There’s a new poll out in the governor’s race in California, and the results are not what anyone should want to see.
New – Governor poll – California
🔵 Becerra 20%
🔵 Steyer 19%
🔴 Hilton 18%
🔵 Porter 13%
🔴 Bianco 12%
🔵 Mahan 9%Emerson #A – LV – 5/10 pic.twitter.com/WpfG4kHFss
— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) May 13, 2026
Obviously, if you’re a conservative or Republican, you don’t like it — it would be a tragedy if Californians don’t have a real ideological choice after at least 16 years of ruinous one-party rule. Steve Hilton needs to be in that runoff, even if it means he gets clobbered in November.
But the surprising thing is there is very little celebration, it seems, over Xavier Becerra’s rise to the top of the heap. This was an eye-opener:
Biden administration official Xochitl Hinojosa on Xavier Becerra
"I do not trust Xavier Becerra to stand up to Trump. He was not effective in government. A lot of people in the Biden administration are talking about this because they realize he was not an effective HHS… pic.twitter.com/y0sI8N6y7K
— Popstonox (@Popstonox) May 6, 2026
But then you dig a little deeper, and you see why.
KTLA in Los Angeles did an interview with Becerra this week, and… oh, dear…
Incredibly awkward moment as Democrat candidate for California Governor Xavier Becerra gets caught asking reporter for a softball interview: “This is a profile piece – Not a gotcha piece, right?” pic.twitter.com/gzLqkZYKnK
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) May 12, 2026
Then it got worse…
KTLA just ended Xavier Becerra pic.twitter.com/oMuWmbdm8n
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) May 12, 2026
You might consider this as a coup de grace…
As HHS Secy during COVID, Becerra rarely was the administration’s point person in communicating to the American people on the pandemic. This may be the reason why. https://t.co/WWy09M26Et
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) May 12, 2026
Becerra was an unmitigated partial-birth abortion as the head of HHS in the Biden administration. This is a guy who can’t run a lemonade stand and proved it by botching a major department of the federal government for four years.
And the KTLA interview showed that his most high-profile botch, those 85,000 illegal migrant kids they couldn’t account for after HHS apparently handed them over to the international human trafficking network, isn’t one he’s come up with an answer for.
Becerra isn’t intelligent, so it’s a lot to expect that he’d have an intelligent answer. But this was no answer at all. He got tied in knots by a neutral reporter on an issue he’s had a year to perfect a dodge for.
Which means he’s as lazy as he is stupid.
And that makes Xavier Becerra a pretty good avatar for today’s Democrat Party, especially in California. Just think about who the leading lights are in that constellation — Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu — and you’ll realize there isn’t a single one of them who could win a red or purple state or congressional district.
What’s so hilarious, though, is that while the Democrats are ripping Becerra as an incompetent for his time at HHS, what seems to be the main complaint against him is that he’s a moderate squish.
If you’re just catching up, in the past couple weeks Xavier Becerra has:
-Called for more oil drilling after taxing the max from Chevron
-Flipped on single payer after meeting with an industry lobbying group
-Had a campaign finance complaint filed against him
And now this: https://t.co/8jgtvs8isK
— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 12, 2026
And that it’s coming out how much the Biden gang hated him.
Axios previously reported that Susan Rice called Xavier Becerra a “bitch-ass” and passed a note to Alejandro Mayorkas reading “don’t save him” when Becerra was struggling in a cabinet meeting. https://t.co/bMNMgIW6Er
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) May 13, 2026
If everybody hates this guy so much, and not without reason, how is he sitting atop the polls?
I’ll give you the depressing explanation, and it isn’t likely to surprise you.
That explanation is pretty simple — Democrats don’t believe in excellence. They don’t even believe in competence. They aren’t the party of the competent and haven’t been in a long time.
You get ahead in Democrat politics not by solving problems or doing an objectively good job in a given office, but by being a certain thing.
It isn’t a coincidence, for example, that they haven’t staged a real presidential primary election since 2008. Their nominations tend to be casting calls based on identity.
And Xavier Becerra is moving up because he’s Hispanic, and Hispanic Democrats in California think it’s their turn, so they’re getting behind Becerra.
That it was mostly Hispanic kids among the 85,000 that Becerra more or less sold into slavery as HHS secretary isn’t all that important.
And let’s face it — it’s not like anybody else among the Democrats in that race is demonstrably more brilliant than Becerra is.
Consider that Swalwell was their frontrunner at one point. And after he dropped out, it was Katie Hot Potatoes Porter, before the public got to see a little too much of her. Now it’s Becerra.
Perhaps they’ll ultimately settle on Steyer, but if so it’s really just that Steyer is out there buying the race. Not subtly, by the way. By the mid-April 2026 filings, Steyer had already dumped more than $132 million into the California gubernatorial contest. And nearly all of that came out of his own pocket. Just from January through mid-April, Steyer had spent $105 million of his own money.
The thing about self-funders is that all that money doesn’t really buy you support. It buys you name recognition, but as gross as political fundraising might be, it’s a form of voter contact. When you ask people for money you’re also going to get their feedback — you’re asking them to invest in you, and investors get to have opinions. Tom Steyer doesn’t have that. He’s just got a gangster roll and he’s making it rain by dumping 20 times the money on TV that the other Dems have spent.
Remember, Meg Whitman blew through $178 million in 2010 and lost. Yes, she was a Republican, sort of, but she was also positively bewitching compared to Tom Steyer.
That so far seems to be Steyer’s biggest hit of the campaign — calling for abolishing ICE. It’s a pretty clumsy pander to the Hard Left, but it’s completely on brand for him.
Who is Tom Steyer, other than this obnoxious wannabe rich-boy politician with far more money than appeal wearing his kid’s boarding school uniform tie? He ran for president in 2020, but not really long or well enough for anybody to notice him. There’s a reason for this — there is nothing at all particularly interesting or salutary about Tom Steyer.
He’s a hedge fund vampire who got rich making oil and gas investments, and got richer in the private prison game. But after Steyer made his money, he wanted to be loved, and that’s when he started dumping filthy lucre into climate PACs on his way to that $340 million boondoggle of a vanity presidential campaign. And his platform is a dog’s breakfast of leftist fantasies that will utterly finish California — a 25 percent electricity bill cut he can’t explain how he’ll achieve, closing corporate tax loopholes in a state already running off its business community, a one-time billionaire assets tax, single-payer-ish healthcare, and breaking up utility monopolies (which might actually not be a bad idea, if you’re dumb enough to believe Steyer would actually do it). And he bought the endorsements of all the usual suspects, like SEIU California and Our Revolution.
Steyer is an empty suit stuffed with Benjamins. He’s useless. But so is Becerra. So is Porter, and so is failed former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is bringing up the rear. Another Democrat, Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, is thought to be somewhat competent and a potential improvement on the disaster Gavin Newsom has been, but Mahan isn’t getting any real traction.
They don’t vote for competence, and they’ve chased all the excellence out of their party. What’s left are crooks and morons and sex pests.
Which isn’t lost on their voters.
Steve Hilton needs to make that runoff, and in a sane society he’d get a shot at fixing California. They’ve got nothing to lose by giving him that shot — you know exactly what you’re getting with either Becerra or Steyer, and it ain’t good.
But right now, there is no real reason to believe California’s voters have what it takes to try something beyond the usual diet of clown politicians who can’t even answer standard reporters’ questions. And that’s depressing for what used to be such a fantastic place to live.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers
What Happened in Indiana Wasn’t a Win for Trump. It Was a Win for the People.
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