Election 2026: Who are the candidates running for California governor?

Following a chaotic primary campaign, the race to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom has narrowed to Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary who is a three-decade veteran of California politics, and Republican Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host who once served as an adviser to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

The odds of becoming the next governor of deep blue California are heavily in Becerra’s favor as voters from his party outnumber those of his opponent in the state by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio. He’s also received the backing of the outgoing governor, and several recent independent polls have shown him with more than a double-digit lead. The latest survey from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group in San Francisco, found that 60% of likely voters would vote for Becerra, compared to 38% for Hilton.

But the British-born Hilton, who is endorsed by President Donald Trump, is looking to end what he refers to as “16 years of one-party rule.” California voters have not elected a Republican to the state’s highest office since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006, and overwhelmingly went for former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump — 58.5% to 38.3% — in the 2024 presidential election.

“If you’re Steve Hilton and Republicans, you’ve been fighting to get attention to this race and not have the race seen as a foregone conclusion,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University.

“And if you’re Xavier Becerra,” he added, “you just keep on keeping on, you don’t want to encourage too many specifics, you want to keep riding above this, and you want to keep talking about Donald Trump.”

Xavier Becerra

Becerra, 68, saw a meteoric rise in the primary from the bottom of the polls — even facing calls to drop out amid concerns of a Republican lockout — to the Democratic frontrunner after embattled ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell withdrew from the race after several women accused him of sexual misconduct.

Becerra, whose campaign did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, has kept a low profile since June, when he came in first with 28% of the vote among 61 candidates. He’s remained vague on policy details, unlike Newsom, who on the campaign trail in 2018 pledged to build 3.5 million new homes, though the actual number likely will fall well short, and institute a single-payer healthcare system, which he has not followed through on.

“I can make some really big promises. But that doesn’t get us anywhere — it may get us elected, but I would prefer not to run on inflated promises that I can’t deliver on,” Becerra recently told Politico.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Becerra has emphasized his working-class roots on the campaign trail. He grew up in Sacramento in a home that his father, a union construction worker, built for them. Becerra was the first in his family to go to college, attending Stanford University for both his undergraduate and law school degrees.

In 1990, he was elected to the state Assembly, serving one two-year term before being elected to a Southern California congressional seat that he held until 2017. Between 2017 and 2021, Becerra served as the state’s first Latino attorney general — gaining prominence as the man who would sue Trump more than 120 times, winning a majority of the lawsuits. He left the post to lead the U.S. Health and Human Services agency under President Joe Biden, overseeing the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and helping to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for those on Medicare.

Becerra has focused on the need to build more housing to tackle the state’s ongoing affordability crisis. He’s vowed to continue with recent efforts to streamline regulations, shrinking timelines for litigation and closing legal loopholes used to block infill housing projects. On his campaign website, Becerra also pledged to sign an executive order on day one to declare California’s housing shortage a state of emergency and direct “every state agency to treat housing production and affordability as the paramount priority.” Their first role, he said, would be to push through the 40,000 affordable housing units sitting in the approval pipeline that need one final bucket of funding to break ground.

In August, Becerra announced a first-in-the-nation plan that he calls “power hour,” which would give some residents up to two hours of free electricity in the middle of the day. He said it would help incentivize running major appliances outside of peak demand times between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., and said he could institute the proposal during his first year in office. California has drastically increased its battery storage capacity in recent years following several heat waves that strained the power grid and caused rolling blackouts.

“We produce so much solar energy that oftentimes in the afternoon we can’t make use of all of it,” he said at Politico’s “The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit” last month.

McCuan said Becerra’s campaign has likely only agreed to one debate, which will be hosted by CNN on Wednesday, because they “don’t want to get hammered into exposure” where the “lack of specifics could harm him late in the game.”

“They don’t want to hurt this approach that has worked well for them that is fundamentally based really on the reality on the ground,” he said, referring to Democrats’ hopes of retaking Congress. “This particular election cycle, Democrats think the sky is falling so they’re going to come out early to vote, and that is gonna harm any Republican … that is on the ballot.”

