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When Steve Hilton first came to live in California, the political strategist had already gone through a few rebrands.
It was 2008 and the British Conservative Party was ascendant after a decade of losses. Hilton, a top adviser to future Prime Minister David Cameron, was a source of great curiosity for the British press; he eschewed suits, rode a bike to work, sometimes went shoeless and avoided reporters. He was also at the center of the party’s turnaround, widely credited with refreshing its image from stale and imperious to socially tolerant, environment-minded and diversity-conscious.
While he was on a temporary stint in Silicon Valley, the British press couldn’t help noticing a similarity between Cameron and Hilton and the Golden State’s then-governor, moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The mixture of free-market economics, social liberalism, high-technology growth and environmental awareness makes California instantly attractive” to the Conservative Party’s “modernizers,” a commentator wrote in The Guardian.
That was the last time a Republican was governor of California. Eighteen years later, Hilton is trying to pick up Schwarzenegger’s mantle in a dramatically different moment for California and American politics.
After finishing second in last month’s top-two primary, he faces long odds in the November general election against Democratic former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Democrats have dominated the state since Schwarzenegger left office; a Republican hasn’t won a statewide seat since before Cameron became prime minister. And though anti-tax sentiments still run deep, so too does hatred of President Donald Trump, who has endorsed Hilton.
It could help Hilton that he cuts an unlikely figure for a MAGA man. A professional advertiser, Hilton spent the first half of his career softening the public images of the Conservatives, of multinational corporations accused of causing various social ills and of capitalism itself, in contrast to the bombastic politics of today. His beliefs, documented in decades of British press coverage and his own books, don’t line up neatly on the political spectrum.
But they also make him hard to pin down. Over the years he’s praised several policy ideas that contradict the deregulatory campaign he’s run today and in the past. In London, he was known as a fount of eccentric ideas who also pushed to slash welfare, loosen labor laws, cut government employment, privatize government services and even floated reducing maternity leave. In 2015, from Silicon Valley, he wrote a book endorsing a higher national living wage in the UK, generous family leave policies and forcing factory farms to pay for the environmental and health costs of their operations.
“He’s quite difficult to put in a box,” said Giles Gibbons, a friend and former business partner at a firm the pair founded in the late 1990s to advise brands on social responsibility. “He challenges the orthodoxy and the process of doing things. He’s a contrarian, in many ways.”
Hilton chafes at central authorities and regulation, saying his purest belief is in small-time entrepreneurs and his favorite word is “hustle.” In the book More Human, he describes himself as anti-establishment, pro-immigration and “perhaps Bernie Sanders meets John Kasich meets Rand Paul.” A populist, he campaigned for Brexit and wrote about the ills of centralized institutions from big banks to monopolies to standardized testing.
Conspiracy theories and turning to Trump
Now, in his latest rebrand, Hilton has taken on a different tone. After moving to Silicon Valley permanently in 2012 and running a political tech startup, he landed a Fox News show, “The Next Revolution,” in 2017. Over six years on the network, he aligned himself closely with the Trump circle, calling for an audit into the 2020 election that President Joe Biden won, promoting the conspiracy theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci was responsible for the pandemic and railing against American colleges for spreading “the woke mind virus.”
He also occasionally criticized key conservative figures and in 2019 endorsed “asset reparations” in the form of business and home loans for African Americans to make up for the generational economic harm of racist policies, a position anathema to Republicans.
On the campaign trail now, he’s gregarious with reporters. He has ditched the ultracasual dress of his younger years — “You’ve got to be respectful of the office, so I’ve stepped up sartorially,” he explained — and the talk of corporate social responsibility — “I don’t think it’s the priority” — in favor of a campaign more aligned with a conventional American Republican in 2026.
He sports a “save girls’ sports” bracelet and has a “family first” agenda to promote adoption, prenatal care and “marriage and family formation” and discourage abortion. He’s promising steep tax cuts and business deregulation. He has vowed to overturn many of the state’s greenhouse gas reduction rules that he calls a product of the “climate agenda” — more than a decade after he advised Cameron in the so-called “greenest government ever.”
