to it. That is not a small choice, and it is not a quiet one. California, it seems, has decided it would like to have an argument with itself. The rest of us will be watching to see how it turns out.
