Why Republicans are surging in two major California elections

Forget the Congressional midterm elections and the just-starting-to-simmer 2028 presidential election. The real action in U.S. politics this year is in California. The Golden State is at an inflection point, the outcomes of which could prove historic. For the first time in two decades, there are serious Republican contenders for the governor’s office. For the first time in more than three decades, there’s a serious Republican contender for Mayor of Los Angeles.

This isn’t the result of a political realignment. The state didn’t suddenly lurch rightward. Despite current polling that has MAGA Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco in first and third places in the governor’s race, it remains a long shot that either of them could actually win in a general election. Despite polling in second place for L.A. Mayor, Republican Spencer Pratt remains a long shot, too.

And yet.

“Long shot” doesn’t mean “no shot.” In fact, with each passing week, those long shots are catching up a little bit more. A poll released today shows Pratt surging from 15% to 22% in just a few weeks. Barring a June surprise (like, you know, the Democrats’ fine-tuned, thoroughly shady, probably criminal ballot harvesting machine) we are almost certainly looking at a November run-off between Pratt and the incumbent, Karen Bass. 

This is the best the Democrats have to offer?

Thanks to her hideous mismanagement before, during, and after the January 2025 Palisades Fire, the continuing homelessness crisis in which she hasn’t made a dent, and the general sense that on her watch the city has entered an accelerating death spiral, Bass is historically unpopular.

Personally, I never understood why she ran for the job in the first place, except as a consolation prize after Joe Biden passed her over for Vice President or a cabinet position. At least Eric Garcetti pretended to like being Mayor. Bass consistently comes off as borderline resentful, like she fancies herself above the job she sought and got.

The third candidate polling in double digits is L.A. city councilwoman Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Like Bass, I have a hard time understanding why she jumped into the race. She actually endorsed Bass earlier this year, then pulled papers at the last minute to run herself. She hasn’t distinguished herself on council, except to refuse to enforce a law in her district that allows homeless encampments near schools to be cleared. Meanwhile, her own two children attend the exclusive, $40,000 a year Curtis School up on Mulholland Drive above Bel Air; they’ll never have to worry about vagrants near their campus.

A couple of other Dems are in the race but polling in the low single digits. They actually help Pratt’s odds: Rae Chen Huang is another Democratic Socialist who will siphon a few votes from Raman, and tech entrepreneur Andrew Miller — who has poured $2.5 million of his own money into a race no one has heard of — is running as a centrist and will pull votes from Bass, whom low information voters think is a moderate, too.

If the Democrats’ field for L.A. Mayor is desultory, their candidates for Governor are positively turgid. With the exception of San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and billionaire investor and born again environmental crusader Tom Steyer, they’re a bunch of out-of-work career politicians. Allegations of sexual misconduct knocked the leading candidate, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell — who looks exactly like the kind of guy who would engage in such behavior — out of the race.

This week, the currently leading Democrat, Xavier Becerra, is being rocked by a scandal of his own, involving a former campaign aide allegedly embezzling $225,000. Becerra has been in politics for 35 years, including stints in the state legislature and Congress. He served as California Attorney General and was appointed by Joe Biden as Secretary of Health and Human Services. And no one can name a single thing he’s accomplished. His own former White House staff and colleagues have criticized his job performance, particularly his ineffectual response to the COVID crisis.

Finally, the less said about former Rep. Katie Porter, the better.

After two decades of almost complete control over L.A. and California, this is the best the Democrats have to offer.

On one hand, Republicans shouldn’t get too excited. In the governor’s race, Hilton and Bianco combined are polling around 35%, which is consistent with Republican performances in every election since Arnold Schwarzenegger won reelection in 2006. On the other hand, if either of them advances to the general election — and it seems likely that Hilton will — he will have five or six months to make his case. Likewise, Bass seems unlikely to cross the 50% + 1 threshold necessary to avoid a run-off. Prat will have time to make his case, too.

How did we get here?

How did we get here? In my estimation, it’s simple: California Democrat politicians are failing to read the room. Even before the January 2025 wildfires, L.A. voters were restive. The political class has put us through a crucible over the last decade, from a homelessness crisis that has cost billions only to metastasize from a serious problem to a humanitarian crisis of historic proportions, to overly-restrictive COVID lockdowns, George Floyd riots that hit the city particularly hard, crumbling infrastructure, a Leviathan public bureaucracy that increasingly fails to provide even basic services, and a general sense that things are spiraling out of control.

