Steve Hilton CALLS OUT California's "Corrupt Machine" In 2026 Governor Race | Billy Bush Interview

How are you, my friend? I'm very good. It's great to be with you. Excited. My man. Listen, let's jump right into this thing. There's only been one debate. Why is that, Steve? Steve. Because we're running against the most pathetic excuse for a candidate, I think, in the history of politics. I'm not prone to wild exaggeration. I try and be reasonable. But I cannot think of a more pathetic candidate. I've been in and around this one way or another for nearly 40 years, right? I've never, and all over the world, I've never seen anything like it. It is so pathetic. He is an apology, an excuse for a candidate. Remember, Becerra, my opponent, is with the, I don't know, fifth or sixth choice for the Democrats. First, it was going to be Kamala Harris. And she said, oh, no. Oh, well. Swalwell. No, but then, you know, they cycled through. It's going to be Kamala Harris. Then it was, they wanted Alex Padilla, the US Senator. He didn't want to do it. Then you're forgetting Katie Porter. She was top of the list for a while. Then she flamed out. Then it was Swalwell. And only then they get to Becerra. And it's this attitude. Well, whatever. He's around. Any D will do. And that's the attitude you get from this corrupt machine. Sixteen years. One party rule. They totally take us for granted. And actually, that's why what you said is so important. The fact that he's just not bothering, not bothering to do anything. He's not campaigning. He hasn't put out any ideas or policies or solutions or anything at all. He's barely even leaving his house. I mean, it's just completely unbelievable. But it's the attitude of contempt for the voters. And actually, that is why everything's such a disaster in California, because they've given up trying to deliver because they think they'll be in power forever, regardless of what they do or who they put up. It's this arrogance of one party rule. And I've got a very simple attitude to it, which is if you can't be bothered to try and earn people's vote, you don't deserve people's vote. Now, look, they've got this corrupt machine. They are outspending us right now, 20 to one. Because they got all this money, and it's our money, remember, because most of it is coming from the government unions. So in effect, that's taxpayer-funded, totally corrupt, and they're just running ads and assuming that the machine will just put him in office and then he'll deliver for them because he'll be their puppet. What's, I mean, give me the best polling information that you have. I mean, in no polls are you leading, and in some it's like 20 points or something like that. You know, is this is this doable? Yeah, I think it still is. I mean, I've always said it's difficult and a long shot. I've never pretended otherwise. I think there's basically three sets of information I'm just going to go through. Number one is what you just said, the polls. What you might consider the establishment polls that have been running these series of polls for a long time, you know, they do, you know, every few months and in an election more frequently, and it's the ones like PPIC, Public Policy Institute of California, the Berkeley Institute of Government Politica. They run these polls, and they are all showing a big lead, the same kind of lead we've had for 20 years in California for the Democrat, 20 points. There was, Emerson was 27 points, you know, so big leads. Then you've got the second category. which I would call the polls that are more kind of conducted in the moment, like right now, they're commissioned especially for now. California Post, some of the ballot initiative campaigns, our own polls, they are showing a Democrat lead, but a much smaller one. It's around the 10% level, 10%, 8%, 12%, that kind of thing, like less than half the establishment polls. What explains the difference? It's the assumptions about the electorate, about what the turnout is. And the turnout models for the establishment polls are assuming it's going to be the same as it's always been in California and Republicans don't show up and whatever. The ones that are more of the moment actually assume a higher level of Republican turnout based on things like the energy that we're putting into the campaign and the fact you get a lot of support out there, and also the motivating factors like the voter ID ballot initiative. Thank you. So they've got a different assumption about who votes. And that actually shows you the way through this because the polls where it's closer have a higher level of Republican turnout, in other words. And Republicans show up on Election Day more than, so Tuesday matters more for you. You've got to get good turnout. There's another thing, I'll give you the third thing, which is, this is anecdotal, it's not data, but it's very consistent now. And I'm hearing it every single day, often many times a day, especially in L.A., actually. A lot of people coming up to me and saying, I'm almost word for word. It's interesting. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but this year I'm voting for you because we've got to have a change. And a lot of the L.A. people say, but I'm not really telling anyone. So you've still got that kind of a great liberal friend of mine whose ass I was kicking in pickleball last night said the same thing to me. He said, I'm sick of it. I'm voting for Steve Hilton. And I said, well, I mean. Okay. Well, yeah. So I don't know how much that adds up. I was on Bill Maher's show on... I saw you. You were great with Andy Beshear. Yeah. I mean, you know, they were being pretty tough on the Trump thing and whatever. And I was speaking to Bill afterwards and he said, well, I won't tell you what exactly, all of what he said, because he, you know, but he said, I was having this conversation with him a little bit and he said, yeah, but you know, the people who come up to you and tell you that they're the ones that like you anyway, and the ones that hate you won't say, won't come up to you. So I don't know. I've never been a candidate before. I've never run for it. Maybe all candidates kind of tell themselves this. But I'm just telling you this. I don't know. All I know is what I see. Like last night, for example, we had a rally in San Diego County, Oceanside, like thousands of people, thousands of people. And so, I don't know, I feel an energy and an excitement. And also, everyone who's been involved in elections in California much longer than I I have. I mean, we moved here 2012, but it's only recent last five years or so. I've been really engaged in politics in California. And all these people have been around, said they've never seen anything like they've really never, even with Arnold. They didn't see a campaign like this. No, you're out there all day. I mean, listen, you're you're you're you're in the middle of Fentanyl Alley. You're going through the streets. You're going through garbage. You're standing in front of the high speed rail, which doesn't have any tracks on it and still isn't. He's been a giant money suck. You've put yourself all over the place. And it really does infuriate me that Javier Becerra isn't really out there. He doesn't really care. He's sort of expecting to win. It's infuriating. Let me ask you one thing that we hear about. A lot of people outside of California ask me about voter fraud. They just have this image of California being totally rigged. Is that? Can you go that far? Is that the case? Do you feel confident in the system? I do actually, but in, but when it's a shitty system, right. And that's the answer really, which is, that's why I don't use words like rigged and cheating and whatever, even fraud. I mean, there's a little bit, but the, I'm not saying there's none. And, and, and when they say, oh, it's only 20,000 non-citizens voting. That's 20,000 too many. It's against the law. What are you talking about? But it's, oh, there's only 20,000 murders. So it's like, fine. It's a ridiculous attitude. We got to stop all of, you know, we got to enforce the law always. However, The really big point is this. That they've legalized all this crazy stuff. So it's not actually cheating. It's not actually, it's legal. And what I mean by that is this combination of universal mail-in voting where they're sending out ballots to everyone, whether you ask for it or not, everyone who's on the voter rolls, combined with the fact that the voter rolls are completely wrong and out of date. I mean, they've been cleaned up to a certain extent because of pressure from the Justice Department and others. Judicial Watch had a very important lawsuit. To clean up L.A. County's voter rolls, one and a half million incorrect names were removed as a result of that. So we're making progress, but it's still probably in the order of. I don't know, five or six million, million wrong names on the voter rolls. So you've got ballots being sent out all over the place. And then you've got ballot harvesting legalized. That's where it really comes into it, because they've legalized this practice where anybody can go around collecting any number of ballots and hand them in. And so they've now got that very organized, their machine. This is what we mean by the machine. And it's the unions and all these nonprofits. And the really sick thing about it is that often it's taxpayer-funded nonprofits. We've actually been exposing some of that through Operation Zero Waste, part of my campaign to find the fraud. And there's just disgusting examples. You'll get a commission from Trump for exposing the, for being a whistleblower, you know. Very good. It's the only reason I'm doing it. And so you've got, you know, like, I'll give you some examples, you know, we found that three, I'm getting the numbers, it's a couple of months ago, $350 million that was supposed to be spent on, it's from the cannabis tax, they legalize cannabis here, Prop 64 money going to what they said was substance abuse prevention is part of the kind of selling cannabis legalization to the public. We found that $350 million of that went to a non-profit that the sort of umbrella entity sounded like it could be doing substance abuse prevention. It was like a health sort of name, but then we found within that they chopped it up into 500 or so smaller grants to all these little entities, and when you dig into what they are, it's all democrat front organizations doing voter registration and ballot harvesting, and we found many examples like that. Isn't that deserving of the word fraud? Well, because it's legal. So I suppose you could say, I mean, it's just it's it's there's no law breaking in any of that. It's what they've legalized. It's just they're hiding it, you know, and the taxpayers paying for a lot of this stuff. So have you done a good enough job playing by the rules and harvesting ballots yourself? Right. That's exactly the right response. So we've put out videos about, you know, like we had a supporter come to one of our events. She had an armful of ballots. I said, what are you doing? She said, I just did a ballot harvesting pizza party. I sent it all out. We had pizza and I said, bring your ballots. We'll fill them out together and I'll hand them in. Great. Yes. Let's do that. Everyone can do that. That sounds good. You've been, like I said, I mean, your social media has been fabulous. You openly curse on social. You'll drop F-bombs in Instagram posts. Is that straight talk or are you frustrated? It's a bit of both, honestly. I don't generally make a habit of that. I don't want to just be a jerk about it. But I've told my daughters, like I say, girls, there's nothing wrong with the F-bomb if it is correctly placed. And used. You can't just willy-nilly squeeze it in between words. You know what I mean? Yes, I agree with that, exactly. F