CARLSBAD, Calif. \u2014 Republican television commentator Steve Hilton was projected to advance to the Nov. 3 general election following \u200bJune 2’s open primary, media projected on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Hilton will face Democratic former cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra. Hilton and Becerra led the field in the state’s top-two \u200cprimary since the first vote counts started coming in on election night, but the Democratic billionaire, Tom Steyer, had \u2060been close enough in third place that \u200bmedia held off projecting the two \u2060finalists.<\/p>\n
California elections can take days to determine a winner as mail-in ballots are accepted if \u200cpostmarked on or before \u200cElection Day and received within seven days after Election Day.<\/p>\n
Officially, California has \u2060up to 30 days after the June 2 election \u2060to count and verify ballots, and the secretary of state has 38 days to certify the election, or until July 10.<\/p>\n
Becerra led the field with 27.9%, followed by Hilton with 24.9%, according to The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Steyer was third with 22.6%, though he maintained a mathematically plausible path until now.<\/p>\n
Under California’s “jungle primary,” in which candidates of \u200call parties appear on the same ballot, the two \u200bleading vote-getters advance, regardless of party.<\/p>\n
California’s next governor will succeed term-limited Democrat Gavin Newsom and take charge of a $4 trillion economy, among the world’s largest, while confronting deep challenges on water, affordability and homelessness.<\/p>\n
Becerra is a former state attorney general and congressman from Los Angeles who was secretary of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden. If he were to prevail in November, he would become the \u200bfirst Latino elected governor in a state where 40% of the population is Hispanic or Latino.<\/p>\n
Hilton is \u200ca British-born former \u200cFox News host \u2060who was endorsed by President Donald Trump. Once an adviser to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, he became a U.S. citizen in 2021.<\/p>\n
Steyer, a hedge fund billionaire who spent $350 million of his own money running for president in 2020, spent another $200 million running for \u200cgovernor. He positioned himself as \u200ba progressive who promised to raise taxes on \u200cbillionaires, including himself.<\/p>\n
Republicans have \u2060not held a \u200bstatewide office in California since former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term ended in January 2011.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CARLSBAD, Calif. \u2014 Republican television commentator Steve Hilton was projected to advance to the Nov. 3 general election…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6996,6995,9180,6813,3216,1286,972,100,13,4201,6997,127,4509,821,4591,19],"class_list":["post-354044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-finance","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}