Well, it’s official: Kamala Harris isn’t seeking the California governor’s mansion in 2026 when term-limited Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom begins his presidential cam– err, leaves his position.
And it’s also official: With her out of the race, Democrats might be in trouble in the nation’s most populous — and one of its most consistently blue — states.
A new poll released Friday found that former Democratic U.S. Rep. Katie Porter and Republican Fox News personality Steve Hilton are first and second in polling for the state’s so-called “jungle primary,” respectively — the only two candidates in double digits, and a move that would set up a contest between arguably the most left-wing politician in the race and the strongest Republican.
The Emerson College Polling survey was conducted on Aug. 4-5 among 1,000 registered voters in California, and came just days after Harris — expected to be a field-clearer if she entered the race — announced she wouldn’t be running to replace Newsom in Sacramento.
Porter, the progressive lawmaker who finished a distant third in the jungle primary for Senate in 2024 (and then blamed now-Sen. Adam Schiff’s campaign for intentionally elevating Republican candidate and former Los Angeles Dodgers star Steve Garvey into second, saying the system was “rigged by billionaires” so he could have an easier path to the upper chamber), is up six points since April’s survey, to 18 percent of the vote from 12 percent.
Hilton, who worked at Fox News for six years and also advised former British Prime Minister David Cameron, announced after that poll was taken; he’s second with 12 percent of the vote.
Third was another Republican, former Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who was up from 4 percent to 7 percent. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa held steady at 5 percent. None of the other candidates broke that threshold.
“With Kamala Harris officially out of the race, Katie Porter has emerged as the Democratic frontrunner, increasing her support from 12 percent to 18 percent since the April Emerson poll,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, reacted.
“Steve Hilton, who was not in the race in April, has jumped to 12 percent, while the share of undecided voters has dropped from 54 percent to 38 percent over the summer.”
Can the Republicans take the governor’s mansion in California?
That last part is the important number; while 38 percent seems like quite a lot, a 16-point drop in just four months combined with a coalescing around Porter and an excitement around Hilton’s candidacy indicates that, while it’s a long way off, we have two tentative favorites in the primary for 2026’s biggest gubernatorial contest.
Under California’s jungle primary system, the top two candidates regardless of party affiliation advance. Porter had been expected to be the challenger to Adam Schiff’s left flank under that system last year (amazingly, that flank exists, and Porter manages to occupy it), but the progressive lawmaker found out the hard way why President Donald Trump gave the guy the nickname “Shifty Schiff.” As CalMatters noted last April, Schiff’s campaign spent $10 million on ads attacking Garvey that were, in fact, “thinly veiled support ads targeting Republican voters.”
“The goal was to consolidate Republican votes for Garvey and get him into the run-off in November, thus helping U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff avoid a costly and competitive race against a fellow Democrat, Rep. Katie Porter,” CalMatters reported.
It worked: Garvey finished just slightly behind Schiff in the jungle primary, 31.6 percent to 31.5 percent, with Porter a distant third at 15.3 percent. Schiff would win the general election by 17 points over Garvey.
There are several differences between that race and this one, however.
First, you have two major events — namely, the California wildfires in January and the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles in June — which have proven the Democratic Party in California, particularly its progressives, to be unusually impotent.
Second, Schiff may be a man of the left, but he’s a pragmatist — at least compared to Porter, a firebrand described by Politico as “the most [Bernie] Sanders-adjacent” candidate in the race who shares a “close alliance with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her consistent message rejecting corporate influence in politics.”
Porter has tried to move to the right a little bit, but only a little bit — saying that she wants to “defend our state against Trump’s attacks and work to solve the challenges Californians face,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
How does she plan on doing that? As the outlet reported in its March piece, by spending money, naturally:
Porter praised Gov. Gavin Newsom several times Wednesday, but said she’d differ from Newsom in what she emphasizes, particularly in her focus on making child care more affordable. Newsom’s support of making the first two years of community college free and providing free lunches to public schoolkids “put real money back in my pocket, but there is more to do. We have not done enough to focus on child care. We have not done enough to make sure that we’re going to have the next generation of Californians living here, having families here and flourishing here, and a big part of that, in addition to addressing child care, is also housing.”
And, as The Washington Post reported when she announced her candidacy, Porter “plans to focus her campaign agenda on lowering Californians’ costs and making housing more affordable, while strengthening protections for abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and immigrant rights — which she argues are all under threat with full Republican control in Washington.”
In other words, she plans to defy Washington even harder than Newsom or Los Angeles Democratic Mayor Karen Bass have. Note how much the Democrats love the Supremacy Clause — particularly on matters of abortion and “LGBTQ+ rights” — until they no longer have White House supremacy.
Hilton, meanwhile, has made a pragmatic pitch to California voters, saying he was going to stop “the destruction of the California dream” in his campaign announcement in late April, as per the Associated Press.
Blaming the wildfires on “Democratic extremism and incompetence” and high taxes on the blue majority that’s prevailed in the state, he’s running under the slogan “Golden Again: Great Jobs, Great Homes, Great Kids,” which would involve “reinforcing his commitment to positive, practical solutions instead of today’s ideology and dogma.”
And since then, he’s been busy hitting California Democrats for their priorities:
Today, unelected bureaucrat Liane Randolph, head of CARB (California Air Resources Board) raised your gas prices. Gavin Newsom did nothing to stop it.
On Day 1 as governor I will remove Liane Randolph and start rolling back extreme climate regulations so we can have $3.00 gas. pic.twitter.com/s9aWdSSibp
— steve hilton (@SteveHiltonx) July 1, 2025
🚨 ‘Boil Water Order’ in Malibu, wildfires burning out of control…but Gavin Newsom is busy hosting runaway Texas legislators as part of his plan to steal six more House seats.
No water in the fire hydrants. Now it’s no drinking water in the taps. Time for change in California! pic.twitter.com/82PhOxwvPq
— steve hilton (@SteveHiltonx) August 9, 2025
So, could he win a general election? Unlike Garvey, he has experience in politics, both with skin in the game and as a commentator. He also has the outsider card, and he has an annus horribilis for the Golden State — as well as a governor currently preening himself for a national run for office and a Democratic favorite who’s further left than either Gavin or Kamala — to use against his competition.
There hasn’t been a Republican governor of California since Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he was barely Republican. Given the Democrats’ incompetence, an unbearably progressive candidate that Kamala can’t save the left from, and Hilton’s strong polling numbers, that could definitely change. Stay tuned.
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