in this, F in that. And I generally haven't. But especially in L.A., honestly, where this... Because I've spent a lot of time in L.A. It's a really big part of this. It's 25% of the electorate of California is L.A. County. So we've been here a lot. And I've focused a lot on the homelessness. situation and all everything to do with that. So I spent a lot of time now, Skid Row, MacArthur Park, Fentanyl Alley, as you mentioned, and it's so horrific. And it's so disgusting to me that we're in the richest state, in the richest country on earth, America's second city, and it never gets, I mean, it's now months, nothing's changing, nothing's getting better. The fact that this is tolerated and accepted as, well, that's like, it's so unacceptable. And the further point, and this is what I was really making in the video that we put out this morning on social media, To the voter now, like, really? Are you saying you're going to put up with another four years of this because you don't like Trump and you can't bring yourself to vote Republican, so you're just going to go along? That's effing insane. And it is, because there's a simple choice here. Trump's not on the ballot. It's me or Becerra. That's it. Those are the choices. And Becerra is very obviously not going to change anything. He's saying that himself. And as a health secretary, by the way, just specifically on this issue of the drugs and homeless thing, he pushed all of those policies that have brought us to this point, what they call harm reduction, where it's handing out free drugs and needles and crack pipes to street addicts because there's some theory that it means that it's less dangerous. Safe injection sites, all of this stuff, he pushed that as health secretary. Nothing's going to change with him. Yeah, the, the, yeah. Look, if you would run in 2020, it'd be a different story. Javier Becerra is doing everything he can to attach you to Trump and Trump to you. And, you know, Trump is getting killed out there. He's not popular. It's, it's, it's. It's not good. Good. It's. There's too many races out in the country. It looks like the House will definitely go Democrat and the Senate, a bit of a toss-up, but very likely. One piece of data, though, it's interesting. It needs a few weeks to go now, so I don't know if it's got worse. But I think this was from our poll. It was a testing of net favorability in California. Trump was minus 36, but Sarah was minus 8. I was plus 2. So even if you don't believe the actual numbers or whatever, you know, depending on your baseline, that gap between me and the president is the best thing regarding Trump that he has left you alone. I mean, it doesn't see he hasn't come out here and said, Steve, I'm going to do a rally for you because I don't want to. But in that case, you have to be like, you know, let's worry about it this day that the jet fuel and I mean, just relax. We're good. We're handling everything. I think. That's probably the best thing he's done for you, right? I mean, Javier's attaching. He's not attaching himself. No, and I think that, you know, the point I always make is I understand that there are millions of Californians who don't like the president, to put it mildly. I get it. But this is not about that. It really is. That's what I was trying to explain to Bill Maher. It's like, fine, I get it. I'm not even trying to argue with that. I'm just saying that this, you can express your view about him. In 2024, you had a shot at doing that. And 2028, if there's a successor, who knows? But that's not this. This is about, do we want to clear up the homeless encampments? Yes or no? Do we want to get to $3 gas, or are we going to be okay with going to $8 gas, which is what will happen, according to the USC economists, if we don't change policy, because we're just running out of refining capacity? He wants to manage the big government better, he says. No changes, just manage better. You have really put forward a very clear platform of tax cuts and shrinking government. Um, that is attracted and you have it, the words right next to you. Just try it. Try it. Um, why do you think it's really confusing to me as to why there is such a monolithic allegiance? To this, to the blue, the blue state. Why is that? I don't know. I think that it's partly because, I mean, I've got theories about it and we're working hard to overcome that. And I think partly it's because for a long time, Republicans in California haven't fought the kind of campaign I'm doing that's just, you know, culturally. Did they like Arnold Schwarzenegger for eight years because, or seven or whatever it was, because he was a celebrity? Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, and remember he won in a recall. He didn't win in a regular. Right, but then he won re-election straight up. He won re-election and, you know, but he did lose all his ballot initiatives that he wanted to change things around in terms of the finance. I mean, the machine analogy is very important because they do have, I mean, it's Manhattan Institute, City Journal, I should say, reported Christopher Rufo about a month or so ago, something like that. The income of the top 10. Largest government unions in California is $1 billion a year. It's an enormous machine, well-funded machine. And so they're, you know, they've been for year after year building that up, building their base in, you know, local government and in the state legislature and so on. And to get to the point where there's this inevitability about it. That's why you end up with these ridiculous... Oh, he writes the, you know, Javier Becerra's Instagram posts, they're all cliches. Fighting for your kid's future. Building the California dream. We're ready to reclaim our Constitution and our democracy. Reclaim? From whom? It's been you for as long as we can see. That's why, you know, Newsom, when he did that post... Although they were secretly filmed and