Becerra is also serving as the honorary co-chair of an opposition campaign against Proposition 39, which would require voter ID in California. His campaign has frequently taken jabs at his opponent, calling him “Trump’s puppet in California,” and criticizing a recent proposal from Hilton to abolish the DMV that they said would risk driver safety.

Steve Hilton

Hilton, 57, ended the June primary in second place with 24.6% of the vote, and despite his long-shot odds, he believes there’s a pathway for him to victory as he pledges to make the state “Califordable.”

Though he’s “honored” to have Trump’s endorsement, he’s making the appeal to voters of other political parties that they don’t need to like the president to vote for him — they just have to agree that California needs change.

“I’m not running a divisive partisan campaign,” Hilton said in an interview this week. “I’m pointing out the risk, you know, we live it every day with the consequences of the one-party rule that we’ve had.”

Hilton was born in London to Hungarian immigrant parents who fled the Eastern European nation under the threat of communism. He spent his early career working for the U.K.’s Conservative Party and made an unsuccessful bid for the House of Commons in the early 2000s. Hilton went on to serve as a top adviser for Cameron and was known as a “blue sky thinker” around 10 Downing Street — in one instance he proposed using “cloud busters” to make the U.K. sunnier.

In 2012, Hilton moved to California, where he founded CrowdPac, a political crowdfunding platform, and was a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Between 2017 and 2023, he hosted “The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton” on Fox News. He currently lives in Atherton.

Hilton describes himself as “pragmatic and a problem solver.” He pointed to areas where he and other former Democratic governor candidates found common ground during the primary as an example of how he’d work with a Democratically controlled state Legislature. Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter even adopted a part of Hilton’s platform and proposed getting rid of the state income tax on earnings less than $100,000.

Hilton has floated a long list of new policy ideas, including creating an Office of Fun and Freedom, , and that he said will help put homeownership in reach for more Californians. On housing, Hilton has said he wants to “end the war on single-family homes,” and has called for eliminating zoning rules that incentivize density as a condition for streamlined permitting, as well as removing policies that limit suburban sprawl.

He’s also pledged to abolish the DMV, first conducting an audit of the office and then sending the No More DMV Act to the state Legislature. Hilton said the state would move things like license plates, car registration and renewal to the counties’ purview or other local service centers, as they do in Colorado and Arizona. Service centers, some of which will be privatized, would also handle driver’s licenses, including testing. He’d also set the annual vehicle registration fee at a flat $73.

Among Hilton’s biggest concerns is the state’s business climate, which he said faces high regulatory hurdles and taxes.

“I think that there’s a massive complacency that our economic cushion will just continue,” he said. “I think we are sleepwalking toward economic collapse in California.”

Hilton has heavily criticized Becerra over his tenure as Health Secretary, frequently referring to a 2023 New York Times investigation that found some of the thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the border ended up working dangerous jobs. Health and Human Services, under Becerra’s leadership, had been responsible for finding them safe homes. Becerra has repeatedly called it a “Trump lie.” Hilton also frequently points to comments made by Biden administration officials about Becerra, including an instance where former Domestic Policy adviser Susan Rice allegedly called the secretary an “idiot.”

McCuan, the political science professor, said that Hilton has some “innovative campaign ideas” that he sees politicians like Newsom possibly mirroring. Last month, the gubernatorial hopeful posted a video on his YouTube channel where he cooks dinner with a family while talking about the issues facing California.

“It has some hard-hitting kind of politics and points to it, but it’s an attempt to kind of create this retail politics relationship with Steve Hilton,” McCuan said.

But because of his attachment to Trump, McCuan added that he will struggle to “get traction in this electoral environment.”

“If he lost by less than 15, that could be considered a moral victory, and if he loses by less than double digits, that’s actually performing pretty well,” he said. “All of that seems difficult given the dramatic narrative that’s going on in the midterm season that’s national in scope and all about Donald Trump, even in California.”

For voters who remain concerned about the affordability crisis, homelessness, the business climate or a plethora of other key issues that the next governor will oversee, Nov. 3 will offer them a chance to decide which direction they want for California.