Hilton and Becerra jump to early lead in California governor's race

(CN) — With a little more than half the ballots counted in California’s governor race on Wednesday, Republican Steven Hilton is in first place, with 28%, narrowly ahead of Democrat Xavier Becerra, who has 25%.

Trailing them is billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who spent around $215 million of his own money and had just under 20% of the vote as of Wednesday morning. The top two candidates will face each other in the general election in November.

The votes that have been counted are early vote-by-mail ballots, which tend to lean Republican. It is therefore expected that Hilton’s lead will decline and the Democrats will gain. The question is whether Steyer can make up enough ground to make the runoff.

“We’re going to wait till every ballot is counted,” Steyer told supporters Tuesday night in San Francisco. “We’re going to give democracy time to work. We know we finished really strong.”

At his own election night party in Los Angeles, Becerra said, “While I take nothing for granted — there are lots of ballots left to be counted — it appears that we are on track to advance to November.”

Hilton, a British-born political commentator, told his rapturous supporters in Huntington Beach late on Tuesday night, “We’re not there yet, but it’s looking good. It looks very much as if Californians really will have the chance to vote for change in November.”

By Wednesday morning, many of the other leading candidates in the crowded field had dropped out, including Katie Porter, Antonio Villaraigosa and Matt Mahan, the San Jose mayor running as a centrist, who raised some $30 million, much of it from the tech world, and who was sitting in sixth place with 4% of the vote.

It’s unclear how many ballots are still left to be counted, or even how long the process will take. Mail-in ballots are considered valid if they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at county election offices by June 9. That and the sprawling geography of the most populous state in the union make for a very slow and much-derided counting process.

Should the early trends hold, Becerra will be the overwhelming favorite, in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by some 20 points. The last Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was elected in 2003 and ran as a decidedly centrist candidate, leaning heavily on his movie star fame and running as an antidote to incumbent Gray Davis, who was being recalled by voters.

Hilton has played up his similarities to Schwarzenegger — they’re both immigrants; Hilton only became a U.S. citizen in 2021 — but there is at least one key distinction between the two. Hilton has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, the most divisive political leader in generations, and a name who is anathema to many Californians.

“In all likelihood, it would be a relatively sleepy governor’s race,” said Eric Schickler, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. “Becerra will come in heavily favored.”

Though Hilton may try to tack to the center, Schickler said, “given the nature of our nationalized and polarized politics today, it’s going to be really hard for any Republican in California to distance themselves from the president, without condemning him. So Hilton’s in a tough spot.”

Becerra’s rise has been an unlikely one. Though he has held numerous positions — Congressman for 24 years, state attorney general and secretary of Health and Human Services — Becerra was nowhere near a favorite in the race until then-U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell dropped out in disgrace after being accused of sexual misconduct. Becerra became the default choice of Democrats scrambling for a new candidate. He is seen as the Democrat most likely to continue the course set by sitting Governor Gavin Newsom.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass has clinched a spot in the November runoff, according to the Associated Press, with nearly 35% of the vote as of Wednesday morning. Former reality television villain Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican, is in second place with 30%, while left-leaning City Councilwoman Nithya Raman is in third with 22%.

Despite that 8-point game, the race for second is far from decided. There are still hundreds of thousands of votes left to be counted, and the so-called “blue shift,” in which the late-arriving ballots lean heavily toward Democrats, could be significant.

In 2022, Republican Rick Caruso went to bed on election night five points clear of Bass. Weeks later, when all the votes were counted, he had finished in second, a good seven points behind the eventual winner — a 12-point swing.

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