Hilton Pitches Tax and Gas Cuts to Win Over California’s Persuadable Voters

Steve Hilton’s argument for governing California starts with a contrast: the state still has exceptional assets, but its government is producing what he calls the country’s worst outcomes. He points to California’s natural beauty, universities, agricultural industry and innovation economy, alongside its history of building industries such as entertainment and technology. “California means to America what America means to the world,” he said. In his view, that promise makes the state’s decline especially consequential.

Steve Hilton moved to California from Britain in 2012. He attributes the decline to 16 years of Democratic control. He cited high poverty and unemployment, housing costs and a cost of living he described as the highest in the country, and said millions of people were leaving. He also invoked a long-running Chief Executive Magazine ranking that, he said, placed California last among the states for business climate.

The diagnosis is not simply that California’s government is too large. Hilton says its rules are made for narrow interests rather than the public. He pointed to the influence of unions and trial lawyers in Sacramento, and argued that the resulting litigation risk makes it difficult to operate a business. He claimed that a business operating in California had a 90 percent chance of ending up in litigation. One-party rule, he said, allows legislation and regulation to accumulate without effective resistance.

The volume of state lawmaking is one illustration he offered. California’s legislature passed 1,118 bills the previous year, Hilton said. His campaign printed them out for an event; the stack reached about twice his height. He questioned whether lawmakers could read the bills they passed, and whether Governor Gavin Newsom could read all of them before signing. In Hilton’s account, the accumulation of rules reflects a political process dominated by interest groups rather than serving ordinary residents.

He said California had more than 420,000 regulations and pledged to reduce that number to fewer than 200,000 by the end of his first term. The purpose, he said, would be to bring the state closer to the regulatory environment elsewhere in the country. His broader charge was that costs and requirements have piled up while government’s results have not improved commensurately: “Is everything twice as good when they’ve doubled the budget? Of course not.”

David Sacks offered a possible explanation for why poor results can persist in a wealthy state. Silicon Valley, he said, may function as a “resource curse”: the wealth and tax revenue it generates can make it easier for government to avoid improving its performance. Hilton agreed, arguing that California’s large economy obscures a weaker picture beneath the headline number.

Hilton recalled a CNN interview before the primary in which Javier Becerra was asked what should change. Becerra, as Hilton recounted it, pointed to California’s status as the world’s fourth-largest economy and to people still visiting Disneyland and the beaches. Hilton said that answer confused economic scale with the everyday experience of residents. He argued that the economy is unbalanced: technology generates substantial revenue without creating enough jobs to offset weakness elsewhere. The state’s reported economic size includes government, he said, and private-sector job creation since the pandemic was “basically zero.” The distinction he wanted voters to make was that the state’s wealth is not proof, in his view, that its government is working.

Hilton’s challenge is to persuade voters who may want change but are reluctant to vote Republican. Chamath Palihapitiya described a pattern he had observed: people uneasy about the state’s direction may feel that voting against Democrats amounts to a betrayal, or may simply default to the Democratic candidate. Hilton’s answer was that California was already close to “rock bottom” in the practical experience of living there.

He said he had visited all 58 counties and held hundreds of town halls. The repeated message he heard, he said, was “You have to win.” He recalled several people at a small September 11 memorial event in Sacramento telling him they were lifelong Democrats but planned to vote for him. These accounts were Hilton’s evidence that some voters’ habitual party loyalties could shift. Business owners, he added, warned him that they would leave if the state did not change. If the election produced no sign of a new direction, he predicted, the business exodus could accelerate.

The campaign’s own numbers, as Hilton described them, also made persuasion central. He said an early poll, taken after it became clear he would face Becerra, found 33 percent solidly with him, 41 percent solidly with Becerra and 26 percent open to persuasion. Most of that persuadable group had voted Democratic before, he said. He characterized them as working people, many without college degrees, who were under financial pressure and wanted practical help with the cost of living.

That framing shaped his proposed program. He said he would reduce state spending by cancelling high-speed rail, cutting government headcount by 10 percent, finding 5 percent in efficiency savings, and ending funding for nonprofits he said were worsening homelessness. The savings, he argued, would fund a state income-tax exemption on a worker’s first $150,000 of income. Earlier in the discussion, he described the threshold as $100,000; when laying out the campaign plan, he said $150,000.

Hilton also promised to use California energy resources rather than ship oil long distances, and to remove what he called outdated regulations and hidden taxes that raise gasoline prices. He said California could move from roughly $6 gas toward $3, comparable to prices in other states. When Jason Calacanis asked whether that meant eliminating emissions requirements or gasoline cleaning, Hilton rejected that interpretation. He identified the low carbon fuel standard and cap-and-invest program as charges adding about $1.50 to a gallon, and said cap-and-invest revenue helped fund high-speed rail.

