The Golden State Without a Leader:
California governor race: Who are the candidates
California's Historic Wide-Open Governor Race
California stands at a crossroads unlike any in recent memory. With Governor Gavin Newsom constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, the nation's most populous state is navigating its most uncertain gubernatorial primary in a generation. A field of eleven candidates — eight Democrats, two Republicans, and one Green Party contender — is competing for the right to lead California beginning in 2027, yet not a single candidate has cracked 20 percent support in any major poll. Affordability, homelessness, the state budget, the Trump administration's immigration raids, and the fight over California's identity are all in play.
The race is defined by one structural danger for Democrats: California's top-two primary system sends the two highest vote-getters to the November general election regardless of party. With eight Democrats splitting the progressive vote, two Republicans — Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, both Trump supporters who have consistently led the polls — could theoretically advance to face each other in November, locking Democrats out of the general election entirely for the first time in the modern era. Statistical models put the odds of that outcome at 20 to 27 percent, depending on how many Democrats remain in the race through June 2. Democratic Party chair Rusty Hicks has called on lower-polling candidates to withdraw by April 15. None have done so yet.
The primary debate landscape has also been turbulent. A debate scheduled at USC was abruptly canceled after its exclusion criteria drew fierce backlash for leaving out every candidate of color. A Nexstar Media televised debate is now scheduled for April 22, using a 5 percent polling threshold that will include only five candidates: Hilton, Bianco, Swalwell, Porter, and Steyer. Mail-in voting begins in early May, meaning candidates have a shrinking window to break through with voters who remain, by every measure, remarkably disengaged.
What follows is a comprehensive guide to each candidate's qualifications, platform, and standing, ordered by their current polling position as measured by the most authoritative recent surveys.
Latest Polling — Polling Average, March 2026
Candidate Profiles — By Polling Standing
| # | Candidate | Poll | Background | Platform & Key Issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
Steve Hilton
Republican
RepublicanFormer Fox News Host & UK PM Adviser stevehiltonforgovernor.com |
~16% | Hungarian-born British immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley in 2012; former senior adviser to UK PM David Cameron; Fox News host; author of Califailure. Running on a joint ticket with former CA Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero. Backed by Rupert Murdoch. |
NoteHas challenged Swalwell's residency eligibility; opposes use of public funds for out-of-state abortion travel.
|
| 2 |
Chad Bianco
Republican
RepublicanRiverside County Sheriff (2019–present) biancoforgovernor.com |
~14% | Rose through Riverside County Sheriff's ranks; elected sheriff 2018, re-elected 2022. Gained national profile refusing COVID mandates. Leads all candidates among No Party Preference voters (26.8% in IVP poll). Affiliated with Constitutional Sheriffs movement; endorsed Trump 2024. |
NoteSeized
~650,000 Prop. 50 ballots for recount; drew AG Rob Bonta pushback.
Critics note Riverside County's crime-clearance rate is last among CA's
57 sheriffs at 9.2%.
|
| 3 |
Eric Swalwell
Democrat
DemocratU.S. Rep., CA-14 (2013–present) ericswalwell.com |
~13% | Former Alameda County prosecutor; Dublin City Council; seven-term congressman. Led Trump impeachment management after Jan. 6. Brief 2019 presidential run. Endorsed by Sen. Adam Schiff and SEIU California — the two most significant endorsements in the race. Late entrant (Nov. 2025). |
NoteRivals
dispute his California residency (5-year constitutional requirement).
Attacked from left for congressional vote extending "gratitude" to law
enforcement including ICE.
|
| 4 |
Katie Porter
Democrat
DemocratFormer U.S. Rep., CA-47; Law Professor, UCI katieporter.com |
~11% | Consumer protection attorney; first Democrat ever to represent CA-47 (Orange County). Famous for whiteboard congressional questioning of executives. Lost 2024 U.S. Senate primary. Was early frontrunner (18% in Aug. 2025) before viral interview controversy. Still holds major union support. |
NoteTwo
videos — one walking out of a TV interview, one berating a staffer on
Zoom — went viral in late 2025, dropping her from the top of polls. Has
apologized; major backers remain.
|
| 5 |
Tom Steyer
Democrat
DemocratBillionaire Investor; Former 2020 Presidential Candidate tomsteyer.com |
~10% | Founder of Farallon Capital hedge fund; spent $253M on failed 2020 presidential bid. One of America's largest political donors to progressive causes. Has self-funded an estimated $80M+ on this race, blanketing TV and radio — yet polling remains modest, suggesting ad saturation without voter conviction. |
NoteFiled
complaint with CA Secretary of State challenging Swalwell's residency.
