Steve Hilton: It’s Now or Never for California. That’s Why I’m Running for Governor.

Steve Hilton, the charismatic media personality and expat from the UK, has worn many hats in his life: Fox News host, author, entrepreneur, adviser to British prime minister David Cameron, to name a few. Now he’s aiming to become California’s next governor, hoping to overturn what will have been 15 years of one-party rule in the state. I spoke to him recently about how California’s elites are destroying the state he loves, why business is under siege, and why he only uses a flip phone. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Batya Ungar-Sargon: I understand that you have some news you would like to share.

Steve Hilton: You are the first person to hear this from me officially: I am running for governor of California in 2026. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

We moved here from England in 2012. California always for me was just such an inspiration. Literally the best place on Earth, the encapsulation of everything that’s wonderful about America. But everyone can see it’s gone so badly offtrack. It’s barely recognizable even from where it was when we moved here in 2012. It’s just such a struggle for so many people, particularly working people.

That came so clear to me during the past two or three years of traveling the state and just meeting thousands and thousands of Californians who are so frustrated, who are struggling so much. A recent survey found over one third of Californians can’t meet their basic needs. It’s so bad, and it’s hidden because you have Democrats like Gavin Newsom, who goes on about how we’re the fifth biggest economy in the world. That’s true statistically, and I’m proud of that. But it’s a big economy that is really letting down working people. Seeing their struggles, I thought, “I’d like to play a part in solving them. This is my home and it’s being ruined.”

BUS: What would you say are the top three problems facing California?

SH: [laughs] There’s such a long list. I recently wrote a book called Califailure. The subtitle is Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State. I think that is indisputable. We have the highest housing costs in the country. For much of 2024, we had the highest unemployment rate in America. Right now, I believe we’re number two. We’ve had the worst business climate for 10 years in a row. So you go through the whole range of issues and it’s a complete disaster.

I think underlying it all, though, is this one-party rule by the Democrats. That’s the big problem. The combination of ideological extremism and total incompetence have combined to produce this insular, arrogant, ruling elite in Sacramento, totally detached from the impact of their policies. The scale of the nonsense that’s churned out ends up making it impossible to do anything in a sensible, effective, cost-efficient way in California. I think that’s what makes it so impossible to build anything in California.

BUS: Does that mean that you see your potential governorship more as a check on the limitless power of Democratic rule rather than having a set of policies that you’re excited to enact?

SH: No, I’ve got a very clear set of plans on all the big issues. To take one example: energy policy. In the name of climate, the Democrats have increasingly shut down our in-state energy industry in California. A few decades ago, we produced most of the oil and gas we use right here in California—roughly 80 percent. There are no oil pipelines coming into California, so either we produce it here or we ship it in. It used to be about 20 percent was shipped in. Now that’s reversed. But we are barely using any less oil and gas. So they’re now shipping it in on giant supertankers from halfway across the world, spewing out carbon emissions. So in the name of climate, they are increasing carbon emissions while crushing working people in the Central Valley around Bakersfield, where our oil energy industry is located. That’s just one example.

BUS: Is that something that the governor could easily reverse?

SH: None of it is going to be easy. But my point is that we are now in a situation where the scale of the suffering—the poverty, the failure in our public schools, the fact that Latino families in particular are being crushed by this inability to climb the ladder of opportunity—is an emergency for working people.

It’s an ideological experiment: They’ve turned California into the Wuhan Lab of far-left extremism, and they’ve been cooking up this ideological virus. And now the results are in. It’s been a total disaster. We have to turn things around, and one way or another, as governor, I’ll get it done. Even though the Democrats control the legislature in California, I would expect that they would want to implement the changes that I argue for, which are common sense: great jobs, great homes, great kids. Let’s get rid of the insane burden of tax and regulation, which is making it unaffordable for anyone to live here, and impossible to start a business.

BUS: Why do you think Californians have been so willing for so long to put up with such terrible leadership?

SH: I think the pain and the impact of these policies now is so severe that people are really waking up. This is why I say we have the best shot in 20 years, because things are changing.

BUS: Someone who seems to have gotten the memo is Gavin Newsom. He has a new podcast where he seems to be trying to reposition himself as a moderate. Have you listened to his podcast?

SH: [laughs] Bits of it. When my book came out, we approached Gavin to see if he would invite me onto his podcast to discuss whether he agreed that California is the worst-run state in America. But for some inexplicable reason, he didn’t want to do that.

It shows the total detachment of this ruling elite in California from the real world. In early March, Newsom agreed with Charlie Kirk that biological men in girls’ sports is “deeply unfair.” But just a couple of weeks after he said that, there were two bills in the California legislature to remedy the situation by Republican state legislators. He had a perfect opportunity to act on his strongly expressed view. He did nothing, absolutely nothing, to try and advance that legislation.

BUS: Thanks to term limits, Newsom can’t run again. Who are you most hoping to run against?

SH: Well, of course it would be wonderful to run against Kamala Harris, because she’s an absolutely disastrous candidate. I think a lot of people will be very energized to beat her again. It comes back to this arrogant, insular, entitled, ruling-elite mentality. The reasons that are put out there about why she might run are, for example, that she doesn’t want her final act in public life to be certifying Donald Trump’s election victory. Or she’s “intrigued” by the possibility of becoming the first black female governor. It’s just all self-regarding, narcissistic, no concern about the actual problems caused by her policies and how they’re crushing working people, crushing small business in particular.

