It took seven days, but a Republican finally punched through. The Associated Press called the California gubernatorial primary on Monday, confirming that former Fox News host Steve Hilton edged out billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer to claim the second slot in November's general election alongside Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra. The race was not decided until a week after polls closed on June 2, a delay that says as much about California's election machinery as it does about the contest itself.
With 91% of the vote counted, Becerra led with 27.9% and Hilton held 25.0%. Steyer, who poured $213 million of his own fortune into the campaign, finished third at 22.5%, a staggering sum for a loss. Under California's all-party primary system, only the top two finishers advance, regardless of party. That means the Golden State's November ballot will feature something it hasn't produced in years: a genuine two-party contest for governor.
The result sets up a general election between Becerra, a 68-year-old career Democratic politician who served as Biden's Health and Human Services secretary, and Hilton, a 56-year-old British-born conservative who spent six years hosting Fox News' The Next Revolution before entering the race. For a state that hasn't elected a Republican governor in over a decade, the matchup alone is a story.
AP called Becerra's first-place finish on Friday, three days after Election Day. Hilton had to wait four more days. The Los Angeles mayoral primary wasn't called until six days after polls closed. None of this is unusual in California, and that's the problem.
About 80% of California's votes are cast by mail, according to the BBC. Election officials can take up to 30 days to count ballots. Hans von Spakovsky, an attorney and former Federal Election Commission member, told Fox News that the state's reliance on mail voting drives the glacial pace.
"You can go vote in person, but like in the 2024 election, out of 16 million votes that were cast in the presidential election, 13 million were by mail. It takes much longer to process a mail-in ballot than a ballot that's cast at a polling place."
The result is a system where candidates, donors, and voters spend days, sometimes weeks, waiting for clarity. In a race this tight, the delay left Hilton's supporters in limbo while the margin between second and third place narrowed and widened with each ballot drop.
Tom Steyer's third-place finish may be the most expensive primary loss in California history. The 68-year-old billionaire climate activist, worth $2.4 billion according to Forbes, spent $213 million of his own money on the race, as CalMatters reported. He ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and lost. Now he's lost again, outspent every rival many times over, and still came up short by roughly two and a half points.
An Emerson College poll released May 30 had foreshadowed the final order: Becerra at 28%, Steyer at 22%, Hilton at 21%. The actual results tracked almost exactly. Steyer's money bought him close to the threshold but couldn't push him past a candidate who ran on a fraction of the budget.
The field behind Steyer collapsed quickly. Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who led an Emerson College poll back in December 2025 with 13% support, finished fourth with 10.2%. Former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, once considered a frontrunner before reports surfaced that she had abused her staff, landed at 4.4%. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan drew 3.6%. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa managed just 1.2%.
And then there was Eric Swalwell.
The former Democratic congressman withdrew from the race on April 12 after multiple women accused him of sexual assault and rape. But Swalwell remained on the ballot. He collected 0.3% of the vote and finished in 11th place, a fitting coda to a candidacy that had briefly polled in second place in December 2025, tied with Hilton at 12%.
The gap between Swalwell's December polling and his final result illustrates how volatile the race was in its early stages and how dramatically the field reshaped itself in the final months.
Hilton's rise was not preordained. Born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, he previously worked as director of strategy for former British Prime Minister David Cameron before moving to American media. He declared his candidacy in an X post in April 2025, framing his run as a corrective to one-party Democratic governance.
"We need some balance here after 15 years of Democrat one-party rule. Positive, practical policies that actually help people, not ideological crusades."
President Trump endorsed Hilton on April 5. In a December 2025 interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation, Hilton predicted the outcome with confidence.
"There will be one Republican in the general election, and I'm very confident that that will be me."
He was right. With Bianco's support fragmenting the Republican vote early on, Hilton consolidated enough of the right-of-center electorate to survive a crowded primary dominated by Democratic candidates and Democratic money.
Xavier Becerra enters the general election as the clear favorite in a state where Kamala Harris carried the presidential vote by 20 points in 2024, according to Politico. A Becerra victory in November would mark the fifth consecutive time a Democrat won California's governor's mansion. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is term-limited, did not endorse any candidate before the primary.
But Becerra carries baggage that his Democratic rivals were willing to use against him. During a May 6 gubernatorial debate, Villaraigosa confronted Becerra directly over reports that his HHS department lost track of thousands of unaccompanied minor migrants at the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
"Are you proud that you pushed out 85,000 migrant children? According to The New York Times, they were maimed, they were exploited. Some were even killed. You said those are MAGA talking points, it's a MAGA hoax. Tell that to the children who died."
Becerra's response, as reported, was to blame the previous administration. "Trump lied about that, this whole situation with the migrant kids," he said. The exchange previews the kind of accountability questions Hilton can press in the general election, questions Becerra's own party rivals were already raising.
Becerra served as California Attorney General from 2017 to 2021 and represented a Los Angeles-based congressional district from 1993 to 2017. His career has been spent almost entirely in government. Hilton, by contrast, will run as the outsider, a media figure turned candidate who has never held elected office.
The math in California is brutal for any Republican. The state's voter registration, its mail-ballot infrastructure, and its deep-blue urban corridors all favor Democrats. Hilton will need to persuade voters who haven't elected a Republican governor in more than fifteen years that one-party rule has failed them on housing, homelessness, crime, and the cost of living.
He'll also need to make Becerra's HHS record a liability, particularly on the lost migrant children, in a state where immigration debates often break along partisan lines. Whether California's electorate is willing to hear that argument from a Trump-endorsed Republican remains an open question.
But the fact that Hilton is on the ballot at all, after outlasting a $213-million opponent and a crowded field of career Democrats, suggests the race may be more competitive than the state's registration numbers imply. Steyer proved you can't buy a California primary. Hilton will now test whether you can win a California general.
Fifteen years of one-party rule bought California the nation's highest cost of living, a homelessness crisis visible from space, and an election system that needs a full week to count the votes. If that's not a case for change, nothing is.
