The high-stakes gubernatorial race in California remained too close to call on Wednesday morning, with early results showing a tight contest in the crowded race.
With many ballots still left to be counted, three candidates emerged at the top: the Republican Steve Hilton and the Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer. Hilton was leading the field, with 28%, trailed closely by Becerra.
Results were clear enough that two Democratic candidates – the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, and the former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – conceded the race shortly after polls closed.
Still, much could change in the days and weeks ahead. In California, where mail-in voting is popular and great pains are taken to verify each ballot, it could take days for the top two candidates in both races to become clear. And many Democrats strategically held on to their ballots until the last minute, further delaying vote counts across the state.
Becerra and Hilton expressed confidence in advancing to the general election, while Steyer maintained he was still a contender.
“It might take some time to figure out where this is going. We’re going to wait until every ballot is counted. We’re going to give democracy time to work,” Steyer told supporters in San Francisco on Tuesday night.
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, advanced to the general election, while the former reality TV star Spencer Pratt was leading the progressive LA city council member Nithya Raman to land the second spot on November’s ballot.
California’s primaries were the most chaotic in recent memory. A sprawling field of 61 gubernatorial hopefuls were all listed on the same primary ballot. Among them were two Democrats who had withdrawn from the race and a professor who had changed his name to Barack Obama after the 44th president of the United States was elected.
The volatile contest to succeed the term-limited Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, began with a striking absence: no clear heir apparent. After Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, many Democrats had hoped the former vice-president would return home to seek the governorship, but she had other plans.
Other prominent Democrats, including the senator Alex Padilla and the attorney general, Rob Bonta, passed on the race, leaving a crowded field of ambitious but lackluster contenders. The result was what longtime political observers described as the most unpredictable and fragmented gubernatorial campaigns in recent Golden State history.
The race defied nearly every modern political convention. Months went by and no candidate managed to consolidate support in a state where Democrats enjoy a nearly two to one voter registration advantage but where residents are pessimistic and frustrated with their leadership.
That uncertainty was compounded by California’s “jungle” primary system, in which all candidates compete on a single ballot and only the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. The number of Democrats in the race had worried many voters who feared they would inadvertently fracture the vote, allowing two Republicans to advance to the general election, guaranteeing a Republican governor for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger was re-elected in 2006.
Voters consistently cited frustrations with housing affordability, homelessness, wildfire risk and cost of living as they weighed competing visions for governing a state whose economy would rank among the world’s largest if it were an independent nation.
The sprawling nature of the Democratic field prevented consensus in dark blue California. The Democratic party convention ended in a stalemate, with no candidate clearing the 60% threshold to win an endorsement. Newsom, considered a leading contender for the 2028 presidential nomination, Harris, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring at the end of her term, and other top Democratic figures largely stayed on the sidelines. Labor unions, environmental groups and other traditional centers of political influence split among the candidates.
The race was jolted again in April, when Eric Swalwell, a representative who had started to pull away from his Democratic rivals, abruptly suspended his campaign and resigned from Congress after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct and assault, allegations he has denied.
His sudden and shocking downfall scrambled the contest and scattered his support, and set in motion the unexpected rise of Becerra, the former Biden administration health secretary, former California attorney general and US congressman.
Becerra had languished near the bottom of public polls and faced calls from some Democrats to abandon his campaign and help consolidate the field. Instead, he mounted a late surge, presenting himself as an experienced public servant at a moment of deep economic and political uncertainty. By the final weeks of the campaign, he had climbed into contention and, according to several surveys, into first place.
He liked to say on the campaign trail that he was not the “slickest” or the “richest” candidate in the race but he knew how government worked. His campaign promoted a tongue-in-cheek “hot competence summer” campaign, emphasizing his expertise and public service, even as former Biden officials and his rivals raised questions about his leadership at HHS.
Steyer, the billionaire investor and climate activist, offered a clashing vision. After spending a record-smashing $200m of his own fortune on the race, he cast himself as a progressive outsider uniquely capable of shaking up the political status quo in Sacramento. His campaign was defined by the novel proposition of a billionaire who argued that billionaires and corporations should pay more in taxes. Critics accused him of trying to buy his way into the race, but he argued that self-funding insulated him from outside influence.
Hilton, the Republican Fox News personality and former adviser to David Cameron’s Conservative government in the UK, sought to turn the race into a referendum on Democratic governance after “one-party rule” in California. Backed by Trump, Hilton argued that persistent problems with affordability and public safety reflected systemic failures with liberal policy.
Election officials and strategists alike had cautioned that the outcome might not be known on election night. Democrats in particular, known for voting early and by mail, had spent the final weeks of the campaign gaming out voting scenarios in an effort to avert a Republican lockout in the governor’s race. Many Democratic voters said they planned to hold on to their ballots until election day, delaying their choice to ensure there were no late-breaking developments that might hamper a candidate’s chances in November.
In Los Angeles, Bass will have to defend her place in city hall. While she entered office in 2023 as a well-respected fixture of state politics, her support eroded after she traveled to Ghana on an ill-timed diplomatic trip just as deadly wildfires spread across Los Angeles in January 2025.
The discontent with Bass’s first term left her vulnerable to challengers. Pratt, a political novice who rose to prominence as an antagonist on the reality TV show The Hills, decided to run for office after his Pacific Palisades home burned down in the fires and made Bass’s response to the blazes and Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis central to his campaign.
And Raman, a one-time Bass ally who had endorsed the incumbent mayor before joining the race herself at the last minute, argued the nation’s second largest city was due for change.