BUS: You were born to an immigrant family; you experienced economic hardship as a child. How did that inform your political journey?

SH: It was a working-class family. I wouldn’t call it poverty, but we didn’t have a lot of money. My parents are Hungarian, my stepfather’s Hungarian, my dad and mom split up when I was young, and then he went back to Hungary. My mom worked in a shoe store. My stepdad worked construction. I would go with him to the construction sites. It was a very, very regular working-class family.

We would go back to Hungary during the years of communism, as I was developing my thinking and really developing an awareness of what communism really meant. I think the first thing that really built up in me was a real rage against arrogant, unaccountable bureaucracy and elitism, telling people what to do, telling people how to think, telling them how to live. I reflect on it a lot now, given what’s happening in America.

BUS: You were a researcher for Margaret Thatcher, and then you worked on policy for Prime Minister David Cameron. You were instrumental in combining better, more efficient social welfare with anti-establishment deregulation that seems a lot like what Trump is up to. Do you agree?

SH: I was very focused on trying to develop a policy agenda and a political strategy that captured the aspirations of working people, but also the dynamism and energy that had been crushed by years and years of Labor overregulation and taxation. One of the things that we worked on was trying to cut bureaucracy and red tape. I remember Tony Blair once telling me, “You’ve got to understand that the senior officials, the bureaucracy, the civil servants, they genuinely believe that it is their patriotic duty to stop you from doing what you want to do. Because they see themselves as the guardians of the national interest, there to resist those who are here today, gone tomorrow, politicians with their stupid schemes.” And I think there are a lot of lessons there for California.

BUS: California has a terrible housing shortage. Some experts believe that the way to alleviate the pressure on housing is through rezoning efforts. The New York Times reported that your wife wrote a letter to the City Council in 2022 opposing rezoning efforts. Do you support rezoning as a way of making housing more affordable and more accessible?

SH: The central point I would make on housing is that we’ve got to end the war on single-family homes. That’s what’s really driving the housing crisis in California. And you’ve seen over a hundred bills in the legislature in the last few years trying to create different incentives to build apartments instead. This comes back to where we started in terms of bureaucrats telling people how to live and what to do. They are trying to force a completely un-Californian way of life onto California. Only five percent of our land is developed if you add it all up together. There’s so much space to build. People want single-family homes, but it’s blocked by this ideology that single-family homes are bad. They call it sprawl. I call it the California Dream.

BUS: You and your wife seem very supportive of each other. She has worked for Google, Uber, and Netflix. Does her work present a potential conflict of interest?

SH: I think the fact that we are talking about it openly removes that as an issue. I’ve never been anything other than incredibly proud and supportive of her career. She’s had a fantastic, stellar career, and everyone can see that. I don’t think there’s anything there that I’ve ever had the slightest concern about.

BUS: You don’t have a smartphone. Tell me about that.

SH: Goodness. Okay. I lived in the UK when the iPhone came out. I didn’t get one. I didn’t particularly like the screen. So I persisted for years with my Nokia phone, the classic little brick, which I very happily used, and that’s how I communicated. I would text a lot.

After we moved to California in 2012, I tried to get the same little Nokia here but it wasn’t available any more. My former assistant in 10 Downing Street would find versions of the same phone on eBay and send them in a packet and then I would try and use it here, but it was a UK plan. It was very expensive. The whole thing was a disaster. Then I went to the beach one day and sand got in my pocket, and the charging thing got blocked with sand, so I couldn’t use it anymore.

Maybe a week or so later, I was cycling to Stanford to get ready for the new term. And I just suddenly realized, It’s been a week and I don’t have a phone and it’s been fine. So I just reflected on that. Well, I’m sure I’ll get one, I remember thinking, I’ll get one by Christmas or the new year. And then by the time that came around, I really enjoyed not having one. So it started off as a kind of accident, and then it really became a choice. So that was 2012. And I really stuck with that until recently when I’ve been on the road a lot.

BUS: So now you have a flip phone.

SH: Yes. If you want, I can go and get it.

BUS: Smartphones are the sickness of our time and you just don’t have it.

SH: That’s right. We have two boys, and I didn’t want them to have phones. So I thought in a way it was modeling that behavior.

BUS: Is there anything else that the people of California should know about you?

SH: I’ll tell you one thing I think I feel incredibly strongly about. Every business in every sector is being assaulted by this government bureaucracy and regulation and process and permits and procedures and inspections and fees and taxes. But there’s one industry in particular that I always come back to, which is our agriculture industry. Here in California, we have the most fertile agricultural land in the world. And what we grow in California is the good stuff. It’s fruit and produce and nuts, healthy things that we should be eating. What the Democrat machine is doing is deliberately crushing this industry that they see as an enemy.

It breaks my heart. Every time I’m in the Central Valley, it reminds me of my family’s roots in Hungary. The Democrats have totally lost touch with regular working people and I think there’s no better example than our farmers, who we should be absolutely supporting, and who will feed the world and help make America healthy again.

For more coverage of politics in California, read Michael Shellenberger’s piece here:

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