May 12th, 2026 Len’s Political Note #811 Where are we with the California Governor Race?
2026 Primary and General Election
Xavier Becerra. Tom Steyer
We have plenty of polls. But not much time. The polls are not exactly coalescing, but they have a pattern. The real poll, the election that counts is on June 2
Remember the rules. June 2 is a top two primary. The two candidates, regardless of their political party, who get the most votes, will be in a run off in November when other states have a partisan general election. The candidate with the most votes in the run-off wins the election. The poll results below for the top two primary are from the New York Times poll reports.
May 3 by Impact Research for Matt Mahan
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 23%
Ex Fox Host, Trump endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 23%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 14%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 11%
May 2 by Evitarus for the California Democratic Party
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 18%
Ex Fox Host, Trump endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 18%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 14%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 12%
May 1 by SurveyUSA for KGTB & San Diego Union Tribune
Ex Fox Host, Trump-endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 20%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 18%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 12%
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 10%
April 27 Rodriguez Gudelunas Strategies for California Is Not For Sale
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 24%
Ex Fox Host, Trump endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 23%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 15%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 13%
April 27 YouGov for CBS News.
Ex Fox Host, Trump endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 18%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 15%
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 13%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 10%
April 26 EMC Research for a Dem Sponsor CPCA Advocates (Cal Primary Care)
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 21%
Ex Fox Host, Trump endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 20%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 17%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 10%
April 20 IVC Media for Independent Voter Project
Ex-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (D) 23%
Ex Fox Host, Trump endorsed Steve Hilton (R ) 20%
County Sheriff Chad Bianco (R ) 17%
Billionaire Tom Steyer (D) 14%
Robert Hubbell urges Democrats who vote in California to follow the Bunker Hill order. Do not shoot at the British soldiers charging up the hill until you can see the whites of their eyes. In non-metaphorical terms, Democrats should wait until election day or immediately before election day to vote. Democrats should see which Democrat is ahead in the most recent polls and vote for him. Voting earlier than necessary could divide the Democratic vote and put two Republicans into the election run-off. That would ensure a Republican Governor of California.
Look above at the most recent polls. It appears likely that at least one Republican will be among the top two. Trump-endorsed, ex Fox television host Steve Hilton is either first or second in every one of the recent polls.
Republican Steve Hilton was born in London. His parents sought asylum in the United Kingdom in the 1950s after the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union. His father, Istvan Hircsak, (Their family name was Anglicized to Hilton) was an outstanding goalie for the Hungarian national ice hockey team. In London, both Hiltons did menial work at Heathrow. After their divorce, Steve Hilton and his mother lived in genuine hardship. But Steve Hilton was an excellent student. He was awarded a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School after which he earned a BA at New College, Oxford.
After graduation, Steve Hilton went to work for the Conservative Party. He developed a friendship with eventual Prime Minister David Cameron and became the Party’s connection to their advertisers. As Prime Minister beginning in 2008, Cameron had introduced austerity measures, reorganized health services transferring 60 Billion pounds away from the national health to local services, and made changes in welfare, one example of which was a reduction in housing benefits to those considered to be living in too large a space.
In 2012, Steve Hilton became Prime Minister Cameron’s Director of Strategy. During the two years HIlton was in that role, Cameron privatized the Royal Mail, passed the Equality Act which, among other things, prohibited employment discrimination based on race or sexual orientation, and oversaw a failed referendum on an alternative to the first past the post elections that characterized British politics. That failure benefited the Conservatives. The coalition member Liberals had agreed to attempt the referendum as a route to their goal of proportional representation which would have cemented the Liberals as a stronger party.
After two years at that high level of government, Steve Hilton left for Stanford University in 2012 to take what would be a second American sabbatical.
Steve Hilton had made his way as an opponent of big government. His last memo to David Cameron was a proposal to sharply reduce the number of civil servants in the British government. After Stanford, Hilton became part of a Silicon Valley start-up for a couple of years. When he returned to the UK, he joined a research institute and wrote a book the subtitle of which was Designing a World Where People Come First. He continued as a peripatetic scholar, mostly in California. He proposed a solution to the state’s housing shortage with a referendum that would prohibit private law suits based on the California Environmental Quality Act.
In 2016, while working for Fox News, Hilton endorsed Donald Trump for president. His weekly show on Fox, The Next Revolution, lasted until 2023. During the Covid Pandemic, he used the show to urge the end of lockdown measures and mandates for social distances. This cure, he claimed, was worse than the disease.
