CA Governor Candidate Steve Hilton on Why California is Destroying Itself & How a Republican Can Win

28:07Double click into that for a second. For the 40 million residents of California, what is going on? Why are rents so high? Why are homes so expensive? And what can actually be done to make the cost of living and rent cheaper? So the thing, this particular issue, I think almost captures better than anything else, the underlying structural reasons why everything is so difficult in California and so expensive. because you've got these three structural forces that I think underpin the problem and show why a Democrat can't fix it. And the three things are union power, litigation, and climate dogma. And they all come together in the housing story.

29:00The first part of the story is that we're just not building enough homes for the number of jobs that we're creating and the size of our population. It's a classic supply and demand situation. Now, within that, there are certain wrinkles. You could point out that because of rent control, which has got completely out of control, there are a lot of empty properties in California that could be used to house people, but they're not because landlords don't want to do it because the rights have swung so far in favor of tenants. But I don't think that's the major driver. The major driver is the fact that we just haven't built enough housing of different kinds.

29:42And if you go through the reasons for that and why it's so expensive, it brings into play these three factors. First of all, it just costs more to build anything in California. The same exact floor plan, house, apartment building, industrial building, whatever it is, costs two or three times more to build in California than in neighboring states. The first reason is the building codes, the actual requirements for construction, which is way more onerous driven by climate dogma that actually doesn't really provide much climate benefit. What does that mean, climate dogma? Well, you have to install...

30:16Here we are. Because Nevada's hot and drought-ridden and Arizona has issues. So what is it that we say that those states don't say? So when you build apartments or when you build parking, you have to put in EV charging. and the scale of what's required for the EV charging just makes it more expensive. You have to, like if you do a parking structure, you have to reinforce the floors, the bays have to be wider. You have fewer bays per structure. There's specific costs associated with that. Solar panels, we talked about that earlier in terms of low-income apartments that taxes are paying for. Developers have to pay for that as well.

31:03insulation, energy efficiency. All these things are good. And I think that's pretty much the story of California, which is things that start with good intentions actually end up being taken to an extreme where it just makes it too expensive to build at a rate that people can afford to buy the properties. And the other two are really that CEQA where anybody can sue on behalf of - The private right of action under CEQA. But let's unpack that because that brings together the three things, climate litigation and unions, because CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act itself is a nightmare in terms of the amount of regulation you have to comply with.

31:40The private right of action means anyone can sue. 70 % of CEQA lawsuits are used to block housing. Most of those lawsuits are filed by unions. They're used as leverage to negotiate what they call project labor agreements, where you have an agreement for the site, and usually they have one or two of these components, both of which sound great. Skilled and trained workforce, which means union only, so it's a closed shop, and prevailing wage. Again, sounds very good, but it's two or three times market rate wages. So both of those things inflate the cost. Often, I've spoken to many developers, there aren't enough union workers in the area to actually do the job.

32:25So they have to sometimes fly them in from other states to do the job, and the cost of travel and accommodation. It's just crazy. This is the key, Shamath. There's no equivalent to CEQA in Texas, where I now reside after 20 years in California. The other thing is the fees. It's$30 ,000 per door in fees to the government. The impact fees, exactly. To build a door in California, it's under$1 ,000 in Texas. And in California, it has three times the new units per capita than California. So every year, we produce three times as many new homes per capita. Just a simple question, though, guys. put this into chat GPT or whatever.

33:02California's mandate with CEQA is to protect the air, protect the water, protect the land by some measures. Texas doesn't have it. Is it the case that Texas's air is worse, the water is worse, and the land is worse? No, definitely not. So is it roughly the same, meaning the particulate count, the pollen count? Is the air quality the same? Because if it is, then what is CEQA doing other than just slowing down and retarding the progress of housing? Why hasn't that studied? Because I think, again, all of this, guys, comes back to when the data is presented in a way that's factual, there's very little room for people on both sides to argue it because they're all relatively smart.

33:50It's when it's presented either in a partisan way or by somebody who reeks of partisanship that I think people attack the messenger versus the message. So I'm just trying to understand why hasn't the California government confronted this? It has the highest rents in America. It has the highest poverty rate in America. And it also has the highest regulation that has the lowest and the slowest unit housing growth. Steve, I guess what I'm asking you is how does that not get to the legislature. Okay, I'll tell you, I'm afraid the answer is the corruption within the system and the interest groups that have taken over the system.

