Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco are asking California voters to do something they haven’t done in two decades: Elect a GOP governor.
The two Republicans are aware of the headwinds. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one. President Donald Trump is deeply unpopular; nearly three-quarters of residents polled by the Public Policy Institute of California last month disapprove of his performance.
The men are betting their campaigns that voter frustration with California’s high prices, homelessness and red tape outweighs outrage at Trump in the race to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom. A narrow majority of those polled by PPIC said the state is on the wrong track, led by independents and Republicans.
The Republicans are also watching for a Democratic doomsday scenario, though they both say it’s unlikely: an eight-candidate Democratic primary field so splintered that Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff, are the only two candidates to emerge from the top-two June 2 primary, shutting out Democrats from the general election. A UC Berkeley poll released Wednesday gave credence to the theory, showing Hilton and Bianco at the top of the field with 17% and 16%, respectively, several points ahead of the top-polling Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin.
In an interview, GOP consultant Tim Rosales said a Democratic lockout may be Hilton and Bianco’s only realistic path.
“It’s a math equation at this point,” Rosales said. “And the national environment certainly doesn’t help.”
Short of that, they’ll need a lot more Marsha Schouweilers.
For decades Schouweiler voted for Democrats and even worked for them in the Legislature. But around 18 months ago, the Sacramento retiree left the party, fed up with its stance on immigration and its relentless focus on Trump over pocketbook issues.
“They’re just too far left for me,” Schouweiler said in an interview last week.
She’s now a registered Republican still trying to make up her mind between Hilton and Bianco.
Chad Bianco speaks during a California Chamber of Commerce panel last year in West Sacramento. He has described the state as being on the brink of collapse, and cast himself as its best savior. PAUL KITAGAKI JR. pkitagaki@sacbee.com
Both men stand out in the crowded field for governor. Hilton is a flip-phone-wielding Brit and Trump-loving former Fox News host who has called for an end to factory farming. Bianco is a two-term sheriff known for his opposition to pandemic-era stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates who has faced scrutiny over deaths in his jails.
There’s lots of overlap in the policies of Hilton and Bianco. They’ve proposed replicating Trump’s DOGE at the state level and want to unwind the state’s sanctuary laws aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants. They also support major cuts to the state’s environmental and building codes, slashing taxes and government spending.
Bianco wants to eliminate income taxes entirely, funded by a boom in oil production. Hilton wants to zero out income taxes for residents’ first $100,000 of income and return gas prices to $3 a gallon, driven by tax cuts and increased oil production.
Looming over their election is President Donald Trump, whose endorsement could quickly change the race.
Both Bianco and Hilton declined to say whether they disagreed with any of Trump’s policies, arguing that Sacramento Democrats are using the president to distract from their own record.
But neither has been subtle about their support for the president. In a 2024 Instagram post, Bianco said “it’s time we put a felon in the White House.” In a 2020 segment on his Fox News show, Hilton called Trump’s first term “one of the most successful in history.”
While Trump has stayed out of the race, far-right provocateur Laura Loomer, a Trump confidant whose attacks have led to several firings in his second term, has repeatedly attacked Bianco on social media. The Florida resident has drawn attention to Bianco’s decision to kneel alongside activists in the early days of the 2020 racial justice protests, and a CNN interview in which Bianco, when pressed, said undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes should have a pathway to citizenship after facing a penalty.
Political activist Laura Loomer films US President Donald Trump in the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, earlier this year. Loomer has attacked Biano over immigration and his response to the 2020 racial justice protests. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS AFP via Getty Images
Bianco has said he was praying with protesters, and, after the CNN interview, said that he is “completely against amnesty” for undocumented immigrants. He also told the Bee he believed Loomer was being paid by Hilton through an intermediary to attack him; a New Yorker profile of Loomer published last year quoted a number of anonymous sources who claimed Loomer is a hired gun.
Hilton and Loomer denied Bianco’s accusation.
“I don’t work for Steve Hilton and have never been paid by Hilton,” Loomer said in an email. “Why am I not allowed to report on the Gubernatorial election in one of the most populous states in the nation?”
David Cameron’s right-hand man
If Hilton and Bianco’s policies sound similar, their biographies differ wildly.
Hilton cuts an especially unusual profile for California politics. His parents emigrated from Hungary to England, where he grew up and rose through the ranks of Conservative Party politics. He served as director of strategy for former UK Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012.