Attacked by Swalwell as "spending $100 million lying." Past hedge fund
conflicts of interest likely to resurface.
|
| 6 |
Xavier Becerra
Democrat
DemocratFormer U.S. HHS Secretary; Former CA Attorney General becerraforgovernor.com |
~4% | 20+ years in Congress; California's first Latino AG (2017–2021), filing 100+ suits against first Trump term; Biden's HHS Secretary (2021–2025). Deepest combination of legislative, legal, and executive experience in the field — yet surveys show roughly 30–49% of Democratic voters have never heard of him. |
|
| 7 |
Antonio Villaraigosa
Democrat
DemocratFormer Mayor of Los Angeles (2005–2013) antoniov.com |
~4% | Former CA Assembly Speaker; 41st Mayor of Los Angeles; co-chaired Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign and the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Lost 2018 governor's primary to Newsom. Endorsed by LA Mayor Karen Bass and (after her first choice withdrew) former Sen. Barbara Boxer. |
NotePredicts Trump will endorse one Republican, consolidating their vote — a scenario he says breaks the two-Republican threat.
|
| 8 |
Matt Mahan
Democrat
DemocratMayor of San Jose (2023–present) mattmahan.com |
~3% | Founded civic tech company Brigade Media; elected San Jose mayor 2023, achieving one-third reduction in street homelessness. Last major candidate to enter (Jan. 2026). Raised millions quickly from Silicon Valley tech executives including billionaire developer Rick Caruso. Overperforms among independents and anti-establishment voters. |
|
| 9 |
Betty Yee
Democrat
DemocratFormer CA State Controller (2015–2023) bettyyee.com |
~2% | Two-term State Controller; chaired Franchise Tax Board; sat on CalPERS and CalSTRS boards; former state budget director under Gov. Gray Davis; current CA Democratic Party vice chair. Raised only $342K in second half of 2025 — less than some Assembly campaigns — while spending more than she raised. |
|
| 10 |
Tony Thurmond
Democrat
DemocratCA Superintendent of Public Instruction (2019–present) tonythurmond.com |
~2% | Only candidate currently holding statewide office. Former social worker who grew up on public assistance; two terms in CA Assembly; re-elected Superintendent 2022. Raised only $181K in second half of 2025. Publicly accused the CA Democratic Party of using the dropout push to target candidates of color. |
|
| 11 |
Butch Ware
Green Party
Green PartyUC Santa Barbara Professor Green Party CA |
~2% | Associate professor of African and Islamic history at UC Santa Barbara. Green Party's 2024 vice-presidential nominee alongside Jill Stein. Only third-party candidate in the race; no third-party candidate has ever advanced through California's top-two primary to the general election. |
|
The Strategic Picture: What Happens Next
With California's top-two primary on June 2 and mail-in voting beginning in early May, the race is approaching its decisive phase. No candidate has yet broken through with a majority of voters — or even close. The Berkeley IGS poll's Mark DiCamillo called voter disengagement "historic," noting that not a single major candidate is viewed more positively than negatively across the statewide electorate.
The core structural dynamic is this: Republicans are unified and disciplined. Their vote is split only between two candidates, Hilton and Bianco, who together capture the roughly 35–40 percent of California voters who reliably vote Republican in statewide contests. Democrats, meanwhile, have eight candidates diluting their 60-percent registration advantage into fragments too small to guarantee top-two advancement. The statistical models run by multiple analysts put the odds of an all-Republican November runoff at 20–27 percent.
California Democratic Party chair Rusty Hicks has set an April 15 deadline for lower-polling candidates to exit. Whether any will comply — given the political incentives to remain, including fundraising, future positioning, and, in some cases, genuine conviction that their candidacy represents underserved constituencies — remains the central open question in the race. The Nexstar debate on April 22 will include only the five polling above 5 percent: Hilton, Bianco, Swalwell, Porter, and Steyer. How those five perform on that stage could reshape a race that, even at this late stage, has yet to produce a true frontrunner.
