Steve Hilton on Newsom: “He Wants to Run, But He Doesn’t Want to Be Humiliated”

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Guy Benson: Well, joining us now is Steve Hilton. He’s a small businessman, a former host at Fox News, and he is now the Republican nominee for governor of California. Steve Hilton, welcome back to the show.

Steve Hilton: Hi. How are you doing?

Guy Benson: Good to be with you.

Steve Hilton: I’m doing very well.

Guy Benson: So I just have to ask this because a lot of people are looking at the New York Times polling today, which is not good for Republicans across the country. And there are so many people in California and all over the nation who want to believe that you can do this, but it’s such a blue state. With those headwinds and with that political environment, especially out there, what is your path? What are you seeing on the ground? And how are people reacting to your campaign and your opponent’s campaign? Sort of a big-picture assessment here.

Steve Hilton: Thank you, Guy. There’s two things going on. When you look at the headlines and the polls, it’s a very uphill battle. No question about that. To a certain extent, that picture is getting worse, not better, both nationally–you see it here and in other races as well.

But the answer to your question about what you’re seeing on the ground is completely the opposite. And I know candidates often say that, but I’ve got to tell you, everywhere I go, our events are getting bigger–hundreds and hundreds of people coming. We mainly invite Democrats and independents to them because those are the people we particularly need to reach.

People come up to me every single day saying, “I’m a lifelong Democrat, but this year I’m voting for you because something’s got to change in California.”

And so those are two contrasting things. Of course, the only thing that you can do as a candidate, which is what we’re very strongly doing, is laying out the choice that people have: to keep going in this disastrous direction that’s given us the highest cost of living in the country after 16 years of one party running everything, or actually have some balance in our government in California and change direction.

The specific way that we’re telling that story is through very positive, practical things to bring down the cost of living: your first $150,000 tax-free by cutting the bloat and waste in our state budget; a sensible energy policy that will reduce gas prices, with a target of $3 gas in California, which you could see before the Iran war, as in most other states it was lower than $3; and so on.

So these are the things that we’re going to be focusing on.

Just last week, we made an announcement that caught a lot of people’s attention here in California: capping vehicle registration, which is the highest in the country. People are paying hundreds, sometimes over $1,000 a year, to register their car or truck. I’m going to cap that at a flat rate of $73 per year and abolish the DMV, which most other states have done.

So this is how we’re going to be doing it: louder and stronger and clearer. The choice is that you can have four more years of cost, failure, and corruption, or lower taxes and cheaper gas if you vote for change.

Guy Benson: You mentioned abolishing the DMV, and trust me, people often use the DMV as an example of just incompetent, sclerotic government at its worst. But there are also certain functions that something approaching a DMV has to achieve. What would that plan actually look like functionally for people if you were to get your way on that?

Steve Hilton: In California, it would look like what most other states do. Most other states don’t have a self-standing, bloated bureaucratic agency that treats people with absolute contempt and costs a fortune like the DMV does.

For example, some of the functions–many of the functions–could be done directly online. And then, extraordinarily, considering we’re with our self-image of California as a tech capital of the world, it’s extraordinarily old-fashioned and in-person when it could be done online.

Other functions will be transferred to county offices that already exist and have the capacity to. That’s what happens in other states. And some things just need to be cut.

A lot of the money that goes into those bloated registration fees just goes into the Democrats’ bottomless money pit. And we’ve got to cut the budget in California and reduce spending. They’ve doubled the budget of California in the last 10 years, even as 2 million people on net have left the state. I mean, there’s just no excuse for this level of spending. We’ve got to bring it down to a sensible level.

Guy Benson: There is also this interesting question about what would happen if, hypothetically, there were to be a U.S. Senate vacancy in California if you were governor. And I guess part of this is, like, “Oh, well, one of the dangers of having a Republican as governor is it could impact the federal government as well, and you could get a Republican in the Senate representing California.”

How do you decide to handle that issue?

Steve Hilton: I don’t think it’s a hard decision at all. I know there’s been some controversy over this. I think it is just an obvious point that if you’ve had the voters of California choose a Democratic senator, and in fact, in the last elections that we had for that, very overwhelmingly choose a Democratic senator, I think that it’s just obvious–

Guy Benson: Unfortunately, but that’s exactly reality.

Steve Hilton: I don’t even think it’s a question. Of course you have to honor the vote that people took. We may not like it, and of course we want to campaign hard to get different representation, just as I’m doing now, but you can’t just overturn an election, as it were, by appointing someone from a different party than people voted for.

So to me, that is not a difficult question at all, and it’s not even political. It’s just an obvious point that’s in line with how we should think about the role in our democracy.