he's talking about the DSA and a lot of attention went to the part where he said, yeah, the DSA is the kind of future of the Democrats or whatever. But in also in that answer, he said, well, the system isn't working for people. You are the system. Like, what are you talking about? You've run. He's amazing. He's statewide office. It's just like, you know, chat GPT, give me the give me the top five cliches that, you know, people say in elections and then just bam, put them out on little Instagram cards that nobody likes. I mean, I think one of the things in terms of the, you know, like that there's an association association with, you know, national Republican politics that that we have to. And it's not about sort of disavowing things there. It's just about showing positively what I'm all about, which is not that I've really not gotten into and wouldn't in this campaign, you know, the kinds of issues, the kinds of culture war type things that may play really well. You know, not that I don't agree with those positions. It's just that it's not where people are at in California. Right. It's about California affordability, as you call it right now. So we haven't done all of that, that you might expect in a race in Texas or wherever. And so I think that but actually this is the first campaign like that. And so, you know, it might take a bit of time to build what you might call a new Republican brand in California. Maybe that's part of the story. I don't know. I would say to parents out there, if you're tired of... You know, paying for your kid's apartment, you know, in L.A. and because they can't afford it. And, you know, so they're frustrated. They got to keep going to mom and dad. I'm frustrated because I got to do it. It's it's it's just I hope I hope the young people wake up and make a change because they're all, you know, they're wondering, how do I live here? How do I live anywhere? But California especially is just. It's violently expensive. Exactly. And that's why that's the other point I make is people are leaving in their droves. Millions and millions of people in the last 10 years or so have left California, including a lot of young people searching for what we used to think of as the California dream and where you can make it, buy a house, raise a family, start a business, all those things that used to be the best place to do that. This is the dream to come here. Right. And now it's leaving and you go to Texas and whatever. However, and so my. Simple point there is all those people who are leaving, they're not fleeing Trump. They're fleeing Democrat policies. And they're actually moving to states run by Republicans. They're moving to states where the taxes are lower, the costs are lower, the streets are cleaner, the business climate is more friendly. That's what they are looking for. And my argument is we can have that here. If we vote for it, we've got a week to go. Steve, you did something controversial. I want to know the decision behind it. The, uh, I laughed my caboose off the lesbian commercial. You got the two AI lesbian girls in there. That wasn't AI, by the way. Oh, those are real. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Real performers. The two girls are there and they're underneath like a pride flag. And they're like, I don't know. I don't know where we should try it. Should we try it? Just try it. Just try it. And then the camera pans down. And exposes a ballot. I think I said, oh, my God, did you just say, you know what? We got to, we got to do in order to change this monolith to affect it. We've got to just think outside the box. And was there anyone like, no, no, no. And you were, did were you close or did you say, do it? No, no, I was really excited. No, it's it's it's a really thank you. It was. It's one of a series, right? There have been many others, not all of them as controversial as that, but all making the same point, which is, you know, it's just a creative expression of the idea, which is, it's one of the, you know, classic creative techniques, you know, misdirection. You think it's, well, it's like a, you know, joke. You think it's one thing and it's actually the other. And in this case, it was pretty, you know, provocative. But that's the point. You know, in a way, you could say that, And it's kind of making a point that it's more transgressive to vote Republican in California than some of these other things. And that's what we're trying to challenge. And just try it is a very, very important idea. And we've expressed we've had a number of probably about eight different ads like that now. And there was a great group therapy one about people talking about experiencing being Republican. And it's just it's a really I'm really proud of the campaign. It's funny. And there'll be a few more. Because you've got to connect with people. Hit them hard, man. We got, uh, it's. It's Tuesday, so it's got to happen. Steve, quickly, Amanda here in the comments section wants to know if you are related to Paris Hilton. I told her no for you, right? No, I'm very sorry. But can I give you a little connection here? So my parents are Hungarian. Yeah. My dad actually is a lot older than my mom. My stepfather's also, everyone's Hungarian. My dad was in, he was a sports guy in Hungary. He was the goalie for the national hockey team, ice hockey. Played, actually played in the Olympics. Wow. When he was in, I mean, he's died a while ago, but he dated in Budapest, in Hungary, Eva Gabor. Zsa Zsa Gabor's sister, Eva Gabor. Really? And she, Zsa Zsa Gabor, married Conrad Hilton. And so there is some weird, random little something going on there. The answer is maybe then, as far as I can, as we'll see. All right. I know you got to run. You got big events tonight and every night I would. It is an official endorsement. The Hot Mike's podcast stands behind Steve Hilton for governor. Try it. Just try it. Thank you, man. Good to see you.