34:30I'll tell you a story, which is my first, I know a lot about housing policy because it was the first area of policy I studied when I decided that I wanted to get into the whole world of policy and politics in California. I actually tried to get a ballot initiative qualified for the ballot that would have two elements to it. One is what Jason just mentioned, capping impact fees, which are now up to about 20 % of the cost of housing. I wanted to do a statewide cap of 3 % of construction costs. And the second component was eliminating the private right of action under secret. I didn't succeed in getting it on the ballot, didn't raise enough money in time.

35:09So then I tried to pursue it through the legislature. I said, well, let's see if we can make something happened in the legislature. So I went to Sacramento, I took meetings with legislators, started to engage with Sacramento. There was one meeting I had with a legislator who was described to me as good on housing, as a person you need to talk to. And we had a great meeting. They said, this would be transformational. I said, great, let's work on it together, bipartisan. You're Democrat, I'm Republican, that'd be great. People like that. Oh, I couldn't support you publicly. Why not? Well, the unions would hate it.

35:43Why? Because if you take away the private right of action, you take away the union's leverage. And I said, yeah, but you just told me it would be transformational. We were sitting in an office. You could see the state capital down below, high up. They just waved their arm around like this and said, yeah, the unions run this place. And that's the real reason. If you look at, for example, Newsom touted these two bills last year, AB 130, AB 131, that we're going to solve the housing crisis. He said, this is the moment where we are embracing abundance and all the rest of it. Big CEQA exemptions for certain types of housing.

36:18But if you look at the fine print tucked away in it, you only get the exemptions if you have these project labor agreements and union closed shop and prevailing wage. So you're just writing back in exactly the things that Seqe is causing the cost increases from. Let's follow all the way through. If you look at Gavin Newsom's political donations over the 16 years he's been running statewide, just as a proxy for Democrat politicians, by category. The number one category, government unions. Number two, trial lawyers. Number three, non-government unions. So that's why nothing changes, because the interests that benefit from this system are funding the politicians that make the decisions.

37:05Yeah, and Chamath, to your other question of like, is the environment better since 1970? When this regulation came into pass, California still has the worst air quality in the country, largely because of the addiction to cars and traffic. And then Texas, as a comparison, and just has industrial waste problems because we don't want chemicals here or chemical processing done here. So we have a car-loving culture in California, to your point, Jason, as part of our cultural fabric, driving down Highway 1. It's just a very iconic thing that's embedded in this state. Steve, I have two questions. What has all of the incremental regulations done with respect to climate quality, whether it's EV mandates or the ICE engine requirements?

37:51And then separately, just as a more general way to explain it, why is gas in California$7 and$8 a gallon? And why is it$3 everywhere else? Why is ours more than 2x that it costs everywhere else, including other states that are also quite expensive to live in? Well, also, we have the highest gas in the country, including Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, even though we have abundant oil reserves. So we have way higher gas prices than states that don't have oil reserves. We actually have very significant oil reserves in California. The fundamental reason that gas prices are so high is because, again, in the name of climate, but actually in this case, it's counterproductive to climate.

38:34But instead of using the production that we have here in California, I've been to the oil fields in Kern County mainly, near Bakersfield. We are now importing nearly 80 % of the oil that we use. Really, this all started in 2006 with the passage of the global warming solutions. That was the sort of foundational climate legislation in California. Over that period, our use of fossil fuels has declined by not that much. and the proportion of our energy that's coming from fossil fuels is about 80 % still. The rest of the country, it's about 81%. So it's barely any different. But the difference is we used to produce most of what we use in state.

39:15Now we are importing nearly 80%. And that has driven up the cost. You have to strip it for halfway around the world. Our number one provider is Iraq right now. That's the number one source of oil. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. The state of California itself, we, are wholly dependent on Iraqi oil to sustain our economy? It's not wholly, it's the number one provider, yes. So if you look at the sources of oil, number one, Iraq, number two, I think it's Ecuador and Brazil. But the broader point on that is because we used to have, let's just go back a few steps. We had a really strong energy industry and infrastructure in California where we produced most of the oil and gas that we use.

