A very successful businessman—and a major contributor to Democratic Party candidates and causes—once explained to me why he talked, acted, and thought like a Republican but never considered supporting any Republican candidate, ever. “We’ve already got the Republicans,” he told me.

This is the transactional essence behind corporate support for Democrats in California, the one-party state. Republicans have no political power, and whenever the Democrats in the state legislature are surprisingly split on a matter of concern to business interests, the handful of Republican politicians will invariably cast pro-business votes.

This has been going on for a long time. Democrats have controlled both houses of the state legislature since 1997 and the governorship since 2011. A signature moment came in 2010 when Jerry Brown defeated the hapless billionaire Republican Meg Whitman to begin his second two-term stint as governor. That’s when the California Chamber of Commerce made an internal decision to start supporting “pro-business” Democrats.

So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the California Chamber of Commerce has endorsed Xavier Becerra for governor, the Democrat who will face Republican Steve Hilton this November.

In a guest op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal on June 17, candidate Hilton reiterated the case for change. Per-capita state government spending has nearly tripled over the last two decades, without a single quality-of-life metric improving. More than two million Californians moved out of the state during Newsom’s years as governor. Major businesses have relocated, with more on the way out. California has the highest taxes, the highest levels of unemployment, the highest poverty rate, and the highest cost of living in America.

It’s a familiar refrain, and yet Californians keep electing Democrats. Hilton faces an uphill battle. Republicans are only 25 percent of registered voters; Democrats are 45 percent, with No Party Preference voters at 23 percent, nearly outnumbering Republicans. In the last four gubernatorial elections in the state, Republicans barely captured 40 percent of the vote. Brian Dahle got 40.8 percent in 2022; John Cox got 38.1 percent in 2018; Neel Kashkari got 40.0 percent in 2014; and Meg Whitman squandered $170 million in her 2010 gubernatorial quest in exchange for only 40.9 percent of the vote.

These are remarkably consistent numbers. Can Hilton overcome them? In California’s preposterous jungle primary, where, in this most recent iteration, there were 63 candidates, Hilton captured 24.7 percent to come in second to Xavier Becerra, who got 28.1 percent. Hilton had to contend with Tom Steyer, a bona fide fascist billionaire who masquerades as a social democrat and who, unlike Meg Whitman, hired a campaign team that knew what it was doing and wasn’t just going through the motions. Steyer’s hard-left campaign attracted 22.9 percent and almost edged out Hilton for a spot on the ballot.

Also complicating Hilton’s ascension to the runoff was another Republican, Chad Bianco, who pulled in 10.2 percent of the primary vote. Which brings us to one of Hilton’s major challenges if he hopes to defy history and beat the odds. He will have to pull in Bianco’s voters, who are, generally speaking, further right of center than Hilton voters.

This won’t be easy. The battle between these two Republicans turned bitter. In a perfect post-primary world, Hilton and Bianco would meet, put aside their differences, and make some joint campaign appearances. The formula whereby Hilton picks up 50-plus percent in November is hard enough. He needs Bianco’s 10 percent, or as much of it as possible.

If voters were practical, Hilton could take for granted 10.2 percent from Bianco voters in the general election, along with another 1.2 percent from voters who supported one of the other 10 Republican candidates on the crowded primary ballot. But these voters not only made an initial choice for a Republican other than Hilton. More than any other voting cohort in the state, they are disgusted with the whole system—the jungle primary, the rigged election laws, and the perception that Republicans will never win and even if they did, they wouldn’t fix anything.

But even if we suppose Hilton can muster the traditional 40 percent support that Republicans have typically earned, he still has to find another 10 percent elsewhere. And if, like his predecessors, he garners 40 percent when only 25 percent of voters are Republicans, he will have already pulled significant votes from the 23 percent No Party Preference voters along with a handful of Democrats.

Simply by virtue of the overwhelming advantage in registration that Democrats have in California, the main chance for Steve Hilton—the only chance—is for him to convince them that a vote for him is preferable to a vote for Becerra. That ought to be obvious. The state has blown through literally trillions of dollars over the past few Democratic administrations, and nothing has improved. But three things win elections: the party affiliation, the policy agenda, and the candidate’s personality. Hilton can’t win the first of these, but he can attract defecting Democrats if he wins the other two.

Ordinarily, the Democrats win on policy because their rhetoric goes down easy. Inclusion. Compassion. Environmentalism. And “affordability,” their latest mantra. But increasing percentages of Californians realize the results have delivered the opposite of what the rhetoric promised. Hilton, on the other hand, has developed detailed policy solutions that offer a new approach to every challenge where Democrats have failed. Can he sell them?

This is where personality will be decisive. Everybody wants change, but by successfully stereotyping Republicans as mean-spirited, Democrats have positioned themselves as the only option despite their failing policies. This is the context in which Hilton emerges from a bruising primary campaign where his tactics and persona were necessarily abrasive. Now he needs to return to his genial, upbeat roots. His winning strategy is to focus overwhelmingly on the solutions he offers and the dreams they can fulfill for all Californians. If Hilton comes across as someone who will govern as a bridge builder, voters will trust him. If he comes across as someone who is upbeat and optimistic about the future, voters will like him.

Meanwhile, California’s business community has a choice to make. They can stick with Democrats, accepting an essentially fascist political economy where only the largest corporations will survive the escalating regulatory onslaught and increasing taxes, and only then if they always play ball with the one-party regime. Or they can return to their roots, accepting competition instead of cronyism, and supporting candidates who are trying to roll back a government that has lost its way.

Steve Hilton is the best candidate for governor that California has had in years. Regardless of their party affiliation, Californians who vote for him have nothing to lose and everything to gain.