The System, The Irony & The Coming Consolidation
Background & Qualifications
Steve Hilton, of Hungarian descent, was born in the United Kingdom and has lived in California since 2012 after relocating to Silicon Valley for his wife's position at Google. He became a U.S. citizen after arriving and served as a senior strategy adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012. He subsequently founded a tech company and hosted The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton on Fox News until departing to run for governor. In 2025 he published Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America's Worst-Run State, which became the de facto manifesto for his campaign. He announced his candidacy in April 2025 and is running alongside former California Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero as a declared joint ticket — an unusual arrangement since California holds separate elections for governor and lieutenant governor.
Campaign Platform
Hilton has framed his entire campaign around what he calls a "Califordable" agenda — reducing the cost of living through tax cuts, deregulation, and energy policy reform. His signature tax proposal would exempt the first $100,000 of income from California state income tax. On energy, he pledges to cut electricity bills in half and lower gasoline prices to under $3 per gallon by expanding production and cutting mandates. He wants to slash the state budget, which he argues has grown by 50 percent after inflation over the last decade with worsening outcomes. He is opposed to the proposed "billionaires tax" being advanced by unions, calling it "an asset seizure" that is "totally unworkable." On housing, he has pledged to restore the California dream of single-family homeownership.
On public safety, Hilton calls for full enforcement of laws against homelessness, open-air drug use, shoplifting, and violent crime, saying law enforcement must be fully supported. He is strongly pro-law enforcement and backed by the California Republican Party's law-and-order wing. On immigration, Hilton — himself a legal immigrant — has pledged to end all sanctuary state policies, saying he would make California "a clear and willing partner with the federal government" on all immigration enforcement. He would oppose the use of public funds for out-of-state abortion travel and says he wants to move California "toward life in ways that are achievable and realistic" while being less specific on the overall abortion question than some conservatives.
Hilton's Trump alignment is his central liability in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one. His campaign has argued the governor's race is "not about President Trump — it's about the lives of people in California." Critics in his own camp warn that vote-splitting between Hilton and Chad Bianco could deny Republicans a spot in the November runoff. He has also raised questions about Swalwell's California residency, a charge the Swalwell campaign disputes. Hilton has both the highest and the lowest favorability of the top candidates depending on the partisan lens — well above water with Republicans, deeply underwater with Democrats and many independents.
Background & Qualifications
Chad Bianco began his career as a line law enforcement officer before rising through the ranks to become Riverside County Sheriff in 2018, a post to which he was re-elected in 2022. He gained national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic for declaring he would not enforce the county's mask mandate, making him a hero of the California anti-mandate movement. He has cast himself as "the antithesis of California state government," pledging in colorful terms to "take a nuclear bomb" into Sacramento and "destroy everything they do behind closed doors." His campaign is endorsed by several law enforcement groups and the California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA), the same organization backing Hilton, creating endorsement competition between the two Republicans.
In a controversial move that drew national attention, Bianco seized approximately 650,000 ballots cast in the 2025 Proposition 50 special election for a recount, prompting sharp pushback from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who accused him of overstepping his authority. Bianco has framed the action as a defense of election integrity. A particularly notable strength: among No Party Preference (independent) voters, Bianco leads all candidates at 26.8 percent in the IVP poll, making him the strongest crossover Republican in the field.
Campaign Platform
Bianco's platform centers on restoring what he calls the "California Dream" through a combination of tax elimination, deregulation, and immigration enforcement. He has called for eliminating the state income tax and gas tax entirely — a more aggressive fiscal position than Hilton. He argues that overregulation has devastated California's business environment and pledges to be a Trump-aligned governor willing to cooperate fully with federal immigration enforcement. He wants to overturn California's sanctuary law and has been vocal about the need for strong enforcement against illegal immigration. He supports the California tech sector and has attempted to appeal to business-minded voters frustrated with Sacramento's regulatory environment.
The ballot seizure controversy over Prop. 50 has generated significant legal and political blowback. Attorney General Rob Bonta criticized the action as an improper use of law enforcement authority. More broadly, Bianco and Hilton's neck-and-neck polling numbers have alarm bells ringing among California Republicans, who fear that a split GOP vote could allow both Republicans to cancel each other out — ensuring only Democrats advance to November. Reform California has explicitly warned Republican voters of this scenario and urged strategic voting.