It’s so bad that the city literally cannot even keep the lights on, with thieves stripping the copper wiring out of street lights and even traffic lights. On any given night some 40% of the city’s lights are dark. 

I’ve visited a lot of cities in third world countries. You know what they all had in common? Functioning street lights. The lights were on at night along the dirt roads in Arusha, Tanzania. They were on in Tuzluca, a small town in eastern Turkey a few miles from the Armenian border. They were on in Phuket, Thailand and Lombok, Indonesia.

In Hancock Park? Not so much. On the new, $600 million Sixth Street Bridge? Nope.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this failure. And Karen Bass’s response is, somehow, even worse: She wants voters to approve a citywide ballot measure in November that will triple property owners’ street light assessment fees. She wants the people to pay for her failure.

Likewise, when business groups floated a proposal to temporarily suspend the city’s business tax, providing desperately-needed relief to small businesses in particular that have been hammered over the last six years, Bass said, “eliminating the business task would eliminate the LAFD.”

Excuse my language, but the absolute fucking gall of this woman. The same person who went to war with LAFD leadership as the flames raged in the Palisades, the same person who cut the department’s budget by millions, is now holding the department hostage because she needs the money.

The absolute fucking gall. It’s no wonder a former reality TV star with no political experience is surging in the race. Angelenos’ experiences are playing out in cities statewide. It’s no wonder that two MAGA Republicans are surging in the governor’s race.

Democrats need to own up to some grim realities

If the Democrats were smart, they’d start reading the room. They’d realize that they cannot declare themselves the “resistance” to Trump when their own failed policies are hurting millions of people, including millions of first and second generation immigrants about whom they claim to care so much. Their “sanctuary” policies come off as purely performative in a state that’s tied with Louisiana for the nation’s worst poverty rate.

Likewise, their paeans to progressivism ring hollow when their policies allowed as many as 10,000 homeless people to die last year, many in horrific ways. In the last ten years of California’s homelessness crisis, somewhere between 50,000 to 75,000 people have died. If we go back to the start of the crisis in the early 2000s, it’s entirely possible that the death toll exceeds 100,000. To put that in perspective, during the ten year Vietnam War 52,873 U.S. soldiers died. And Vietnam is widely viewed as one of the most tragic policy failures in U.S. history.

Similarly, we will likely never know the true, final death toll from the wildfires that have ravaged the state since 2018. The people who died in the fires themselves, as horrible and tragic as those deaths were, are a fraction of the final count.

According to researchers at Boston University, by August 2025 the death toll from the Palisades Fire stood at 440. The additional deaths are due to the long term effects of smoke inhalation, as well as stress induced cardiac events, suicide, and other causes. In the coming years the figure will rise into the thousands. Ditto for other major wildfires.

There’s a model staring them in the face

The truly crazy thing is, the Democrats have a prototype of success staring them in the face. His name is Daniel Lurie, the Mayor of San Francisco. He ran as an unabashedly pro-business, pro-law and order moderate, and he’s largely governed as such. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Lurie’s (I’ve met him a handful of times; my mother and his stepmother are friends), but credit where credit is due.

Aside from the fact that he’s a YIMBY, he’s having success in restoring San Francisco from a 25 year malaise that began when Gavin Newsom was mayor in the early 2000s. He’s forcing homeless encampment clean-ups and reinvigorating the police department. He’s working to attract new businesses to the city’s moribund downtown.

His tenure hasn’t been without controversies. He’s doled out city contracts to companies controlled by people close to him. Like most big city California Democrat mayors, he’s currently taking fire for a massive shortfall in the city’s budget (never underestimate the ability of even moderate Democrats to spend the people’s money recklessly). And while street homelessness seems to be on the decline, the number of homeless families in the city has increased by 15% on his watch.

Nevertheless, he’s doing a lot better than his peers and counterparts. If a centrist with the support of party stalwarts like Willie Brown can win office in loony left Frisco, it’s possible anywhere.

Instead, much of the rest of the party seems content with continued unforced errors and self-inflicted wounds. Unless they do that soul searching, Republican prospects may continue to brighten in the bluest state in the nation. If that happens, no one can say the Democrats didn’t have plenty of chances to get it right.