Guy Benson: I saw that one of the initiatives that Democrats are pursuing out in California is what they’re calling, in a very classy way, the “GTFO Act,” the goal of which is to ban people who were ICE agents from being hired into state agencies in the future.

This is just retaliation. This is anti-enforcement extremism. This is political posturing. But this is California under one-party rule, with all the problems you guys have. They’re focused on stuff like this.

Steve Hilton: It’s really the arrogance of one-party rule, where they’re completely assuming that they’re going to be in power forever, there’ll be no check on their behavior, they don’t need to actually focus on making life better for constituents because they assume they’ll be re-elected, whatever they do, and so they focus on these insular, political, obsessive issues–these fringe issues, in many cases–that won’t make life better for a single person that they’re supposed to represent, but hand it to their activists and make themselves feel good.

And in this case, it’s really despicable because they’re attacking public servants. I mean, we constantly hear from Democrats about how much they care about public service and so on. That’s what they’re talking about here.

Imagine if we did it the other way around and anyone who was a state agency employee that was involved in fraud or waste or abused billions of dollars of taxpayer money, or the open border that we saw under Biden–if anyone who worked in the government, anything to do with these policy failures, were banned from any kind of public office or hiring, the other side would laugh at that and say, “How petulant and vindictive.”

Of course that’s what it is, but that’s what you get from one-party rule.

Guy Benson: I see that your campaign has a document out about ending what you call the “war on small business.” And I think when you look at some of the details, it’s actually not really hyperbolic to see what the government of California is doing to small businesses and small business owners and say, “No, this is a very hostile environment,” like a punitive environment.

Tell us about the environment and then what you would like to change if you get elected.

Steve Hilton: It is punitive because I sit down and talk to small businesses all the time. And it’s on every single front. And I’m a small business owner. That’s the description, by the way, on the ballot–the three words you’re allowed to choose to describe yourself on the ballot in California.

Most of my career has been as a small-business owner, and it’s a combination of the fees and charges and gouging that happens on every level, the taxes that you have to pay as well, the regulations. We are the most over-regulated state in the country–over 420,000 regulations. My commitment is to reduce that to under 200,000 by the end of my first term.

One thing that isn’t really discussed enough is the litigation: lawsuits, endless shakedowns, extortionate lawsuits against small-business owners. Why? Because the trial lawyers are one of the biggest donors to Democratic politicians.

So you see, year after year, they are passing legislation to enact what’s known as private rights of action, where anyone can be sued for anything. And of course, it’s a bonanza for the trial lawyers.

Just one example of that is something called PAGA, the Private Attorneys General Act, which has basically outsourced the enforcement of California labor law to trial attorneys.

And so you go around the state, you’ve got just a local restaurant hit with sometimes three or four of these lawsuits for totally footling, often made-up violations of labor law–a name wrong on a payslip, or a break that’s supposed to start after five hours starting one minute late–and then there’s a lawsuit, and the damages are multiplied by every single one of the employees you have.

It’s just completely outrageous, and nothing’s being done about it because the interests in Sacramento benefit from it. But that’s an example of where you’ve done the work, as I have: you appoint, as governor, a labor commissioner that will stop all this and actually enforce the law as written rather than give it away to trial lawyers.

So it’s just endless examples like this where–and actually, it speaks to a deeper point that is clearer and clearer to me as this election goes on–is that the foundational issue is, of course, we talk about the economic issues, but the foundational one is a moral one.

Because after 16 years of this in California, we’ve turned into a state where the people who do the right thing are punished, and the people who do the wrong thing are rewarded. And that’s completely upside down, and that’s what I’m going to turn around as governor.

Guy Benson: It’s like the chump effect, where people who play by the rules feel like chumps because it does them no good, and they see other people being rewarded for their lack of good behavior. And you wonder, “Why am I doing this? Why am I still here? What’s the point?”

And on that score, actually, Steve, I was in California–very, very Northern California, up in the beautiful Eureka-Redwoods area–just a few weeks ago, and the group that I spoke to, everyone was rooting for you and will be supporting you in the election coming up in November.

But there’s still some people who are, you know, beaten down just by California politics, and statewide races just being so, so difficult for anyone who’s right of center. And they were like, “You know, what really is the point? We’re gonna vote for him, but man, it’s tough out there.”

And I said, “Well, you can’t get into despairing mode.” And also, there are some really important referendums on the ballot along with you in November. One on this ruinous wealth tax that they’re trying to shove down people’s throats, that even some of the Democrats recognize would be so bad for the economy, and then voter ID, which is, of course, of great interest, I think, to a national audience as well.

There’s a real chance to get a win there, I think, in California statewide on an issue. I just want you–I’d love for you to speak to those as well because you’re on the ballot with those key questions.