Steve Hilton also claimed that Anthony Fauci, using his national health role, had commissioned work at China’s Wuhan Institute that was the source of the Covid Virus. After Trump was defeated in the 2020 election, Hilton demanded investigations into what he claimed were election frauds that led to the defeat. Even now, at the May 5 debate among California candidates for governor, Steve Hilton avoided the issue of who won the 2020 election, choosing to push on to other issues rather than answer a direct question about the election that Trump continues to claim Joe Biden won as a result of fraud.
One last word about Steve Hilton. He met his wife, Rachel Whetstone, while working for Cameron. She has gone on to lead communications for Google, serve as vice president of policy and communications for Uber, and is now working as the chief communications officer for Netflix. Large corporations all.
What we need to know about the other Republican on the ballot – Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – is that he persuaded a judge who is a political ally to confiscate, with no evidentiary basis whatsoever, 600,000 ballots from the 2025 elections. This is not a man with an interest in democracy.
California Democrats should follow Robert Hubbell’s advice to wait to vote. Should we wait to give money? A vote on election day counts the same as an early vote. Donations on the day before the election are not without value. Donations today – less than a month before the June 2 primary – can affect the election. Our donations can help decide which Democrat is on the California ballot for Governor.
Where should you put your last-minute money before the primary? I regret having to say this. Do not give to Katie Porter. She was my candidate. (See Len’s Political Note #753.) She was a brilliant Congresswoman. No one did a better job of questioning a questionable Republican official. But she was fifth or sixth in every one of the polls listed above. Don’t give to Matt Mahon either. No matter how much you love the moderate Mayor of San Jose. No matter how badly you want the Democrats to be more centrist. Unless your goal is to squeeze Republican Chad Bianco into the top two, do not give money or vote for Matt Mahon.
Bianco is third or fourth in every one of the polls above. Go back further to the middle of April and you can find two polls with Bianco second to Steve Hilton. Of those polls, Tom Steyer is third in one of them and Xavier Becerra is third in the other. If your goal is to ensure that the at least one Democrat achieves one of the top two positions, those mid-April polls do not give you advice about which Democrat to support.
Considering what the polls tell us, Democrats can donate last-minute money to whichever of the two remaining Democrats they prefer – Tom Steyer or Xavier Becerra. Think about the kind of governor each would be; how they would deal with the oversight they face from constituents, from those who enforce the law.
The two men have some similarities. Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer are each 68 years old. They each attended nationally competitive colleges and graduate schools. Xavier Becerra went to Stanford for his BA and for law school. Tom Steyer went to Yale and then to Stanford for his MBA. In a country now led by one of the most virulent opponents of immigration to the United States that we have seen since he 1920s, consider Steve Hilton, the immigrant, and these two Democratic candidates
Xavier Becerra is the child of Mexican immigrants. His dad was born in the US, but raised in Tijuana. His mother was born and raised in Mexico. The couple moved to Sacramento where Xavier was born. The six of them – his parents, his three sisters, and Xavier – lived for a time in a one room apartment in Sacramento. Xavier Becerra went to a local public high school and was the first in his family to graduate from college.
Tom Steyer was born in Manhattan, grew up on the Upper East Side, went to the Buckley School on the Upper East Side, and went away to boarding school. He was the class valedictorian at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire after which he went to Yale. His father Roy Henry had gone to Cornell and then Yale Law School. He was a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the few top New York firms to welcome Jews, and served as a prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials. Roy Henry’s father, renamed Herman, and his mother, renamed Gussie, immigrated to New York from Poland at the end of the nineteenth century. Tom Steyer ‘s father’s family had come from an Eastern European shtetl. His mother, on the other hand, was a Brooklyn Episcopalian. Her father was a dry goods merchant living in Meadville, Pennsylvania when she was baptized. It appears that her grandfather was a professor of medicine in Minneapolis.
After Business School, Tom Steyer returned to New York City. He spent two years at Morgan Stanley, two more at Goldman Sachs. Having experience in mergers and acquisitions and, through a San Francisco firm, Hellman & Friedman. in private equity, he opened his own firm, his hedge fund.
