Conservative journalist Bill O’Reilly declared on his “No Spin” podcast that Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton “can’t win” in California, claiming the state’s elections are “rigged.”
O’Reilly praised Hilton as a candidate but argued the deck is stacked against him in the Golden State.
“Steve is a good campaigner, and he’s a sincere man, I believe,” O’Reilly said. “He can’t win! Because counties in California are rigged. You won’t get the vote count ‘til three weeks after election day! Come on! Everybody knows this.”
O’Reilly also took aim at Hilton’s Democratic opponent, Xavier Becerra, who served in the Biden administration.
“So, Hilton’s doing a good job up against [Xavier] Becerra, who is like one of the worst civil servants I’ve ever seen. He was in the Biden administration. But Steve can’t win,” he said.
A recent Manhattan Institute poll showed Becerra holding a commanding lead over Hilton, with 55% of likely voters backing the Democrat compared to 38% supporting Hilton.
The Trump administration began pushing the theory that California’s elections were rigged during the primaries, when Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt began falling behind Democratic incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Democratic City Councilwoman Nithya Raman.
Under California law, counties have up to 30 days after an election to process votes and can count late-arriving ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received before a certain date. Trump argued that the delay in determining election outcomes meant the state was rigging votes against Republicans.
“You see what’s happening in California — they’re rigging the election,” Trump said during the mayoral race. “Now maybe we caught them and maybe they won’t be able to get away with it.”
Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and MAGA supporters on social media echoed the president’s claim.
Hilton, however, who has been backed by Trump, distanced himself from the president’s claims during a June interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront.”
Burnett asked Hilton whether he was worried about fraud or simply frustrated by a slow count in a process he believed was fair.
“Yeah. So look, there’s so many things wrong with the system. I’ve been saying all along that we take it very seriously because we don’t want to let people down and we’ve been very vigilant on it,” Hilton said.
“We’re keeping an eye on it. We’ve got teams standing by, lawyers standing by, and actually it’s the same answer that actually I’ve been giving for a few days now, we’ve seen nothing that would give us cause to intervene in that way,” he continued.
Democratic California Secretary of State Shirley Weber pushed back on Trump’s claims.
“In California, election officials work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls and ensure that only eligible voters are registered,” Weber said in a statement.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed Trump’s claims as “the ramblings of a mad king.” In September, Newsom signed a package of preemptive election laws aimed at keeping the federal government out of the state’s vote-counting process.
According to Democracy Docket, the move is the state’s latest effort to stop law enforcement or federal officials from disrupting vote counting ahead of November’s midterm elections.
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