Who is Steve Hilton, the Briton who could become California’s next governor?

Still, the math remains grim for Hilton – not least because Donald Trump is in the White House, his approval ratings are scraping rock bottom, and 2026 is shaping up to be a tough year for any candidate with an R after their name.

Steve Hilton has presented himself as a more approachable kind of Republican. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

Hilton was endorsed by Trump and claims to be personal friends with many members of his cabinet – credentials that helped him leapfrog over the other significant Republican in the race, Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff. Now, though, he has to explain all that away in a state where Trump’s popularity runs about 10 points lower than the national average.

Judging by his appearances since election night, he has already begun the process of pivoting away from Trump and seeking to prove what he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail: that he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue, who can appeal to voters across the spectrum.

“When people say, how are you going to win in California as a Republican, my question is, how will a Democrat win, based on the record that they are putting before the people and offering no change at all?” he told reporters in Sacramento, the state capital, the day after the election. “We’re offering change, which is what a majority of Californians want.”

In the final weeks of the primary campaign, Hilton pointedly refused to give a straight answer when asked who had won the 2020 presidential election – a position widely interpreted as obeisance to Trump, who has refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden beat him fair and square at the end of his first presidential term.

Three days after the primary, however, Hilton had no difficulty saying what he and many other Republicans had previously struggled to. “Everybody knows that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” he told an LA public radio station.

Hilton has similarly distanced himself from Trump’s repeated, baseless claims that California’s elections are rigged. “I’m sure every other campaign has lawyers standing by, ready to act if there’s anything untoward,” he told the same radio host, “but so far we haven’t seen anything that meets that standard.”

Rather, Hilton has tied the slowness of California’s vote count to a broader critique of what he sees as a state crushed under the weight of its own unwieldy bureaucracy. “California can put satellites into space, build world-changing technology, and power the global economy, but somehow, the government can’t tell voters who won an election without making them wait weeks,” he said in one emailed statement.

“California has become the state of delays and excuses. High-speed rail, homelessness, housing, energy, and now elections,” he said in another.

During the campaign, Hilton appeared to relish the prospect of a run-off with Steyer, calling him even more extreme than California’s current governor and likely 2028 presidential contender, Gavin Newsom, who is deeply unpopular with Republicans across the country.

Supporters of Steve Hilton at his election night event in Huntington Beach, California, on 2 June. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

As a candidate promising sweeping change, though, Hilton is likely to find plenty of ways to attack Becerra, an establishment Democrat who came under repeated attack from his primary rivals for being ineffective in his prior roles as California attorney general and US health and human services secretary. On Tuesday Hilton called him “an amiable but unaccomplished establishment nonentity”.

Becerra has also had to fight off the shadow of a scandal involving his former chief of staff and a prominent California political consultant who, according to court pleadings, conspired to steal $225,000 from a dormant campaign account and use the money to top up the chief of staff’s salary. Becerra has repeatedly claimed he knew nothing about it.

One specter Steyer raised during his campaign was the prospect of Trump’s justice department indicting Becerra between now and November – a scenario that Becerra dismissed as “false and defamatory” since, he says, the FBI formally cleared him in its investigation.

Still, Hilton might need a scandal or some other political misfortune to beset Becerra if he is to buck the odds and become the first Republican to win statewide office in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger last won the governor’s race in 2006.

Hilton’s 25% share of the primary vote can seem impressive, given the crowded field and the fact that he led the polls for much of the last several months. It is, however, roughly the same share of the primary vote won by the 2018 Republican gubernatorial candidate, John Cox. Cox went on to lose to Newsom in a landslide, in another midterm election in which disenchantment with Trump loomed large.

And Hilton will not be immune to attacks of his own. When speaking to hardcore Republican audiences, he has vaunted his friendship with Charlie Kirk, the polarizing Republican youth leader shot dead last year who embraced the “great replacement” theory that sees immigrants as a threat to American national identity, among other extreme positions.

Hilton has also expressed skepticism about government vaccine mandates and supported the idea that “right-to-life” states could demand the extradition of California doctors who send abortion medications across state lines.

“The Trump endorsement that was the booster shot he needed … to make the top two will be the political equivalent of monkeypox in the run-off,” predicted Garry South, the veteran Democratic strategist. “Steve Hilton has as much chance of becoming governor as I do.”