But he denies being inconsistent.
“I’m not an ideologue, I’m very pragmatic in my approach,” he said. “I don’t like being told what to do myself, and I don’t want to tell anyone else what to do with their life either, and I think that’s a very Californian attitude.”
A branding expert
The son of Hungarian immigrants to the United Kingdom who grew up working class, Hilton got his start in politics straight out of Oxford University.
He worked for the Conservatives and their advertising firm, M&C Saatchi, on political messaging, and worked on a controversial 1996 ad depicting Labour Party leader Tony Blair with “demon eyes,” which advertising regulators banned.
There he met Gibbons when they both worked on an antiracism campaign for a government agency. During focus groups, Gibbons said, they learned if they slapped a Nike logo on the campaign, the message was better received — and it improved Nike’s likability.
Convinced of the power of brands to do good, the pair founded the consulting firm Good Business, which helped corporations improve their images and their bottom lines through charity and PSAs on global health and environmentalism. Their clients included Nike, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. The firm’s thinking ran counter to the traditional business mindset of focusing on profits, addressed rising anti-globalization sentiments and helped usher in a trend of corporate social responsibility.
“Capitalism is a force for good, but it can become even better,” Hilton wrote in a 2001 Guardian column. “It’s time for Conservatives to wake up and smell the fair-trade coffee.”
He brought that free market centrism back to politics a few years later, eventually leaving the firm (which Gibbons still runs) to advise Cameron as he ascended to Conservative Party leadership. Hilton was godfather to Cameron’s son; the pair were among a cadre of young, posh conservatives intent on revamping the party’s “nasty” image for the 21st century.
Under Hilton’s strategy, there was less focus on restricting immigration and privatizing parts of the National Health Service, a greater embrace of civil unions for gay couples and an emphasis on helping the poor and standing up to big business. Cameron appeared frequently in web videos and emphasized fighting climate change. In one famous stunt, Hilton took Cameron to the Arctic Circle in Norway for a photoshoot with huskies and a melting glacier. He updated the Conservative Party logo, from a torch to a tree, and came up with the slogan “vote blue, go green.” There was talk of the responsibility companies bore for society.
Similarly, Hilton credits much of his own success this year to his messaging: promising simple (and ambitious) goals like $3 a-gallon gas and affordable starter homes. But for all his expertise in branding, he said he hasn’t thought about whether California Republicans should change their approach to appeal to more voters. Only a quarter of California’s registered voters are Republican, and party leaders have failed to disassociate the party from the president, last year suffering a major defeat on gerrymandering that could strip the party of several seats in Congress.
Hilton characterized his work to modernize the Conservative Party in the U.K. less as an appeal to the center and more as an effort to shift the party from one associated with elites to one for ordinary citizens and the working class. In that vein, he said, he still calls himself an environmentalist, with a California policy proposal that calls for planting trees and preserving wetlands, but opposes California’s greenhouse gas reduction rules because he says they are mandates that increase costs for consumers.
If anything, he said, California itself needs rebranding as a friendlier place to do business. That’s why he hasn’t talked about corporate responsibility lately, he said, and instead has promised to loosen regulations across the board, characterizing the current state of business in California as “life or death.”
“We’ve just got to really focus on the fundamental economic conditions before we start worrying about all of that,” he said. “We need to restore the appeal of Brand California.”
One stance he has retained from his days with Cameron is the classically conservative focus on the family, though in a move of Hilton unorthodoxy, he’s kept his own family absent from the “grueling process” of the campaign.
It’s a marked contrast from Becerra, whose wife and adult daughters introduced him onstage the night of the primary election. The next day, Hilton told a reporter it was “old-fashioned” to ask whether his wife, prominent tech executive Rachel Whetstone, would be more involved in the race.
‘Positive populism’
At the heart of Hilton’s political philosophies is a populist devotion to decentralizing power.
He was the brain behind Cameron’s banner ‘Big Society’ policy to put decision-making power about schools, police, social services and other government services in the hands of local residents, nonprofits and often, the private sector.
