Steve Hilton Detoxified the Tories. Now He Wants to Detoxify the GOP

The consensus among California’s political elite is settled. No Republican can win the governorship of this state. Certainly not one endorsed by Donald Trump. Certainly not an English ‘Fox News commentator’ who has never held elected office. The punditocracy is agreed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

I have heard that kind of confidence before. In Britain, in the 2000s. The Conservative Party, after three catastrophic election defeats, was deemed unelectable by almost every commentator. Too toxic. Too associated with a discredited past. Too far removed from the concerns of ordinary voters to mount a serious challenge to Blair’s New Labour.

The man brought in to fix that problem was a 30-something Oxford-educated strategist named Steve Hilton.

Whether you regard that era as a genuine reinvention of British conservatism or an expensive rebranding exercise that ultimately changed very little is a reasonable debate. What is not debatable is that it worked electorally. Twice.

I was an elected Conservative activist, Association Officer and councillor during the years Hilton was doing that work. I watched him give the party a green tree logo, an Arctic husky photograph and a ‘Vote for Change’ banner that spoke to exactly the voters who had written the Conservatives off. It worked. David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, survived five years of austerity and won again in 2015.

I have since ended up, thanks to a beguiling ‘California girl’, as a radio host sheltered halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Earlier this week I interviewed Hilton for my show. That afternoon I watched him bewitch 400 supporters at Cal Poly, a state university campus at the heart of this stretch of coastline. Tom Steyer, the billionaire two-time gubernatorial candidate, had been in the same town the day before. He drew 40 people.

California’s political class is very sure this time is different. So was Britain’s.

The arithmetic, on the face of it, is brutal. California last elected a Republican to statewide office 20 years ago. Democrats hold every constitutional office and a supermajority in the state legislature. The state’s voter registration runs 45% Democrat to 25% Republican. Trump lost California by 29 points in 2024. A Trump-endorsed candidate winning here would be an extraordinary upset.

Then again, California’s last Republican governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger with a foreign accent nobody understood, and they elected him twice!

Yet the polling tells a more complicated story. 70% of likely California voters view the Republican Party unfavourably. 60% feel the same about the Democrats. Trust in the administration sits at 44%. The ‘right track/wrong track’ question, the most reliable indicator of an electorate’s appetite for change, shows more than 50% now say ‘wrong track’.

That is not the profile of a confident incumbent Democrat Party. It is the profile of one that has stopped trying to earn its mandate.

Hilton says his arithmetic is compelling. “Trump received 6.1 million California votes in 2024. I need 5.9 million to win.” In a lower-turnout midterm, with California Democrats facing their first genuinely competitive gubernatorial race since 2010, he argues the numbers work. Complacency is his best ally.

His leading opponents have provided some assistance. Xavier Becerra, Biden’s former Health & Human Services Secretary and the top Democrat in the polls, has a problem his own former colleagues won’t keep private. Six Biden officials told Politico his rise has become the running joke in their group chats. Biden’s Justice Department Communications Director told CNN: “He was not effective in government. If you ask any Cabinet secretary, they will tell you the same thing.”

Then there is Tom Steyer, who has spent $193 million of his own money on California politics and is back for another go – presumably on the grounds that democracy is simply a matter of finding the right price.

Against this field, Hilton’s “Califordable” platform has genuine traction. California’s budget has doubled in 15 years to over $300 billion. The return, despite boasting the fourth highest GDP in the world? The highest homelessness rate in the nation. Bottom of housing affordability. Public schools ranked 40th nationally. The highest poverty rate and income inequality of any state.

Hilton’s signature illustration is a $20 million state ‘diaper’ programme charging taxpayers 50 cents per nappy – three times the retail price. The difference, he argues, disappears into politically connected nonprofits. Policy wonks will quibble with the maths. Mothers paying the bills will not.

The more serious objection is ideological. How does the architect of ‘Vote for Change’, designed for a centrist, pro-European Conservative government, become the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of California?

His answer is Brexit – the moment he concluded that institutions could not be reformed from within. That the gap between what governments promise and what they deliver had grown too wide for even the best branding to paper over.

Dear Daily Sceptic reader – or at least most of us – that will sound less like a political conversion and more like common sense.

There is another dimension to Hilton that his opponents prefer to ignore. This is a man who was the architect of British conservatism’s green, centrist, compassionate reinvention. A man whom David Cameron trusted enough to make godfather to his severely disabled son Ivan, who died aged six in 2009.

His wife Rachel Whetstone, who ran communications and public policy at Google, Uber and Netflix, brings her own formidable credentials to the enterprise.

That is not the biography of a culture warrior. It is the biography of a man with more political range than his opponents may like to admit.

California’s political establishment is very sure that history will not repeat itself. So, once, was ours.

Clive Pinder left Britain, moved to California and started a media platform dedicated to better conversations. His therapist considers this progress. Decide for yourself at www.substack.com/@insearchofsanity.