As Election Day approaches, hope and despair brew among California Republicans

Mission Viejo— Twenty years after Republicans last won a state-level election in California, few Republican voters believe this will be the year.

But they can hope.

“I pray, pray, pray that people come out of this and come out and vote for Steve,” said Annette Owens, 65, an Orange County resident and longtime special education teacher.

Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host from the United Kingdom, faces longtime Democratic politician Xavier Becerra, who is favored to win the Nov. 3 election to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The 2026 election looks particularly grim for California Republicans, whose statewide influence has shrunk to super-minority levels over the past two decades. Proposition 50’s redistricting eliminated some key Republican seats in Congress. Nationally, the party is struggling with high prices, the fallout from the war with Iran and polls showing President Trump’s approval ratings at historic lows.

While she’s “doubtful” Hilton or any other Republican running statewide can defeat a Democratic opponent, Owens said “if anyone is willing to do it,” it’s Hilton.

The candidate had just spent nearly 40 minutes speaking to dozens of Orange County moms in Mission Viejo. Mission Viejo is a hilly, fertile enclave dotted with golf courses and Spanish colonial architecture.

In a glass-walled event space overlooking the city’s verdant public ballpark, the women and their casual husbands sipped mimosas while listening to Hilton and local Republicans advocate for change after 16 years of Democratic control of California government.

“We can make this a place where people can pursue their dreams and build their lives, and here’s the ultimate test: After my first four years in office, people are going to move back to California,” Hilton said.

Rachel Darvish drove from her home in Pacific Palisades to support the gubernatorial candidate. Darwish was captured by the virus after the fire in January 2025 Video rages against Newsom as he surveyed the wreckage. After the fire she joined the Republican Party.

“I always thought of myself as an independent until one day I realized we had no choice,” said Darvish, wearing a Hilton campaign T-shirt. “I think this is really the first election where it really matters whether it’s Republican or Democratic, and there’s a clear distinction.”

Hilton and other Republicans acknowledge that number. In California, where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans nearly two to one, unaffiliated voters mostly support Democrats in races across the state.

Hilton, a Trump supporter, often declares to supporters that the race against Becerra, the Biden-era U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary and former state attorney general, is “really difficult to win, but not impossible.”

The former Fox News host considered three sets of facts when calculating his chances of winning. What he calls “institutional polling,” conducted by widely trusted pollsters like the Berkeley Institute of Government and the Public Policy Institute of California, shows him trailing by more than 20 points. His internal polling also showed him losing, albeit by a smaller margin.

And then there are the people who attend his events.

“Every day, I hear all these people say, ‘I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I’m voting for you because we have to have some balance and we have to make changes,'” he said in an interview on the golf course terrace after the event. “A lot of people say, ‘But I won’t tell anyone.'”

Historically, midterm elections are more difficult for the party of the sitting president. Although Trump has never been popular in California, a recent Berkeley IGS poll showed that his approval rating fell to a record low of 27%.

Republicans face huge headwinds in California

Politicians expect anti-Trump sentiment will intensify the headwinds Republicans face in California. More than half of those likely to vote Democratic, and 37% overall prime mover of this election are opposing government policies.

“I don’t really expect Republicans to win anything statewide,” said Jon Fleischman, a conservative author and former executive director of the California Republican Party. “If anyone expected this, they didn’t know how to do math.”

He doesn’t expect Republican turnout to be down, but “Democratic turnout will probably be a little bit higher than normal. Maybe it’s a difference that makes no difference.”

Some Republicans are frustrated by only Democratic choices in the high-profile races for Los Angeles mayor and state insurance commissioner.

Darvish, who endorsed conservative Spencer Platt for mayor of Los Angeles in the primary, described the runoff between incumbent Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Rahman as a choice between “Satan and Lucifer.”

“I have to vote for Karen Bass,” she said. “It’s really hard for me to say that,” but she doesn’t want Rahman or any Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate to win.

Some Republicans have said they will not vote for insurance commissioner, the only statewide race between two Democrats: former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim and state Sen. Ben Allen.

Fleischman described the DSA-endorsed King as a “crazy guy,” while Allen, who represents Manhattan Beach, El Segundo, Beverly Hills and other cities, as an “extreme liberal” who “enthusiastically supports almost every Gavin Newsom policy that I don’t like.”

Republican strategist Rob Stutzman said that while Trump and the Republican Party may suffer in the midterm elections, many Democrats “are also very unpopular.” “All politicians are in trouble right now. Voters are in a very bad mood.”

Hilton acknowledged that it would be easier to run in the midterm elections with an incumbent Democratic president, but he believes Trump’s endorsement is not as harmful to his campaign as it seems.

“This issue was not actually brought up in any meeting,” he said. “People are really asking about gas prices.”

Republican candidates and party officials are making the case that California’s longstanding homelessness and cost of living problems have little to do with the president.

“I can’t think of anything more irrelevant than Trump,” said Roxanne Hoge, chairwoman of the Los Angeles Republican Party. “We are drowning in high taxes and high costs. Any attempt to use this election to decide who is president and who can only be president for two more years is a failure and has nothing to offer.”

Hilton not involved in voter fraud accusations

Federal authorities this week charged 28 people in California with illegally registering and voting, part of a broader fight for more control over state elections.

Hilton took a number of stances when discussing claims of election fraud just after winning the primary election in June. He took issue with rules such as ballot collection and a seven-day post-election deadline for mail-in ballots to be delivered, but he did not believe there was systemic fraud or cheating.

“We can’t allow ourselves to believe that every time we lose an election, it’s because they cheated,” he said in August when a supporter made the accusation at Modesto City Hall. “We lost the election [because] We didn’t win enough votes, right? “

That’s why he’s trying to appeal to independent voters and Democrats who “can’t stand President Trump” but “desperately want some change in California,” he explained to applause from the Republican-majority crowd.

Hilton is counting on voters like former Democrat Summer Behan to not only vote for him but to persuade other disillusioned voters.

“My car got hit 14 times in a year and a half,” Behan told Hilton during the Modesto event. “Our home insurance went from $180 to $860, so we had to sell the house.”

She drove more than two hours to reach her nonprofit job in San Francisco.

“It’s an exhausting way to live,” Behan said after the town hall. Families from her children’s school had moved out of state, but she wanted to stay. “California is beautiful and has a lot to offer people, so I wanted to try to stick with it and see what it would be like under different leadership.”