California Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in twenty years. Registered Democrats outnumber them nearly two-to-one. And yet, heading into the June 2 primary, the GOP has a genuine, if narrow, path to the governor’s office. The catch is that the path requires something that cuts against every instinct in modern campaigning: both Republican candidates need to win at roughly the same time.
Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host and British political strategist, and Chad Bianco, the Riverside County Sheriff, are both running for governor. Under California’s top-two primary system, the two candidates with the most votes advance to November regardless of party. With eight major Democratic candidates splitting the liberal vote, Hilton and Bianco could theoretically both clear the field and lock every Democrat out of the general election entirely.
That would be an extraordinary outcome. It’s also the only scenario where a Republican realistically becomes governor.
The Math Behind the Strategy
The arithmetic here is specific. For both Republicans to advance, they need to split GOP primary support almost evenly, each pulling enough votes to finish first and second while the Democratic vote fractures across eight candidates. If one Republican consolidates too much support and the other falls back, the second slot goes to a Democrat. The whole thing collapses.
GOP strategist Rob Stutzman put it plainly. “There’s an amazing irony there, that they need to beat each other but they both need to succeed at the same time,” he said. “It cuts against human nature and cuts against the way you put together campaigns.”
Neither Hilton nor Bianco is running that kind of campaign. Hilton has spent recent months trying to consolidate Republican support by attacking Bianco directly. Bianco has been happy to return the fire. They are running standard primary campaigns, designed to knock the other out, which is precisely the behavior that makes their shared path to November harder to hold.
Two Candidates, Similar Platforms
Despite very different backgrounds, Hilton and Bianco are selling nearly the same product.
Hilton built his career writing about populism and decentralizing government power. Bianco made his name as a local sheriff who has pushed the boundaries of police authority, including in ways that touch on elections. One comes from the world of political commentary; the other from law enforcement. Both are running on aggressive deregulation.
Their shared targets include the California Environmental Quality Act, the landmark law requiring environmental review for new construction. Both candidates argue CEQA drives up housing costs and slows development. Both want to reverse recent prison closures, boost in-state oil production to push gas prices down, and reduce or eliminate the state’s 61-cents-per-gallon gas tax.
Hilton has proposed shielding the first $100,000 of earnings from state income tax. The policy positions between the two overlap enough that voters choosing on ideology alone have little to differentiate them, which makes the personality-driven attacks between Hilton and Bianco more central to the primary than the platforms.
What Democrats Are Watching
Democrats insist the two-Republican scenario won’t happen. But the party is also under real pressure to take the threat seriously, particularly in a cycle where they’re counting on strong liberal turnout in November for competitive U.S. House races across the state.
If Democratic voters stay home in the primary, or if they spread support too thinly across eight candidates without any consolidation, the math gets uncomfortable. Eight is a lot of candidates. Even a modest turnout advantage for Republicans in June, combined with genuine Democratic fragmentation, puts the scenario in play.
The party has two decades of California statewide dominance as evidence that this kind of outcome is unlikely. They don’t have evidence that it’s impossible.
This article draws on reporting from CalMatters.
The Structural Problem
What makes this situation genuinely strange is that the Republican candidates’ incentives point in exactly the wrong direction for their collective goal.
In a normal primary, you attack your opponent to drive down their support and elevate your own. Here, driving Bianco’s support too low is a problem for Hilton, because it means a Democrat takes second place. And vice versa. The optimal outcome for California Republicans isn’t either candidate winning the primary. It’s a near-tie between them.
No campaign is designed to produce a tie. Campaigns are designed to win.
So Hilton keeps attacking Bianco, trying to pull ahead. Bianco attacks back, trying to survive. Neither is wrong to do so from the perspective of their own campaign. Both are, in a structural sense, working against the scenario that gives their party any real shot at November.
California’s top-two primary was designed to produce more competitive general elections and reduce partisan extremism. In this race, it has produced something weirder. Two candidates from the same party are locked in a contest where their best collective outcome requires neither of them to be too good at campaigning against each other.
The June 2 primary is two months out. Whether the Democratic field consolidates, whether either Republican breaks away, and whether turnout patterns hold to form will all matter more than the strategy memos. But the basic structure of the race is already set. For Republicans, the path forward requires an outcome that neither candidate is actually trying to create.