SACRAMENTO — The strangest thing about the fraud the president keeps describing is who it failed to harm. On the same Tuesday that Donald Trump accused California Democrats of trying to steal the state’s elections, the candidate he endorsed for governor clinched a place in the November runoff, the best opening any Republican has had here in two decades.
Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary in the Biden administration, and Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host who once advised the British prime minister David Cameron, will face each other in November for the governorship Gavin Newsom is vacating, ABC News projected on Tuesday evening. With most of the vote counted a week after election day, Becerra held just under 28 percent and Hilton just under 25, with the billionaire climate advocate Tom Steyer falling short in third.
California’s top-two primary usually sends a pair of Democrats to November. Hilton’s second-place finish breaks that pattern and splits the runoff down party lines in a state where a Republican last won the governorship in 2006. Trump, who endorsed him in April with the promise that California could be fixed with federal help and a great governor, has a stake in the outcome that is hard to overstate.
Which is what makes the president’s other project this week so striking. While the count crept toward a projection, Trump posted that the Democratic Party was trying to steal both the governor’s race and the Los Angeles mayoral primary, complaining about mail ballots and the pace of the tally. He offered no evidence. His own candidate was, at that moment, advancing.
The state’s chief law enforcement officer did not reach for diplomatic language. Attorney General Rob Bonta, asked about the claims, called them truly embarrassing, unhinged, wild-eyed, dangerous, reckless and desperate, and put the obvious question back to the White House. What is the evidence for the bold claim, he asked in an interview with NPR, before answering it himself. He has none.
The numbers are on Bonta’s side. Research published by the Brookings Institution has put confirmed fraud in mail voting at roughly four cases in every ten million ballots, a rate of 0.000043 percent, and no audit or court in California has surfaced anything to suggest this count is different. The slow tally Trump points to is a feature of state law, which gives mail ballots days to arrive and be verified, not a symptom of theft.
Even Hilton declines to follow his patron there. The candidate has mocked the state’s counting speed as an election shambles, but pressed on CNN about the president’s fraud allegations, he pushed back rather than echo them. His message on advancing stayed on cost of living. In the weeks ahead, he said, he would lay out a detailed plan to make the state Califordable, particularly for workers and small businesses.
The gap between the candidate and the president is the tell. For Hilton, the system just produced the result of his political life, and treating it as corrupt would saw off the branch he is standing on. For Trump, the claims serve a different purpose, one that has little to do with this count. California’s Democratic Party chair, Rusty Hicks, called the allegations baseless, and the state has watched the administration build toward them anyway, including a Justice Department prosecutor sent to observe ballot counting in Los Angeles without naming a single allegation.
Seen from that angle, the primary is a rehearsal. The same week the president declared this election rigged, his party in Washington was locking in his agenda by single votes, funding his immigration enforcement machine through the end of his term. The midterms that will decide whether that majority survives are five months away, and a sitting president who has already pronounced California’s elections stolen has positioned himself to say it again in November, whatever the count shows.
Becerra, for his part, enters the runoff as the favorite in a state Trump lost three times, carrying a federal resume and the burden of defending a status quo Hilton will spend five months attacking as unaffordable. The contest gives Republicans a genuine argument and Democrats a genuine fright, which is roughly what a functioning election is supposed to produce.
What nobody inside the state can yet answer is what the federal government intends to do with the machinery it has begun to assemble. The Justice Department has not said what its observer in Los Angeles was looking for, or found. The White House has not said what evidence, if any, sits behind the president’s posts. Until either answers, California is left running its elections under a standing accusation that no official body has substantiated.
The count goes on, the runoff is set, and the two men who will contest it are already campaigning. The fraud, so far, exists only in the posts of the man whose candidate just won.