40:05And we had refineries, about 40 of them around the state, mostly in the Bay Area, down in LA, that refined and turned it into products that we use, gasoline and so on. Now we're down to seven refineries. One of the main reasons for that is that we're not producing what we could be refining. We're shipping it in instead because there are no pipelines. There are no oil pipelines into California. Whatever we don't, if we don't use our own, we have to bring it in by tanker. Um, because of this and because of the, the, the, the fact that the refineries were built to, to refine California crude, which is known as heavy crude.

40:46Um, there are different types around the world. You've got to have a good match. Iraq provides Iraqi oil is a good match. The other place whose oil is a good match for our refineries is South America. And so as a result of Democrat climate policy, we are now expanding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest in order to provide the right kind of oil for California's refineries. I mean, it's just so utterly insane and incoherent. And of course, in the process, we're spewing out carbon emissions because the tankers run on what's called bunker fuel, which is the most polluting form of transportation there is.

41:25And just to make the whole insane scheme work, CARB, the California Air Resources Board, which is obsessed with having all other businesses account for their carbon emissions right down the supply chain. Miraculously, the carbon emissions for the oil imports are only counted from when they're 12 miles off the coast of California. It's just so crazy. Yeah, the change, change the finish line. The taxes add like a dollar a gallon and then there's this carb standard. It's about 60. Yeah, it's just it's more like 61. I thought it was 65. I can't remember exactly. It's just going up again yeah yeah most of the most of the two dollar premium as it were for california is regulatory not taxes yes and most of the oil that's been pulled out of the ground in california we got the easy stuff out what's left is generally dirtier or thicker that's not right i've had a lots of conversation with the industry on this and the the problem is that you've got fields that could be producing but and actually it's a good example of what you can do as governor without the legislature.

42:27Because the way that they've been shutting down production is not legislatively, it's through an agency of the state government called CalGEM, the California Department of Geologic and Energy Management. And it's simply a question of refusing to issue permits for the various stages of production, including maintaining existing wells or expanding. There's a process called sidetracking where you can take a well that's doing five barrels a day and increase it to 100, whatever, and then drilling new wells in existing fields. And they're denying permits for all of that. Actually, you can pretty much turn that around overnight by appointing people who are pro-energy who will issue permits because I think there's a simple common sense rule here, which is as long as we're using oil and gas in California, let's use our oil and gas rather than importing it.

43:15But my conversation with the industry is that I said, look, what could we do if we had a kind of green light from a governor and a regulatory framework that just says, let's do what we can. Let's produce what we can. The estimate that I've got from them is that we can double production every two years in California. If we're already one of the big gas-burning states with the worst air, or previously my state, then you're going to get into the circular conversation with the public of, do we want the air quality to decrease? and most people would say the EV credits were actually a good thing because we had 20 years of smog going down.

43:55Even though we're still worse, it's gotten a lot better. So that's to do with carbon. But there's a real misunderstanding. So I completely agree on air quality. And one of the major advances that has been made is on expecting the LA basin is on smog. Obviously, I wasn't here then, but people say, you know, it's really bad. And now it's not. You have clean skies and you can see Mount Baldy or whatever. You know, it's like a really different world. But that's nothing to do with carbon emissions. And so, and that's to do with actually the main driver of the air quality improvements in California actually are technology.

44:33And if you look at EVs, I mean, EV penetration, even with all the subsidies and so on, it's incredibly low in California. So you can't, it's about four or 5%, something like that, tiny. So actually, the improvements in air quality, dramatic improvements that you saw in LA were nothing to do with EVs. Steve, I want to switch topics to education. This is a thing that we on the pod talk about a lot. We're all the byproduct of a pretty fantastic education system, affordable education, frankly, at every level. We had options to pay for it. We all had access to things like AP to really distinguish ourselves, even Jason.

45:14That's true. What's happening in the California education system? Why are we stripping away things like AP? And how do we tie compensation to outcomes? Because I think a lot of us would want to pay teachers triple, but we'd want to tie it to something that says, wow, the test scores are going up. Our kids can read. Our kids can write. Our kids can compete on the global stage. And it just feels like we are moving backwards. We really are. And it's just, I mean, the numbers are horrific. I mean, you've got, first of all, we spend nearly the most of any state per student right now. In this year, it's about 27 ,000.