The pitch was that doing so would spur innovation and improve service delivery: One example Gibbons cited was an expansion of state-funded schools operated independently by local organizations, akin to American charter schools. Critics called the Big Society a backdoor way to cut social services spending and offload state responsibilities to charities and profit-seekers.
Gibbons said because the policies coincided with a period of austerity after the Great Recession, opponents succeeded in painting the idea as “a way for government not to pay as much for things, and to get communities to sort of step up and do it for free or volunteer.”
Several of Hilton’s former British political colleagues did not respond to inquiries from CalMatters, but some told the San Francisco Standard the idea was a hard sell and impractical to implement. The outlet also quoted Cameron’s memoir describing Hilton as a “disruptive force” and someone more interested in “tipping … over” the political system than working within government.
Hilton left the U.K. for good in 2012 to be closer to Google, where Whetstone was then senior vice president for communications and public policy. A former Conservative Party operative herself, Whetstone later held similar positions at Uber, Meta and Netflix before joining the AI company Sierra.
The couple settled with their sons in Atherton, a San Mateo County enclave that is the second-wealthiest zip code in the country. They raised chickens, took English visitors on bike rides across the Golden Gate Bridge and Hilton stopped using a smartphone, which continues to this day.
Hilton’s departure from England sparked reports that he had left on bad terms, disillusioned with his colleagues at 10 Downing Street. He said in an interview he was “frustrated, for sure.”
The coalition government he helped negotiate “had a very radical promise in there of decentralizing power, reducing bureaucracy, and really changing the way the country was run,” he said. “There really wasn’t the political will to drive that through, and so that was my frustration.”
He’s said little about how he would similarly have to win over the dominant Democrats in the state Legislature if he were to be elected: “I hope that we’ll be able to work together on some things, and I think we all agree broadly on what the problems are.”
He held on to populism during his years in Silicon Valley and at the Stanford design thinking school, pouring his ideas into his 2015 book, which includes rare praise for outgoing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Citing mayors and local governments as superior decision-makers to states and national governments, Hilton credited Newsom, the former San Francisco mayor, for helping spur the eventual legalization of same-sex marriage by performing those ceremonies before they were legal.
“The decentralization of power is the best way to generate and test new ideas,” Hilton wrote. “That incredible, liberating revolution (of the legalization of same-sex marriage) began in earnest with the conviction of an assertive mayor.”
The rest of the book is a treatise on making large, bureaucratic institutions friendlier to workers, consumers and citizens. In addition to calling for minimum pay and stricter working conditions, he approved of grocery co-operatives, a single-payer health system provided patients could still choose from a market of providers, a universal basic income-esque program to give poor families financial assistance but allow them to make their own decisions, a crackdown on money in politics and the benefits of children spending time in nature.
Ultimately, Hilton calls on ordinary people to run for office with the help of his political tech startup.
While doing research for the book he was moved, he said, by a chart he saw showing the inflation-adjusted pay for top U.S. executives skyrocketing over the past several decades while workers’ earnings flatlined.
“You’ve had Reaganism, Clinton, globalization, all this, and yet the basic economic position of most American workers was totally flat,” he said. “It was like a massive call to action. Like, f—, this system is really not working.”
Seizing on a wave of populism across the West, he went on to campaign for Britain’s exit from the European Union — breaking from his old boss and friend Cameron — and to endorse Trump in his first run for president.
Yet he’s still critical of the right for instinctively blaming China and immigration for inequality, the left for blaming it on billionaires and both sides for increasing “hostility” toward big business. He hasn’t proposed any of the regulations he floated in his book (among them, he praised policies requiring companies to cap CEO pay relative to their workers) and is adamantly opposed to any tax proposals that would redistribute unequal wealth.
His answer, instead, is what he calls “positive populism,” which ultimately means relying on the market.
“You need businesses to be successful and the aim of every small business is to become a big business,” he said. “I like to be constructive … I think market-based solutions, less government, is the answer.”
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