Vehicle registration was another example. Hilton said Californians could pay $800, $900 or more than $1,000 to register a vehicle, compared with less than $100 in many other states. He pledged to cap the charge at a $73 flat annual rate, an approach he linked to abolishing the DMV. He presented the DMV as emblematic of a bureaucracy that drives up costs and frustrates residents.

His case against Becerra relied both on policy and on criticism from people who had worked with him. Hilton described Becerra as a 36-year career politician and quoted former Biden domestic policy adviser Susan Rice calling him an “idiot”; he also repeated a separate insult that he said Rice had used. Hilton cited another former Biden cabinet official’s assessment that running a large executive agency was not Becerra’s skill set. He concluded that Becerra would serve the unions, trial lawyers and activists Hilton blamed for California’s high costs and difficult business climate.

The sharp personal attacks were part of a broader contrast Hilton wanted to draw: an outsider promising to unsettle the system against a candidate he portrayed as its product. Sacks cautioned that the race needed to be about California rather than national politics. To win independents, he said, Hilton had to keep the focus on the state’s own problems. Calacanis put the electoral difficulty more directly: Hilton’s numbers, as he described them, showed strong support among Republicans, some support among independents, and little among Democrats. Hilton’s answer was not that he had already won over that last group, but that the persuadable voters in his poll had often voted Democratic and were focused on costs.

That distinction mattered to the campaign’s pitch. Hilton presented the proposed tax, gas-price and vehicle-registration changes as tangible benefits for people who might not identify as Republicans. Pratt later made a similar point in broader terms: voters could support Hilton’s message as common sense, he argued, without making the election about party identity or national politics. Whether such a pitch could convert frustration into votes remained the central campaign question.

Spencer Pratt came to the discussion from a different race and a different starting point. The former reality-television personality said he had never wanted to hold office. After losing his home, his parents’ home and his neighborhood in the Palisades fire, he ran for Los Angeles mayor as “one last Hail Mary,” he said. He described his campaign as an effort to speak publicly about what had happened and to challenge Mayor Karen Bass.

A campaign-video montage shown during the discussion used AI-generated images of politicians as clowns and Batman characters, alongside news coverage, a tweet, debate footage and podcast appearances. Pratt said the videos drew attention because of their message, not because they used AI. He described the campaign as a grassroots effort: after he began speaking about what he considered the truth of his experience, creative people across the country contributed ideas and work. AI, he said, was one element among many, not the reason the videos connected.

Pratt rejected the idea that his appeal was inherently partisan. He said most of the people who voted for him were Democrats, and described the central message as frustration with being lied to and with public money being misused. Hilton, he said, was making a similar kind of appeal. Pratt’s advice was to keep emphasizing common sense and concrete concerns rather than frame the campaign as a test of Republican identity.

One of Hilton’s examples came from MacArthur Park. He described visiting Langer’s Deli, a long-running business near the park, and seeing people smoking or injecting drugs in public. Hilton said four nonprofits appeared each day to distribute crack pipes and needles, and asserted that taxpayers funded the organizations. When Palihapitiya asked whether they were actually distributing drugs, Pratt narrowed the claim: he said the nonprofits bought needles, and that a person associated with one organization had also been caught selling drugs.

Hilton’s second example concerned a Latino couple who had operated a shoe store in South Central Los Angeles for 14 years. He said the owners faced taxes, electricity costs, permits and bureaucracy, while street vendors selling shoes and apparel occupied the surrounding sidewalks. According to Hilton, the vendors did not bear the same costs of rent, electricity, taxes or licensing, and the storefront business was being forced out. He traced the situation to a 2018 state law legalizing street vending and limiting what cities and counties could do about it.

Hilton used the two examples to make a broader argument about incentives: “if you do the right thing, you’re punished, and if you do the wrong thing you’re rewarded.” Palihapitiya urged him to keep naming the laws and practices behind the argument. Partisan beliefs, he said, are hard to dislodge; specific examples could be more persuasive if they were accurate.

Pratt offered another example in the form of food-vending carts. He said there were 50,000 food vendors and that many did not have a permit costing $21. He also said Los Angeles had approved $500,000 for carts, while the reservoir serving the Palisades had not been covered before the fire. His comparison was intended to show misplaced priorities, connecting his city-level criticism to the fire that had turned his campaign into a personal cause.

Pratt said late-counted mail ballots changed the Los Angeles mayoral result after he had been celebrating what he believed was a lead. He focused on ballot collection and the handling of mail ballots, but the exchange repeatedly turned on whether he was alleging fraud or criticizing practices allowed by law.

Pratt said a witness could sign a ballot envelope with a smiley face or an X, and that one witness could sign for many ballots. He described campaign workers visiting apartment buildings, urging residents to vote for a candidate and collecting completed ballots. Calacanis said campaigns could not pay workers per ballot. Pratt clarified that he was not claiming voters were paid: ballot collectors might be paid campaign workers or volunteers who supported the cause.