Background & Qualifications
Eric Swalwell, an Iowa native raised in Dublin, California, began his career as a prosecutor in Alameda County before being elected to the Dublin City Council and then to Congress in 2012, representing a Bay Area district east of San Francisco. Now in his seventh term, he serves on the House Intelligence Committee and was selected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi as one of four impeachment managers in President Trump's second impeachment trial following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He launched a short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. He entered the governor's race in November 2025, one day after Tom Steyer announced his own candidacy, and immediately gained significant traction, earning endorsements from U.S. Senator Adam Schiff — the most prominent Senate endorsement in the race — and the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California.
Campaign Platform
Swalwell's central message is that California's governor has two essential jobs: protecting Californians from the Trump administration and bringing a "new California" that addresses affordability. He emphasizes his record as a Trump antagonist, noting that his January 6 lawsuit against Trump survived into Trump's second presidency. He is running on lowering prices, addressing the housing crisis, and defending healthcare access. He has proposed requiring ICE agents to remove masks and display official identification during operations — a response to immigration raids across Los Angeles that sparked violent protests. He argues that he is the Democrat best positioned to fight Trump in court and in the courts of public opinion simultaneously.
His candidacy has attracted fierce attacks from rivals on multiple fronts. Tom Steyer's campaign filed a letter with the California Secretary of State arguing Swalwell does not meet the state constitutional five-year residency requirement for governor — a charge his campaign disputes, noting the Secretary of State has stated the provision is unenforceable. Katie Porter has attacked him from the left for a congressional vote that expressed "gratitude" to law enforcement including ICE. Steyer has spent heavily on digital advertising mocking Swalwell for missing congressional votes, using footage Swalwell's campaign says was taken during the government shutdown. The California Federation of Labor split its endorsement four ways — between Swalwell, Steyer, Porter, and Villaraigosa — in an unusual multi-candidate decision reflecting the fragmented field.
Swalwell has faced questions about his California residency — a legal requirement for governor — with opponents arguing he lives primarily in Washington, D.C. His campaign disputes this vigorously. He has also been attacked for missed congressional votes and for the ICE-related congressional resolution. His rapid rise in polling has made him the primary target for attack ads from both parties.
Background & Qualifications
Katie Porter became the first Democrat ever to represent California's 47th congressional district (historically a Republican-leaning Orange County seat) when she was elected as part of the 2018 "blue wave." A former consumer protection attorney and law professor at UC Irvine School of Law, she became nationally famous for her signature whiteboard questioning of corporate executives, financial regulators, and Trump cabinet officials, making her a prominent figure on the progressive left. She ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2024, losing in the top-two primary. She announced her gubernatorial candidacy and was the early frontrunner, polling as high as 18 percent in mid-2025 before her numbers began declining following two damaging videos.
Campaign Platform
Porter is running on a platform that blends aggressive resistance to the Trump administration with concrete proposals to address California's affordability crisis. On housing, she has argued that California must build faster: "If California would build housing at the same speed that our competitor states do, we could take almost 20% off the cost of housing." She has called for abolishing ICE — a position to her left of Swalwell and Steyer — and attacked Swalwell for a congressional vote she characterized as pro-ICE. She has been a consistent voice warning Democrats about the risk of a fragmented primary enabling Republican advancement to November. On healthcare, Porter has emphasized the need to protect Californians from federal Medicaid cuts and ACA subsidy expiration. The California Federation of Labor included her in its four-candidate shared endorsement, and she retains support from the major unions that originally backed her, who have stayed loyal despite her polling decline.
Two videos — one showing Porter attempting to walk out of a TV interview, the second capturing her berating a staff member on a Zoom call — went viral in late 2025. Although Porter apologized and most major supporters stayed with her, her favorability ratings dropped and her polling position fell from the top of the Democratic field. She has acknowledged the incidents and sought to move past them. Her campaign contends she remains the "strongest Democrat" in the race based on grassroots support and coalition depth.
The System, The Irony & The Coming Consolidation
A Republican Idea, Not a Democratic One. There is a widespread assumption — worth correcting before it hardens into conventional wisdom — that California's top-two primary system was engineered by Democrats to entrench their dominance. The historical record runs in the opposite direction. Proposition 14, which created the top-two system in June 2010, was authored by a Republican: State Senator Abel Maldonado, a moderate Republican from the 15th district, who negotiated the measure's placement on the ballot as the price of his decisive vote to break the state's budget impasse. Its most prominent public backer was Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both major political parties formally opposed it, as did most of California's labor unions, the ACLU, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association — a rare bipartisan coalition of opposition that crossed from progressive to libertarian-conservative. The California Democratic Party, along with the Republican Party, viewed the measure as an infringement on their constitutional right to select their own nominees, a concern the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000) when it struck down a similar blanket primary. Proposition 14 passed with 54 percent of the vote, driven largely by voters fed up with partisan gridlock in Sacramento — not by partisan engineering from either party headquarters.
