Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, speaks at a rally last year. He’s been at the top of several recent polls, including one released Tuesday by the California Democratic Party.
NATHANIEL LEVINE
nlevine@sacbee.com
The California Democratic Party pitched its new, periodic polls as a way to help voters and campaigns make sense of the unusually wide-open race for governor — and help encourage laggards to quit the race.
Instead, the first iteration of the poll, released Tuesday, underscored the race’s uncertainty and the party’s lack of control over the field. Two Republicans, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, out-polled all of the Democratic field.
Hilton, a former Fox News host, captured just 16% of the 2,000 likely voters survey, with nearly a quarter telling pollsters they were undecided. Three Democrats — Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Rep. Katie Porter, and billionaire Tom Steyer — were all tied at 10%, with none of the remaining candidates polling above 3%.
Not that those numbers showed any sign of discouraging any of the single-digit candidates, with two low-pollers, Betty Yee and Xavier Becerra, launching new ad campaigns this week.
The survey followed the University of Southern California’s decision late Monday to cancel a gubernatorial debate planned for Tuesday evening following outcry that it excluded candidates of color, who’ve also struggled to gain recent traction in polls and fundraising.
In response, Steyer announced plans to host a town hall Tuesday night and invited the other candidates to attend.
The lack of a Democratic frontrunner has raised the prospect that Hilton and Bianco, sheriff of Riverside County, could claim the top two slots in the June 2 primary, effectively guaranteeing a Republican general election faceoff in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one.
Democrats have expressed differing ideas on how to avoid that scenario. In an interview with Politico, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is term limited, declined to play kingmaker, saying the party was better off with a “less opaque, more transparent” process.
Tommy Vietor, a Democratic podcaster and former spokesperson for former President Barack Obama, called the situation a “mess” in a post on X.
“The CA Democratic Party needs to get together ASAP and put a tent on this circus,” Vietor wrote. “Candidates who aren’t above 5% in the polls by April 15th need to drop out and endorse someone else to narrow the field.”
In a call with reporters, California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks refused to say whether he’d had direct conversations with candidates urging them to drop out. He reiterated his call for candidates who lack a “viable path to win” to drop out of the race.
“If you’re polling at 1 to 2%, do you have a path to get to 20?” Hicks asked. “That’s the question.”
Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican who has consulted for candidates from both parties, called for Democrats to take a different approach: elevating either Hilton or Bianco so that only one Republican would advance from the primary.
“It’s done all the time,” Madrid said in a post on X. “I don’t get all the bed wetting.”
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Ben Paviour is the California political power reporter for The Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Bureau. He previously covered Virginia state politics for public radio and was a local investigations fellow at The New York Times. He got his start in journalism at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. Before becoming a reporter, he worked in local government and tech in the Bay Area.