45:52It's more than just over 27 ,000 per student per year in California. you. If you take the average out of the money and we get some of the worst results in the country, I think the number for, you know, it's 47 % that meet basic standards in English and reading. So less than half meet basic standards. For math, it's 35%. So two thirds do not meet the standards. It's just an insane level of failure considering we spend nearly the most. And I think, again, you've got to look at this in a practical way. There's a long-term structural reform that I think we need because the driver of this is really the grip on the government school monopoly of the teacher unions, who increasingly have been driven by ideological factors.

46:38You saw that, for example, in the pandemic when you saw the longest and most destructive school closures in the country. I was always struck by LA, the teacher union in LA, when they put out their demands for reopening schools. It was just a list of political, it was a wealth tax, Medicare for all, something about Palestine. You know, it's just, they've completely become an organized political interest group that's about their members and broader political goals, rather than anything to do with the interests of students and kids in school. So I think that the fact that you've got this monopoly is of the public tool system controlled by the unions, They, of course, in turn control the politicians, as I mentioned earlier, the number one donor to Democrat politicians of these government unions, including the teacher unions.

47:30And so you've got to break that grip. So I think that long term, the answer is to move in the direction of school choice, which I've always been a strong advocate of. You're seeing that school choice revolution across the country now. Many states moving very rapidly in the direction with really good results. It's not a panacea, but I think that that is the long term structural change you need. But that takes a long time and it's going to be very, very hard to get that moving in California, given the fact that the teacher unions basically control the legislature through the Democrat politicians they put there.

48:01So there are some practical things that we've got to do immediately to improve these basic standards. And here we've got to look at what works elsewhere. and you see a lot of attention now on Mississippi, rightly so, because for one third of their spend per student than California, their results are spectacularly better. And it's really happened in the last 10 years. And there's some simple practical things that they do. Number one is how you teach kids to read. There's a technique of reading instruction. I mean, this was a debate I remember having back in the day in England in the nineties, and it's pretty much settled then.

48:39which is there's a technique called phonics. It's a way to teach kids to read. And it's totally clearly established as the most effective. It's barely used in California schools at all. It's like in a very small proportion of schools, of public schools. So that's something that the governor can drive forward through the state board of education where you appoint all the members. Secondly, in Mississippi, they introduce something very common sense, which is, as everyone in education says, up to about third grade, you're learning to read. And then from fourth grade, you're reading to learn. And if you can't read, you can't learn.

49:13And so there's widespread consensus that reading by third grade, by the end of third grade is incredibly important benchmark. In Mississippi, if you don't read by, you don't pass the basic reading test by end of third grade, they give you a bit of help over the summer. And if you still don't make it, you repeat the year. They don't let you go forward. That single change has transformed their results. And then your point about accountability also happens there where they give, and this is something else that we could implement here, which is taking the publicly available test scores and data, but really assigning it in a very visible way to individual teachers and individual schools.

49:52And that's one of the proposals I've got in my campaign, which is a grade for every school and a grade for every teacher so we can reward the good ones and remove the bad ones two more topics that californians are very passionate about and have a lot of opinions about i think one is pretty challenging and the other one seems pretty easy and other states have handled it where it's easier crime and then homelessness crime obviously as a society We've seen violent crime go down over the long arc of our lifetimes in the last 40 or 50 years. But California, still 30 % more violent than the rest of the country.

50:31So we definitely have a violence problem specific to California. And if you live in the major cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, they let people out for petty crimes under$850. There seems, and we see going to a drugstore, everything's locked up. So there is a feeling and a lot of debates over the numbers that there's a lot more property crimes. Some people claim people don't report it anymore. That was my lived experience in California. What is your take on crime? And then we'll go to homelessness. Yeah, I mean, it's just this classic thing in California where they seem to be brilliant at passing laws, right?

51:07Every year, more and more laws, more and more bloats and bureaucracy, more nanny state nonsense. instance. Last session, for example, they passed, this is one session, 1 ,118 bills. That's the number of bills that the legislature passed. We did a thing outside the state capital. I mean, I'm not very tall. We printed them all out. It's like double my height. I mean, just ridiculous. The point I'm making is really good at passing laws, but not very good at enforcing them. There's just something missing in terms of the willy willingness to just enforce the law. That's going to be one of the main points I make in terms of homelessness.