The system was designed with a different irony in mind: its backers hoped it would moderate California politics by forcing candidates of both parties to appeal beyond their base. The explicit goal, as stated in the measure's official arguments, was to "reduce gridlock by electing the best candidates to state office and Congress, regardless of political party" and to give independent voters an equal voice. Early evidence suggested it was modestly achieving that goal, producing some more centrist legislators who needed to court voters across party lines. No one in 2010 imagined that sixteen years later the system's unintended consequence might be handing California's governorship to the Republican Party for the first time since 2006.
The Unintended Trap. The trap that Democrats now find themselves in is entirely of their own making — a consequence not of the system's design but of their failure to manage their field. California's registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly two-to-one. In a traditional primary, one of their eight candidates would emerge as the nominee and almost certainly win the general election in November. The top-two system changes nothing about that underlying math — if Democrats consolidate. The problem is that eight candidates splitting 60 percent of the electorate into fragments is mathematically equivalent to having no candidate at all if the two Republicans, sharing a disciplined 35-to-40 percent, both clear the threshold. The California Democratic Party's own internal poll, conducted March 12–17, confirmed the danger: Hilton and Bianco in first and second place. Berkeley IGS director Mark DiCamillo, with decades of California polling experience, has called voter disengagement in this race "historic." Not one major candidate currently holds a net-positive favorability rating statewide.
What the Party is Doing — and Why It May Not Be Enough. The California Democratic Party is not standing still. Party chair Rusty Hicks set an April 15 deadline for lower-polling candidates to exit and consolidate behind the leading Democrats. The California Federation of Labor, one of the most powerful institutional forces in state Democratic politics, has issued an unusual four-way split endorsement — giving shared backing to Swalwell, Steyer, Porter, and Villaraigosa — effectively acknowledging it cannot choose a single champion. The Nexstar debate on April 22, using a 5 percent threshold, will structurally exclude Becerra, Villaraigosa, Mahan, Yee, and Thurmond from the most-watched confrontation before mail voting opens in early May — a de facto party pressure campaign that may accelerate exits.
Behind the scenes, the party's wealthiest donors, major unions, and allied interest groups — what CalMatters has called "the unions and oligarchs who call the shots" — are almost certainly in active negotiations. The history of California Democratic politics suggests that these institutional forces will eventually succeed in narrowing the field. In every modern gubernatorial cycle, a fragmented early race has eventually coalesced around one or two Democratic champions. In 2018, Gavin Newsom and Republican John Cox advanced from a field of nearly a dozen major candidates. In 2010, Jerry Brown consolidated the Democratic field. The machine has never failed to produce a general election Democrat — yet.
But the Clock Is Running. What is different in 2026 is timing and institutional authority. The deadline pressure is real: mail ballots drop in early May, meaning candidates who linger through April do genuine damage. The five lower-tier Democrats — Becerra, Villaraigosa, Mahan, Yee, and Thurmond — collectively hold roughly 15 to 18 percent of the vote in most surveys. If even a significant portion of that support shifted to Swalwell or another leading Democrat, the top-two dynamic could shift decisively. But each of those candidates has financial backing, political ambitions beyond this race, constituencies they believe they uniquely represent, and — in at least some cases — genuine conviction that their policy perspectives would be lost from the November debate. Several have explicitly argued that the party's consolidation push is disproportionately targeting candidates of color: Thurmond accused the party of effectively telling "every candidate of color in the race for governor to drop out."
The deeper irony is this: a system created by a Republican legislator to moderate California politics and empower independent voters may now deliver its most consequential result yet — potentially forcing Democrats to answer a question they have avoided for a decade. Is their dominance of California governance the product of genuine voter preference, or the product of a field-management apparatus that has so far prevented the kind of fragmentation now threatening to overwhelm them? If Hilton or Bianco reaches the November ballot — let alone if two Republicans advance together — the answer will be written, loudly, in the returns.
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