The hedge fund began with $25 million of capitalization. Of that amount, Warren Hellman was personally responsible for $4 million. Through mostly successful investments, they increased the value of the fund to billions. Not every investment was a success. After all, one of the characteristics of hedge funds is to take risks. On balance, Tom Steyer’s firm took wiser risks and made more money for themselves and their clients than most hedge funds.
The firm also became a target. Even though Tom Steyer and his wife were devoted environmentalists. Even though Tom Steyer was committed to supporting Democrats and provided considerable resources to John Kerry’s campaign for President. Even though Tom Steyer would stay and listen and attempt to convince protesters, he and his firm became targets of those on the left who were deeply skeptical of Billionaires. Clients provide one kind of oversight to a hedge fund; activists another. The media is a third. At the May 5 debate, Tom Steyer was asked about his firm’s investment in coal.
As he risked money in business, he is risking his reputation in politics. He is running for office, telling people what he will do, and he just might do what he says he will do. He promises to make corporations pay their fair share of taxes and put the money he raises into California schools to purse excellence. He promises to build enough homes in California so that people will be able to afford to buy a home and, while he is at it, to break up the utility monopolies so that people can afford the power to live in these new homes. Finally, he promises to ban corporate PAC money from politics which he sees as his largest effort to end the dominance of special interests in politics.
Xavier Becerra prepped for this role by working briefly in Worcester, Massachusetts on behalf of the mentally ill, by returning to California to serve for three years as a Deputy Attorney General, and by serving one term in the California Assembly. Elected to Congress, he was there for 7 terms, fourteen years where he became a protégé of the leader of the Democrats, Nancy Pelosi.
Xavier Becerra’s ascent was rapid. He chaired the Hispanic Caucus, served as assistant to the Speaker, became Vice Chair and then Chair of the Democratic Caucus. Among the issues about which he felt strongly and acted on behalf was women’s reproductive freedom. He opposed a proposal that would have criminalized abortion for sex selection; he sought to ensure that birth control coverage was mandatory in the insurance for all organizations, even religious organizations.
He left Congress to run for Attorney General of California in 2016. In that role Xavier Becerra created an environmental justice division and worked to protect endangered species, filed charges against and convicted a sex trafficking ring run by Chinese Americans, and filed charges against anti-abortion activists for invasion of privacy through undercover videos of patients seeking assistance. He filed over one hundred lawsuits against President Donald Trump, most of them in conjunction with other state Attorneys General. These were on issues that ranged from preserving the environment by opposing or regulating fracking, preserving the Affordable Care Act, preserving the protections that had been afforded to children brought by undocumented immigrants to the United States. There is something conservative about the protections he and the other Attorneys General were seeking. They were working against a Trump administration seeking radical change.
After Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump for the Presidency of the United States in 2020, Xavier Becerra was nominated to be the country’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Attacked by Republicans for what they called a “disregard for people of faith” on women’s issues, he was confirmed by a 50-49 vote. As Secretary, in addition to confirming the Republicans fears that he would protect women’s health, he introduced negotiations on the price of some medications, among them Ozempic which was then seen as an anti-diabetic medication.
The administration’s major challenge was coping with the Pandemic. Xavier Becerra, temporarily blocked by Republicans, did not begin until late March. The fight against Covid was firmly planted in the White House. Becerra was criticized for moving too slowly, for criticizing states’ responses, and for defending federal public health authorities. Some of that criticism came from the White House.
Without sufficient responsibility, Xavier Becerra did what he could. One example of that was his response to a plan to pay doctors through Medicare and Medicaid for taking time with their patients to. persuade them to get vaccinated. Xavier Becerra seemed to be an obstacle. He was concerned that the plan could lead to fraud. More important, though, he wanted to have the plan focus on Medicaid so that poor people, the people least likely to get vaccinated, would be the group the plan would address.
Xavier Becerra had good reason to be cautious regarding fraud. While in Congress, he was accused of improperly seeking considerations for the father of a constituent and donor. Recently, he was accused of having misused government funds for political purposes. His former chief of staff is currently charged with siphoning campaign funds for personal use. Though Xavier Becerra has never been charged with a violation, caution to avoid fraud is not a bad thing.
To summarize: If you vote in California, wait. Vote on election day or shortly before. Vote for the Democrat polling the best to help us be sure that one of the top two candidates is a Democrat. Make donations now. A donation to either Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer or to both of them would help at least one of them be among the top two. DONATE to Xavier Becerra. DONATE TO Tom Steyer.