51:48But when you get to crime, there's just this attitude. I mean, there's something off about how the left has seen this issue. Just when you think it's, you know, the worst excesses of defund the police and all that have receded, you've now got them popping up. What is it? This new thing, micro-looting, right? Oh, micro-looting. The New York Times and Slack podcasts are going on about, oh, it's fine because it's just social justice and we're allowed to kind of basically steal things because it's okay. It's just unbelievable. Subversion of basic values and morality. It's just unbelievable. On crime, it's very decentralized in terms...

52:28I mean, there's some state things that need to be... Remember, the law that you're talking about that legalized theft up to$950 a day, that part has been overturned. That was Prop 47, which was a few years ago. It's been overturned by Prop 36, which was overwhelmingly passed in 2024 by about 70%. But of course, it's not being properly implemented. Gavin Newsom was against it. And so are most Democrats in the state. The people passed it anyway, but now there's real resistance to enforcing it, which is ridiculous. In terms of the overall picture, though, it is very localized. You've got local police forces and sheriff's departments and so on.

53:08So my focus has been, well, what can you do as governor? And one of the biggest drivers I think that's caused the problem is it really started with Jerry Brown before Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom's accelerated it, which is the prison closure program. Also, this is classic California. They've reduced the number of prison places by half. Guess what happened to the budget? It doubled. Not quite that bad, but it's a classic. They cut the numbers in half, double the budget. But the serious point is that you've had tens of thousands of really dangerous, violent criminals either released directly into the community or more destructively for the system transferred to county jails, which are now completely overcrowded.

53:55Um, and therefore at the local level, the whole system is aware that you've had all these transfers from state prison. The system is full. And so there's no capacity. And that really undermines the kind of accountability that judges and prosecutors would want to seek at the local level because they know the jails are full. And so that in turn undermines law enforcement because they say, what's the point? I mean, I hear this term all the time from law enforcement around the state, I'm traveling the state the whole time, they talk about catch and release as the basic operating rule for the kinds of crimes you're talking about.

54:33You catch them, they're just released, nothing happens. And so that undermines law enforcement, why bother if we're just going to bring these people in and nothing's going to happen to them. And that in turn undermines public confidence because everyone sees that. And then they, as you just said, don't bother reporting it. So a simple thing we can do that is completely within the governor's control is stop and reverse the prison closure program, which is what I've committed to doing, is to increase prison capacity in California. That means that you can relieve the pressure on county jails, but also that means that you can use the prisons for what they should be doing, not just bringing accountability.

55:09You commit a crime, you should be punished, but also rehabilitation. We've got one, not the worst, but one of the worst recidivism rates in the whole country. And if we did one of the best states is Virginia, they're less than half what we have. That would massively reduce crime if you just get... You've got to take seriously the rehabilitation part. I mean, a huge proportion of prisoners in these jails, they can't read properly. Many have dyslexia. You've got to have a really serious view on it. And they just don't. They have an ideological view. I think that is the problem with so many of these issues.

55:43It's ideology. In this case, it's decarceration, can't have people in prison, prison is racist, criminal justice reform, all this ideology instead of just practical things to keep people safe. Newsom shut down four or five of the California state prisons. You're absolutely correct, according to my notes. And then it peaked in 2006. California had 165 ,000 people in state prisons now, 93 ,000 people. So it is definitely a trend. And I think a lot of folks who are living here or who are living in California where I used to live are not in favor of that. Looking at homelessness, is it intractable in California?

56:20No. One thing I'll just point out, if people are interested in digging in further to some of the things I've been saying, there's a couple of places you can go for real depth on this, which is the last three years, I've been traveling the state and kind of learning about this stuff and developing solutions. And I had a policy organization for that called Golden Together, goldentogether.com. And you can find policy reports on many of these areas we've discussed and more, including one on homelessness called ending homelessness and actually my real partner in developing that was so called michelle stebe who's done a lot of work on this she actually run homeless shelters and and really at the at the kind of street level of this for many many years also someone called tom wolf who's given me a lot of great advice he's in san francisco a recovering addict um a recovered addict who's who's just fantastic he's very vocal on twitter and uh yeah It's a very common sense approach.