Hilton’s sometimes offbeat ideas and status as Cameron’s PR man led to a partial caricature in The Thick of It, a satire of UK politics; The Guardian described his alter ego as an “herbal-tea drinking, bearded, shaven-headed, cringingly Cameroonian spin doctor.”
In 2015, Hilton wrote a political manifesto, “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First,” that called for smaller, less centralized government and institutions, from curtailing “toxic” factory farming to curbing red tape in U.S. healthcare, “practically Soviet in its style and scope.”
Steve Hilton launched his campaign for California governor last year, vowing to take on the “Democrat industrial complex.” NATHANIEL LEVINE nlevine@sacbee.com
Hilton endorsed Trump in the 2016 election and hosted a weekly show on Fox News from 2017 to 2023. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hilton encouraged an end to lockdowns and later called for an audit into the 2020 presidential election, in a segment that was retweeted by Trump.
Hilton eschews smartphones but begrudgingly adopted a flip phone during his gubernatorial campaign. His wrists are each covered in a half-dozen bracelets, including one honoring slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk and a pink one emblazoned with “Save Girls’ Sports.”
His run for governor was at least partly inspired by an off-the-record conversation with a Democratic lawmaker, whom Hilton declined to name, about a housing policy Hilton was trying to get through the Legislature. Hilton said the Democrat called the policy “transformational” but refused to publicly back it out of fear of angering unions.
“I just felt like, I don’t know, this feels bad and broken and maybe I should have a go,” Hilton said.
Hilton has now renounced his UK citizenship and says he’s in California for the long haul, despite penning a 2025 book called “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State.”
“I really love California,” he said. “I just think it’s an amazing place.”
He argues his plans will make the state more accessible to more people by ending what he’s called “the climate crusade of Democrats,” emphasizing natural gas and oil over wind and solar power, and eschewing regulations that promote denser housing.
“They call is sprawl,” he told an interviewer earlier this year. “I call it the California dream — a single-family home,”
‘The last line of defense from tyrannical government overreach’
Bianco has lived in California since 1989, when he moved from his home in Utah. He graduated from the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Academy in 1993 and found his way to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, where he has worked ever since.
In 2014, Bianco joined the Oath Keepers, a far-right antigovernment militia whose leaders later played an integral role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. When the connection was discovered by reporters in 2021, Bianco acknowledged he’d paid dues for a year but said he never attended a meeting.
Bianco was elected Riverside County sheriff in 2018 and gained increasing prominence during the pandemic, when he inveighed against lockdowns and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
A vehicle decorated in support of Chad Bianco parked outside the California Republican Party’s convention in Orange County last year. Bianco gained national attention in the pandemic for pushing back against stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates. Nicole Nixon nnixon@sacbee.com
When then-President Joe Biden and Newsom began implementing mandatory vaccinations for state and federal workers in 2021, Bianco refused to implement the policy in his office, describing himself as “the last line of defense from tyrannical government overreach.”
The mustached sheriff has come under increasing scrutiny for his handling of jails and criminal convictions.
A 2025 report from the Juvenile & Criminal Justice, a criminal justice advocacy group, found the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department solved 9.2% of violent and property crimes between 2019 and 2024. An investigation last year from the New York Times and the Desert Sun found Riverside County jails were the second-deadliest in the nation from 2020 to 2023.
In 2023, Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a civil rights investigation into “deeply concerning allegations relating to conditions of confinement in its jail facilities, excessive force, and other misconduct.”
Bianco said the clearance rates cited by JCJ were a product of incompatible state and local statistical software rather than an accurate reflection of the office’s crime solving, which he described as “one of the most proactive agencies in the entire state. The jail deaths, he said, were largely the product of 2022 when he said fentanyl and suicides spiked.
Bianco accused Bonta of launching “an absolute fake investigation,” noting that it had yet to produce any findings more than three years after it was launched. He called the attorney general “the most corrupt person in California.”
The attorney general’s office said it was unable to comment on an ongoing investigation to “protect its integrity.”
As a candidate, Bianco has painted a particularly dire picture of an unaffordable, overtaxed state overrun with fraud, whose Democratic leaders are openly hiding malfeasance.
“The only thing that keeps people in California is absolute perfect geography and perfect weather,” the sheriff said. “Nothing is going to change without me getting in there to drastically change our state government.”
This story was originally published March 18, 2026 at 11:52 AM.
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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.