Steve Hilton really, really doesn't like Xavier Becerra.
"What a pathetic little pipsqueak he is, honestly," the Republican nominee for governor of California said in an interview with Carlo Versano on Newsweek's The 1600 podcast. "He's such a jerk, honestly, and it shows you how thin and empty he is. He's got nothing to say except these insults."
Hilton had just watched a clip from the testiest moment of their September 30 CNN debate, when Becerra, who is Mexican American, told the London-born Republican he seemed to "welcome immigrants who look like you but deport immigrants who look like me."
"Obviously a ludicrous thing to say," Hilton said. "My parents are Hungarian. They were refugees from communism. I know what it's like to grow up in a working-class immigrant home and try and climb the ladder of opportunity."
"He's just a smug, lazy, arrogant, entitled nothing of a person just sort of sitting at home doing nothing," Hilton said, adding that "empty suit" is "the number one thing you hear" about Becerra from Democrats who have worked with him.
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Becerra also skipped a Los Angeles Times forum the week after the debate. Hilton said voters across the state hear some version of the same excuse: "We invited Xavier Becerra to join us today but due to a scheduling conflict he wasn't able to make it. And I don't know quite what the conflicts are because he doesn't seem to be scheduling anything at all."
A former senior adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and onetime Fox News host, Hilton became a U.S. citizen in 2021. He is trying to become the first Republican to win statewide office in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Democrats hold a registration edge of more than 4 million; President Donald Trump, who endorsed Hilton, is deeply unpopular in the state, and the latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, released September 24, had Becerra ahead 58 percent to 33 percent.
Hilton says he has campaigned in all 58 counties, and that the message he hears from voters at airports and coffee shops is the same everywhere. "It's very simple what they say: you have to win," he said. "There's a sort of desperation about it."
'Try Something Different'
"Well, I'm my own person," Hilton said when asked about the Trump endorsement. "Anyone who knows me and has worked with me in the past knows that when back in the day, when I was senior advisor to the prime minister in the UK, I was seen as very independent-minded. That's always been my thing."
His pitch to Democrats and independents is about who has been running the state. "We've had one party running everything for 16 years," he said. "If you look back over history, you look at other countries, it's just not healthy to have one party rule. Frankly, whichever the party is, whether it's on the right or the left, it ends up not working."
"So my message is very simple," he said. "Try something different. Let's have some balance. You don't have to change your party. You don't have to change your politics. You just have to vote for some change in this election."
At the debate, Hilton accused Becerra of answering every question by invoking Trump. "It's not President Trump who's been running California for 16 years. It's the Democrat machine of which Xavier Becerra is part, and they won't take any responsibility for it," he said.
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Gas, by his count, runs about $6.40 a gallon in California against roughly $4.40 nationally. "That's obviously not because of anything to do with President Trump," Hilton said, "because he's also president in the states where gas is two dollars lower."
Asked for one good thing Trump has done for California, he chose the border, calling the crackdown "a really powerful demonstration that government, when properly run and organized, can do something that can be effective."
He said he opposed federal cuts to the University of California ("That's a crown jewel for us"), a floated plan to pull customs officers from the state's airports and the idea of Washington taking stakes in tech companies. "I've always disagreed about the characterization of the 2020 election," he added. "I've never disputed the outcome there."
After the Federal Communications Commission overruled a California order protecting phone service in rural areas with no cell coverage, Hilton wrote to the agency's chairman. "I said, what are you talking about? How dare you tell us how to run our phone system in California? F off, frankly."
Hilton rejected Becerra's claim that he would deport every undocumented farmworker in the state. "It's a fantasy. I'm not going to deport anyone because I can't because the governor doesn't have any role in that. It's federal policy," he said. "It is completely preposterous and he knows it."
'Take Less Out'
Hilton's platform starts with taxes: nothing owed to the state on the first $150,000 of earnings and a flat 8 percent above that. He has also promised $3 gas and an end to the DMV. Critics say the numbers don't add up.
"Well, they're wrong," he said. "I never want to say anything I can't deliver."
California's 9.3 percent bracket starts just above $70,000, Hilton said, in counties where the government's own low-income line is $100,000. "So we're taking people who are defined by the government as low-income. And taxing them nearly 10 percent of their income. It's unacceptable."
He put the cost at about $25 billion a year and said he would pay for it by ending high-speed rail funding, going after Medi-Cal home health fraud, where he said there is "massive scamming going on," and cutting 5 percent across departments. "Anyone in the private sector recognizes that you regularly are asked to save some money," he said. "That never happens in the government."
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"The quickest [way] to get more money into people's pockets is for the government to take less out," Hilton said. "That can be done almost overnight."
Asked whether the flat rate amounts to a gift for someone like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, he pointed to the current top rate. "The top rate is now 13.3, and that's driving people out of the state," he said. "We are losing our edge and the competitive race is being won by Texas." Full repeal of the income tax, which his Republican primary rival promised, would be great, he said, but "that's not achievable."
"They gouge you for everything," Hilton said of how the state treats small businesses. "The first thing you have to do before you have any revenue, any customers is pay the government $800." He would scrap that fee and rein in lawsuits under the Private Attorneys General Act, which he called "shakedown extortionate lawsuits."
"It's one of these things where if you know, you know," said Hilton, who has run restaurants. "And if you don't know, be thankful."
'Just Try It'
His "Just Try It" ad shows one young woman coaxing another, in front of a Pride flag, to fill out a mail-in ballot for him. Sonja Shaw, the conservative running for state superintendent of public instruction, called it "creepy, weird, disturbing garbage."
"It's a strong piece of creative work. And like anything creative that strong people have strong reactions," Hilton said. "Remember it's not just one ad, it's part of a campaign. ... We've been doing it 16 years one way. Just try something different."
He said he had campaigned with Shaw that weekend. "We're all on the same team. We're all fighting hard and, you know, not everyone may agree with every single tactic. But we're very, very united."
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On AI, he wants California out front on the industry and on the rules. He would pause AI in classrooms statewide, "not forever, just until we figure out exactly what is the appropriate role for AI in education," and he backs a bill to ban "robo-firings," in which software dismisses a worker with no human involvement. "I think that's wrong," he said.
"You've got people spouting off about AI, you know, politicians in Congress of both parties who obviously have no idea what they're talking about," Hilton said. "We can't have these idiots who just don't understand what they're talking about making the rules."
He still carries a flip phone and held it up for the camera. Asked about data centers, he said: "I have a flip phone, so it's not me, it's all you lot with your smartphones that are driving the need for data centers."
Brexit and the 'Rebel Spirit'
Hilton campaigned for Brexit in 2016. Asked whether he regrets it, he said: "100 percent the right thing to do. It's a question of democracy."
Britain, he conceded, has been "completely mismanaged" since the vote. "But it's not because of Brexit, it is because of bad government and stupid policies," he said, faulting Conservative governments that never delivered the deregulation he campaigned for. The European Union, in his words, was "an unelected technocratic bureaucracy in Brussels that nobody ever voted for."
Which is more broken, California politics or British politics? "I think very similar, honestly," he said.
He ended on what he thinks California has lost, the "rebel spirit" that built Hollywood and Silicon Valley. "That's what's being crushed by this bloated nanny state bureaucratic government. That's just bossing everyone around from morning till night, telling us how to live, how to run our businesses, what kind of house to live in, what kind of car to drive," Hilton said. "That is not California. ... And that's what I want to get back to."
Watch the full conversation between Steve Hilton and Carlo Versano in the video player above or on YouTube.
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