Steve Hilton: You’re exactly right, Guy, and those things should help us get a bigger turnout.

The key to this election actually is a combination of a really big Republican turnout and a campaign–which is the one I’m running–that is positive and pragmatic and not ideological and divisive, but appeals to independents and Democrats who’ve had enough of what’s been going on.

But the Republican turnout is very important, and the number that I always cite is that the estimate is that the total number of votes that I would need to win in November is 6 million. That’s our estimate based on what we’ve seen in the last two midterms and in the turnout in the primary.

President Trump in California in 2024 got 6.1 million votes without even campaigning here. Now, of course, that turned into 38% of the vote because it’s much higher overall turnout, but the point remains that actually there are enough Republican votes to win in California if every Republican actually votes.

And so the power to do this change and make it happen is in our hands, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m running such a high-energy campaign, running up and down the state.

I’m the first candidate anyone can recall who’s been to every single county in California, and I’m going to continue to do that, even in the face of indicators like you mentioned in terms of polls, both national and state polls, that look like, you know, it’s just going to be the same old story in California.

I don’t think it is because people really are fed up, and we’re going to be going around and making clear to people we can’t give up. We really can’t. We have to try and make the change happen this year.

Guy Benson: There’s a clip that’s making the rounds that’s interesting to people, not just in California but around the country. Your current governor, Gavin Newsom, who’s on his way out, your opponent is Javier Becerra, who’s this sort of unqualified guy who’s failed upward and was a totally disastrous health secretary under the Biden administration. Even they hated him there.

Regardless, Gavin Newsom is a major player in California on the national stage. He, of course, has seen himself as a future president for a very long time. And it seems like his focus of governance for a while has been positioning himself to run nationally.

He just gave an interview to CNN and Jake Tapper. They were fly-fishing together. And this exchange occurred, which is kind of interesting. Cut 27.

Speaker 4: You’re not even the only California now, right?

Yeah, we got Ro Khanna.

Yeah, Kamala.

Yeah, I don’t know. She runs, but we’ll see. I know she’s called around.

Yeah, but I wouldn’t run if she ran.

If she runs, you will not?

Of course not. Why would I?

Speaker 5: I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do it to me. Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to you. I won’t waste everyone’s time. Who needs that?

What do you mean? That doesn’t even make sense to me.

I just–I wouldn’t. No, first of all, electorally, it’s a gift from God for everybody else. They enjoy the hell out of it. Mutual assured destruction. It serves no greater good.

Guy Benson: All right, so apparently if Kamala Harris runs again, Gavin Newsom is saying, “Well, of course, I would never run for president in that circumstance.” But what’s going on there, Steve?

Steve Hilton: Well, it’s so ridiculous, isn’t it, this sort of psychodrama between these two California career politicians who are so useless in their different ways.

I actually don’t know whether he’s saying this because he knows that she’s not going to run and therefore feels confident that he can do it, or actually he really doesn’t want to run, and he’s sort of pre-buttal, as it were, laying the pathway for him to confound everyone’s expectations and choose not to run.

Guy Benson: Oh, he wants to run.

Steve Hilton: He wants to, but he only doesn’t want to be humiliated, and the numbers are not looking good for him. I agree with you. I mean, the whole day, basically, he’s been brought–so he’s been thinking about and for the past eight years as governor.

That’s one of the reasons that it’s such a disaster here in California, because he’s been completely absent. And instead of stopping the insanity coming out of the state legislature, he’s just been waving it all through, which is one of the reasons we have this massive bloat and cost in California.

So yes, I agree with you that that’s been his focus. But as he’s looking now into the reality of it, there are newer, brighter, shinier objects in the Democratic field, and so he may be looking a little bit nervous about that.

I think the true point, though–someone made it, so it’s not an original point for me–but I think that the truest thing about this is the fact that he’s even saying this is itself disqualifying if you’re just looking at this as some kind of political calculation rather than on the basis that you’ve got a strong conviction.

Guy Benson: Right, like you’re the guy for the job for a reason.

Steve Hilton: For a reason. You’re the guy for the job, and you’ve got the ideas and the character and the vision to lead the greatest nation on earth. And if that just goes out the window because a two-time failed candidate chooses to run, I think that’s obviously disqualifying.

Guy Benson: Well, Gavin Newsom is the current governor of California. We’ll see what’s next for him. A man who wants to replace him is Steve Hilton, the Republican in the race and our guest here on the Guy Benson Show.

A debate is coming up against his opponent, Javier Becerra, at the end of the month. Steve, we will check in back with you as this campaign unfolds. Thank you for your time today.

Steve Hilton: Of course. Thank you, Guy. Great to be with you.