California primary results came in stronger than anticipated for Republican candidates across the board Tuesday, with Steve Hilton leading Xavier Becerra in the governor’s race and Spencer Pratt advancing to a runoff against Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayoral race.
Susan Crabtree, national political correspondent for RealClearPolitics and co-author of Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traders Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what the results mean and whether either candidate can actually clear the ceiling Republicans have faced in California for two decades.
Crabtree said the results were stronger than anticipated not just at the top of the ticket but down the ballot as well, with every Republican running in a major statewide race outperforming what any Republican has done in California in roughly twenty years. She said the Pacific Palisades fire has become a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong under the current governing regime in California, providing a concrete, visual, locally devastating argument for the case both Hilton and Pratt are making. She said Republican candidate Rick Caruso actually performed better than Pratt in his run against Karen Bass four years ago, getting approximately forty-three to forty-four percent of the vote, which provides a useful baseline for measuring how high the ceiling actually is.
On Xavier Becerra’s weaknesses as the leading Democratic candidate for governor, Crabtree said he is genuinely weak in ways that go beyond the current political moment. His congressional career was undistinguished, his tenure as California attorney general drew criticism from within his own party, and his time as Biden’s HHS Secretary was marked by the loss of tracking of hundreds of thousands of migrant children, some of whom were subsequently found to have been trafficked or placed in jobs where they were mistreated and harmed. She said that is an extraordinarily poor record for the presumptive standard-bearer of the Democratic Party in the nation’s largest state, and that the Democrats’ inability to consolidate behind a strong candidate reflects the splintered, disorganized condition of the California Democratic establishment right now. Even figures from the Biden administration have been taking shots at Becerra, and Eric Swalwell’s unceremonious exit from the race left Becerra inheriting union support without having earned it organically.
Steve Hilton, she said, oozes energy and charisma in ways that cut through even the unusual biographical detail that he is a former British citizen running for governor of California, which she noted is very California as a phenomenon. His Trump endorsement helped drive Republican turnout above the level achieved by fellow Republican candidate Chad Maes, and he has been leading the race at the top of the ticket for months through a period when Democrats were disorganized and unable to coalesce. The general election will be different. Direct mail flooding California districts is already linking Hilton to Trump through the no kings framing, and both he and Pratt face the fundamental arithmetic that Republicans represent only twenty-five percent of statewide registered voters and fifteen percent in Los Angeles specifically.
Crabtree said the more important long-term significance of both candidacies may be less about who wins in November than about what kind of debate California is now having. Without Hilton and Pratt in these races, the governor and mayor contests would have been competitions between Democrats arguing over how much more to tax billionaires, how many more services to provide to people in the country illegally, and how many more nonprofit organizations to fund. Instead, both contests are forcing a genuine debate about Gavin Newsom’s actual record. She noted that Newsom had been positioning himself to move directly from a gerrymandering ballot initiative victory last fall toward a White House run without having to defend his governance in any serious way. A competitive general election race against Hilton makes that impossible. She said the debate is waking people up to ideas they have not heard in California in a generation, and that even if neither candidate wins, the new foundation being established gives future Republican candidates something to build on and will accelerate what she described as an already visible GOP registration surge in Los Angeles.