57:15Yeah, exactly. Okay, so it's very simply, I'll try and sort of capture it simply. It's three points. Number one, it actually already is illegal to live on, and the homeless encampments already are illegal. They've always been illegal. It's another example of where we just got to enforce the law. For years, local politicians in California hid behind a court ruling that is called the Boise ruling from many years ago, which stated, it's the Ninth Circuit ruling applies to the Western states, which is that the statement there was you can't remove people from the street unless you have sufficient shelter available locally.

57:51And they used this to say we can't remove people because we don't have enough shelter. It didn't define what shelter was. They defined it as these permanent supportive housing units costing$900 ,000 a door. But it could have been a camp with cots. There's no reason. But even that excuse has been lifted because there's a Supreme Court case called Grants Passed versus Oregon in 2024 overturned that. So there's no excuse. These people running local governments, they have the power and the legal authority to remove every single homeless encounter, and they should. And my argument is, once I'm elected, I'll give them a certain amount of time.

58:33And if they haven't done it, then I'll use state law enforcement resources to take people off the streets. And then you get to point two and three of the plan, which is, you've got to give people help in a compassionate way, help them get their lives back on track. So over 80 % of people who are homeless have drug or alcohol problems, addiction, or severe mental health problems. So you've got to deal with that. So the second part is drug and alcohol recovery. You've got to get people into recovery. That used to be the rule in California, rehab or jail. And we've got to get back to that. It can't be an option.

59:04We've got plenty of service providers who can do it. You've got to require it. I mean, last year, even the, going back to our point about the legislature, even the Democrat legislature passed a bill called the Sober Housing Act, which would have taken a certain proportion of homeless spending and allocated it to a shelter where you had a requirement with sobriety. Newsom vetoed that bill. It's unbelievable. So we've got to have a 100 % sober requirement for any kind of state services on homelessness. The third part is mental health, where honestly, going back to the jails conversation, you talk to sheriffs around the state, the number varies, but they say 50, I've heard as high as 70 % of the people in their jails have severe mental health problems.

59:51that's where we're actually treating people with mental health forms either they're on the street or they're in jail it's totally barbaric and one of the reasons is that we when you're talking about the homeless population obviously low-income people so it's very much entwined when you talk about mental health care with medicaid with the federal system and there's a rule in medicaid that was set up right at the beginning when it was founded in the mid-60s called the imd rule institutions of mental disease. And this was a time when they didn't want large mental asylums and whatever. The idea was you have small facilities in the community.

1:00:25So the rule is there is no Medicaid reimbursement to the states for any mental health care provided in a facility with more than 16 beds. It's a 16-bed rule. Of course, that makes the whole thing incredibly uneconomic and inefficient. Imagine if hospitals could only be 16 beds, how inefficient that would be. The first Trump administration created a waiver, the IMD waiver, that states could apply for so you could get around the rule. A lot of other states have taken that up. California hasn't. There's plenty of money in the system. Like we've been saying, the budgets are there. They've just been diverted into the wrong places.

1:01:03So the third part of the plan is to take the money that's currently going into the homeless industrial complex, these ridiculous apartment units for people who should be either getting mental health care or recovery treatment, take that money and put it into modern large-scale mental health facilities, and then we can treat people properly. And when you do your fraud work, that's a great place for you to put a big magnifying glass because that's where there's massive amounts of corruption. You cannot believe how much we spend in this, or we spend in California on homeless. And if you pay for something, you will get more of it.

1:01:36And they're getting a lot more of it. Steve, as we wrap up, give us the quarterback view of your path to victory. Walk us through the sequence of events, the key moments leading up to the primary vote, and then from primary to election day. What has to happen for you to get to Sacramento? So we have the top two system for those who, I mean, another crazy California thing where you end up with two candidates going through to the general election, regardless of party. The idea of this was to have more moderate politics. Ever since it was introduced, the state's gone further and further to the left.

1:02:12And so you've got various scenarios that are possible. Right now, I'm leading in all of the polls. On the Republican side, there's one other candidate. I think with President Trump's endorsement of my campaign, I think we can expect... I'm pretty confident that we can make it into the top two. It's not certain. We've got to fight very hard over the next month or so. The ballots go out next week, early May. But I think that we're going to have a top two with myself and one other Democrat. And right now, it looks as if it's going to be one of Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, or Javier Becerra. And all of those three represent either no change from what we have now or a move even further to the left in the wrong direction.

