The Patriot Post® · Are Californians Dreaming?

If you’re like me, you have a strong inclination to concede California as a lost cause. Perhaps it is. But were California a country, it would rank fifth among the world’s economies — behind the rest of the U.S., China, Germany, and Japan — and for that reason alone, it bears watching, and hoping, and praying.

Yesterday, Californians headed to the polls, and the races to watch were for governor and for Los Angeles mayor. Here, then, is an update of how things went, especially for the upstart Republican candidates in those races.

I say “update” because, in typical California fashion, the Once-Golden State is still counting the votes. And it’ll likely keep counting the votes for days and weeks to come. Remember: California was still finding and counting congressional and presidential votes around a month after the polls had closed in the 2024 presidential election. That’s no way to run a state, unless your goal is to remove every duly elected Republican congressman from office and chase away every resolute Republican resident who hasn’t yet beat feet for Arizona or Nevada or Idaho, but that might be what we’re in for once again.

Both the gubernatorial race and the mayoral race feature California’s jungle primary, in which the top two finishers advance, regardless of political party. So while both Republicans — one, Steve Hilton, a former chief strategist for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and the other, Spencer Pratt, a reality TV personality with a knack for making great campaign ads — have performed remarkably well, they can still be shut out of the general election. And, in both cases, they’ll be prohibitive underdogs in November regardless. That’s because Democrats outnumber Republicans in California by nearly 2-to-1.

As of 6 a.m. Pacific Time, in the gubernatorial race, with just over 60% of the vote counted, Hilton leads with 27.8%, followed by former hard-left congressman and Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra with 25.4%, and then hard-left climate-changer Tom Steyer with 19.6%. The one to watch is Steyer. By the time it’s over, Becerra will likely have leaped ahead of Hilton, because California has a way of finding just the right amount of the right votes. But if Steyer, who spent more than $200 million on this campaign, also leaps past Hilton — which isn’t implausible given what kinds of votes are still out there — then Hilton gets shut out of the general election by a hard-lefty and an even-harder-lefty. Once again, Californians will get the government they deserve.

In the mayoral race, hard-left Democrat Karen Bass leads with 34.8% of the vote, followed by Pratt with 30.4%, and then by even-harder-left Nithya Raman with 22.3%. Thus, Bass is the first sitting mayor of LA in decades to get less than 50% of the vote in the primary, and for that failure — and for myriad other failures, including her failure to prepare for the devastating Palisades fires instead of jet-setting to Africa while her city burned — she’ll be forced into a runoff. Whether it’s with Pratt or Raman is yet to be determined.

Last night, Pratt had the tone of a man who’d already won. “I literally could not be more excited,” he said. “I am ready for whatever God puts in front of me. … I was going to be happy if I wasn’t moving forward, but now I feel very confident.”

As Bass said last night at her own rally: “We’re not going to let somebody turn back our clock. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to continue moving our city forward, because this is the greatest city in the world.” (Here, it’s instructive to remember what happened to Bass four years ago. In 2022, she beat Republican Rick Caruso in the general election runoff by less than 10 points, which shows just how weak she is in a city overwhelmingly populated by Democrats.)

Does anyone really believe that pablum? If they do, they deserve Karen Bass, and they deserve her good and hard. California is, of course, a one-party state, and it’s gone steadily downhill for a quarter-century. As historian and Central Valley farmer Victor Davis Hanson has written:

The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.

Yet despite this laundry list of Democrat-induced illnesses, I don’t think the people there are ready to cry uncle just yet. It’s been 15 years since moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor there, and many Republicans during the past 15 years have already voted with their feet and skedaddled, which means the percentage of Republican voters there to effect change at the ballot box is even smaller.

Yeah, yeah, the optimist in me says that after decades of Democrat malfeasance, Californians are finally waking up. But more likely, come November, a majority of this overwhelmingly Democrat state will simply hit the snooze alarm and roll over for another election cycle and four more years of disastrous Democrat rule.

That’d be bad news for Steve Hilton and for Spencer Pratt, but it’d be far worse news for the millions of decent, hardworking Californians who’ve had enough of their state’s leftist-led spiral into Third World status.

California, of course, wasn’t the only state that held primaries yesterday. In Iowa, President Donald Trump’s remarkable 117-for-117 record in endorsements came to an end as his guy for governor, Congressman Randy Feenstra, got edged out by businessman Zach Lahn in the GOP primary. Perhaps things would’ve turned out differently if Trump had endorsed Feenstra sooner. His endorsement came on Friday, though, long after a lot of Iowans had already cast early ballots.

Perhaps the most awful surprise of the evening was in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, where Dr. Adam Hamawy, who the New York Post reports is “an Egypt-born former combat surgeon who once volunteered with an Al Qaeda-linked group in Bosnia,” won the Democrat primary there and is a virtual shoe-in to be the heavily Democrat district’s next congressman.

Worse yet, Hamawy was a defense witness in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Think about that: Democrats in New Jersey just elected a guy with ties to al-Qaeda and the infamous Blind Sheikh.

Once again, we’ll get the government we deserve. Good and hard.