It took seven days, but California now has its November matchup for governor. The Associated Press called the state's all-party primary on Tuesday, confirming that Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton will face each other in the general election to succeed term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom. Polls closed on June 2. The race wasn't settled until June 9.
In a state that allows election officials up to 30 days to finish counting ballots, a week-long wait barely registers as unusual. But it does register as a problem, one that leaves voters, candidates, and the country watching California shrug at a pace of democracy that most functioning democracies would find unacceptable.
The results themselves carry real significance. Becerra, the 68-year-old former Health and Human Services secretary and longtime California political fixture, led the field with 27.9% of the vote with 91% counted. Hilton, the 56-year-old former Fox News host and Trump-backed outsider, secured second place at 25.0%, edging out a billionaire who spent a quarter-billion dollars trying to buy the seat.
The man Hilton beat for the second slot was Tom Steyer, the climate activist and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate worth an estimated $2.4 billion. Steyer poured $213 million of his own money into the race, according to CalMatters. He finished third with 22.5%.
That works out to roughly $9.5 million per percentage point, a staggering sum that bought Steyer nothing but a concession. For a party that lectures ordinary Americans about inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics, California Democrats just watched one of their own light a fortune on fire and lose to a former cable news host who ran on common sense.
Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco came in fourth at 10.2%. Former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, once considered a frontrunner before reports surfaced that she had abused her staff, managed just 4.4%. Democratic San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan took 3.6%, and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa finished with a dismal 1.2%.
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. He remained on the ballot anyway and pulled 0.3%, finishing in 11th place. That California's Democratic bench included both Porter and Swalwell tells you something about the quality of one-party governance.
The AP called Becerra's advancement on Friday, three days after Election Day. Hilton's second-place finish wasn't confirmed for another four days after that. The Los Angeles mayoral primary took six days to call. None of this is new. California's ballot-counting delays have become a recurring embarrassment, and the state's leaders have shown little urgency about fixing them.
About 80% of California votes are now cast by mail, according to the BBC. Hans von Spakovsky, an attorney and former Federal Election Commission member, explained the math to Fox News.
"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."
California has effectively built an election system optimized for convenience and sluggishness in equal measure. Other states manage mail-in voting without leaving their citizens in limbo for a week. California treats the delay as a feature, not a bug.
The slow count has drawn federal scrutiny. Federal prosecutors have opened election fraud investigations related to the delays, and President Trump has publicly raised alarms about the state's inability, or unwillingness, to produce timely results.
Even Newsom's own office has acknowledged the problem. After initially accusing Trump of lying about vote-count issues, the governor's office conceded the state does have a counting problem, an admission that arrived with the quiet awkwardness of a politician caught contradicting himself.
Steve Hilton enters the general election as a heavy underdog. Kamala Harris carried California by 20 points in 2024. A Becerra victory in November would mark the fifth consecutive time a Democrat won the governorship. No Republican has come close in years.
But Hilton is running a campaign built on a simple argument: 15 years of unbroken Democratic control have not served Californians well. In an April post on X, Hilton framed his candidacy in blunt terms.
"We need some balance here after 15 years of Democrat one-party rule. Positive, practical policies that actually help people, not ideological crusades."
Hilton, who is U.K.-born and previously served as director of strategy for former British Prime Minister David Cameron, hosted Fox News' "The Next Revolution" for six years before entering the race. He announced his candidacy with the slogan "Make California Golden Again" and earned Trump's endorsement on April 5.
His confidence about consolidating the Republican lane proved justified. As early returns showed him pulling ahead of Bianco, Hilton told voters he was certain he would be the sole Republican standing.
"There will be one Republican in the general election, and I'm very confident that that will be me."
An Emerson College poll released May 30 had shown Becerra at 28%, Steyer at 22%, and Hilton at 21%, a margin that proved almost exactly right. An earlier Emerson poll from December 2025 had Hilton tied with Swalwell at 12%, well behind Bianco's 13%. Hilton's rise over the final months of the primary was steady and decisive.
Xavier Becerra brings a long political résumé to the general election. He represented a Los Angeles-based district in the U.S. House from 1993 to 2017, served as California Attorney General from 2017 to 2021, and then ran the Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden.
It is that last job that may define the fall campaign. During Becerra's tenure at HHS, the department reportedly lost track of thousands of unaccompanied minor migrants at the U.S. southern border with Mexico. The issue surfaced forcefully during a May 6 gubernatorial debate when Villaraigosa confronted Becerra directly.
"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 captured in the debate, was to blame Trump: "Trump lied about that, this whole situation with the migrant kids." That answer may satisfy a deep-blue primary electorate. Whether it holds up under five months of general-election scrutiny, with a Republican opponent who will press the point relentlessly, is another matter entirely.
Newsom, for his part, did not endorse any candidate before the primary. The outgoing governor's silence left the Democratic field to fight among itself, and the result was a crowded, expensive, and occasionally ugly contest that consumed hundreds of millions of dollars and still couldn't produce a timely result.
The general election will test whether California's one-party dominance is truly unshakable or merely untested. Hilton faces daunting math in a state where Democrats hold every statewide office and where the last Republican governor left Sacramento two decades ago.
But Becerra carries vulnerabilities that money can't paper over. His HHS record on unaccompanied minors is documented. His instinct to dismiss legitimate criticism as partisan talking points has already been challenged, by a fellow Democrat, on a debate stage, in front of California voters. Meanwhile, the state's election infrastructure itself remains under a cloud, with federal investigators examining the very delays that kept this race in limbo for a week.
Hilton's pitch is straightforward: accountability, practical governance, and an end to ideological excess. Whether California is ready to hear it is the only question that matters now.
A state that can't count its own votes in less than a week might want to think twice before insisting everything else is running just fine.