Friedberg pressed Pratt to say whether he believed fraud had caused his loss. Pratt called it a trick question and answered that without evidence, he would say no. He said he had consulted law firms, but argued that ballots were separated from their envelopes after arriving to be counted, making it difficult to connect a ballot to a signature or address. Calacanis noted that certification signatures were on the envelopes, while Palihapitiya summarized Pratt’s concern as an inability to audit the ballots.

Hilton described Pratt as second on election night, then narrowly displaced a week later by ballots counted afterward. Friedberg said a claim involving tens of thousands of fake ballots would require evidence. Pratt rejected that description: he was not claiming the ballots were fake. Calacanis characterized the issue as a process permitted by state law rather than necessarily fraud, and asked where the crime had occurred.

Pratt’s answer was that ballot collection could cross a line that ordinary campaigning could not. He said it was illegal to approach voters at a polling place to urge them to vote for a candidate, but that organizers could visit apartment buildings, return repeatedly and collect ballots under California’s ballot-harvesting rules. He said Democratic Socialists of America organizers might be paid or might volunteer as true believers, and described repeated visits as harassment. Friedberg asked whether anyone had filed a complaint; Pratt replied that people approached in this way might not be in a position to do so.

The speakers also disagreed about what the campaign could do in response. Pratt said he had tried legal ballot harvesting, but that a campaign making a single door-knocking visit would not match organizers who returned several times. Calacanis argued that Republicans might need to use the same legal mechanism to elect candidates in a heavily Democratic state. Pratt said he intended to use what he had learned in a future campaign.

Pratt separately claimed that ballots were mailed to people who had moved or died, and that hundreds had been delivered to an empty parking lot downtown. The exchange did not connect those claims to specific ballots in the mayoral count. What Pratt emphasized was his suspicion that the combination of ballot collection and the separation of ballots from envelopes made the process difficult to challenge. His answer to Friedberg’s direct question remained narrower: without evidence, he would not say fraud caused his loss.

For Pratt, the election was an extension of a fight over the fire and its aftermath. He said reservoirs near the Palisades remained empty, including one across the street from his house. He described a hose running from Topanga through regrown brush as the current water supply. He blamed state and local agencies for leaving dead brush around communities and said a firebreak 300 yards around the Palisades could have been cut for less than $500,000, according to a brush-clearing expert he said he had consulted.

Pratt said residents could not clear some of the brush themselves because it included protected plants, and pointed to a million-dollar fine he said the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power received after cutting dead brush near a downed pole. He also said insurers dropped residents after the fire, while attributing the underlying danger to government failures rather than insurers’ decisions.

He said he was part of a mass tort involving 10,000 victims against Governor Newsom, state parks, the city and the water department. His account focused on an earlier eight-acre fire on New Year’s Eve. Pratt said it was put out but not monitored as required by state park procedures, and that it smoldered before a wind event on January 6 and 7. He referred to firefighter whistleblowers and deposition testimony, saying state park employees had photographed smoke on the hillside but said they were not firefighters when asked why they did not act. He argued that state parks were liable for allowing a dangerous condition to burn down the community, and that the water department was responsible for empty reservoirs.

Pratt said he could not rebuild until the lawsuit was resolved. He described the suit as a way to make the record public and seek compensation, but said his initial effort to publicize what happened changed when Bass appeared likely to win another term. He said he called Rick Caruso, who declined to run, and decided to enter the mayoral race himself.

The experience also shaped his plans after the campaign. Pratt said he wanted to continue making videos because, in his view, news coverage often misrepresented what he saw happening in Los Angeles. He said he had three possible opportunities ahead but did not specify all of them. One idea from his mayoral campaign was to bring data centers to Skid Row in exchange for private investment in water pipes and electricity infrastructure. He said a data-center expert had discussed the possibility with him.

Pratt said he had two years to build relationships in Los Angeles communities before another potential mayoral run. He remained more concerned about Raman and the Democratic Socialists of America than about Bass, and urged people to read the organization’s website to understand its positions. He said the political work he intended to continue was not confined to Los Angeles: he had begun meeting people in New York because he wanted to resist what he saw as a wider political decline.

Hilton’s campaign paired promises to reduce costs with the claim that California could build again. Before leaving, he held up a document titled “10 New Cities for California” and said the state had the talent and energy to attract people to build businesses, homes and other projects. The proposal was not developed further in the discussion; Hilton’s more specific pledges were the proposed income-tax exemption, lower gasoline prices and a $73 vehicle-registration cap.

Pratt’s advice was to keep the campaign focused on common sense and practical concerns rather than Republican identity. Hilton’s early poll, as he described it, left 26 percent of voters open to persuasion, most of them people who had voted Democratic before. His cost-of-living proposals were aimed at that group. Pratt’s closing emphasis was turnout: “If people vote, Steve wins.” For Hilton, the challenge was persuading voters that change could improve their daily lives; for Pratt, it was getting them to participate rather than assume California could not change.