1:03:01So I think broadly, the argument is going to be very straightforward, which is, are you happy with the way things are going in California? Do you want more of it? And if you do, you vote Democrat. Or do you think we need a change? So it's a classic, you know, change versus more of the same election. Getting into the numbers, I know a lot of people look at California and say, well, it's impossible for a Republican to win. And Jason was pointing out we've had Republicans in the past, but that was, you know, a long time ago. And you could say special circumstances because Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in a recall election and so on.

1:03:36And he was a celebrity who was highly notable and loved in Los Angeles half the state. Exactly. All of those things are true. But, and so I've always said from the beginning of this, that it's not going to be easy to win. It's going to be very difficult because of the structural factors in California, but it's not impossible. And given the seriousness of our predicament and how much I think the whole country depends on a successful, growing, thriving, leading California, then we should go for it because getting things back in a common sense direction is just a really important thing. I what America means to the world.

1:04:12And so this matters. If you look at the numbers, some people look at their voter registration numbers and they say, Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one. And that is true. But when you look at actual voting, the gap is a little bit closer. Over the last 20 years where you haven't had Republicans elected, pretty much the average Republican vote has been just over 40%. So it's been like a 60-40 split. Obviously, that's not close, but the gap is perhaps not as wide as some people might think. But then you look at a couple of factors that I really think are different this year. First of all, there's a dissatisfaction with the way things are going that wasn't there before.

1:04:53If you look at that basic number, is the state on the right track, wrong track? Even four years ago in the last governor's race, the wrong track number was going to mid to high 40s. Now it's mid to high 50s. So there's a majority for change in California, just put it that way, which is a good environment to be going into as a candidate representing change. The second point is if you look at the actual votes you're going to need to win, this is a midterm election, 2026. If you try and get some kind of sense of how many votes will be cast in the midterm election this year, take the average of the last two, 2018, 2022, you get a total of 11.7 million total votes as an estimate.

1:05:39So to win, you're going to need just over half of that, call it 5.9 million. Now, when people say there aren't enough Republicans in California to win. In 2024, in the presidential race, President Trump in California, without even campaigning here or spending money on ads or anything, wasn't a targeted state, got 6.1 million votes. In other words, there's more than enough. People have just voted Republican for President Trump. Now, of course, you're not going to get 100 % of a presidential year turnout in a midterm election. But the reason I make that point is that the votes are there actually, even with just Republicans.

1:06:17Now, I don't think we're going to get there just with Republican votes, but that's the starting point is a strong campaign to turn out Republican votes. And a big driver for that this year that, again, is a unique feature this year is the fact that in November, we're going to have voter ID on the ballot. That just qualified for the ballot. And Republicans particularly are enthusiastic about voter ideas. I think it's going to help us get a big turnout. And then in terms of the Coalition for Victory, I think that you've got a real opportunity to put together the kind of multiracial working class coalition that President Trump put together.

1:06:54Because going right back to where we started, it's working class people who are really, really struggling and being hammered the most by these policies. They get to vote directly for no taxes, no state income taxes. Exactly, because that's my tax plan. I just put this out there just the other day, which is, and no tax on tips, that's the other part, I mean, which has been implemented at the federal level, but California won't do it at the state level. Just my whole plan is geared toward a$3 gas, I call it Cal-affordable. $3 gas, cut your electric bills in half, your first hundred grand tax-free, a home you can afford to buy.

1:07:30Really simple, practical, common sense things that particularly help the people who've been hurt the most over the last few years. And I think that's how we pull this off. Steve, on behalf of All In, I just want to say thank you for being so incredibly candid and open with us. We're wishing you the best of luck. Thank you so much. And just from my seat, if you wanted to - Jason's moving back. No, I mean, if you wanted, just I left for a reason and part of it was the dysfunction of the state. And if you want things to continue, I think, you know, having an unbalanced government that's all in one party is a way to do that.

1:08:08You got to try to find some balance here. And I think why not give it a shot? If you're in California, you have nothing to lose. The state is in a massively dysfunctional situation. So I wish you great luck, Steve Hilton. Thank you, guys. Great to be with you. All right. Cheers now.

1:08:39I'm going all in