California Republicans came to San Diego without a plan B. They probably needed one.
The California Republican Party wrapped its spring convention Sunday without endorsing a candidate for governor, a failure that exposed a clean split between two men who can’t stand each other’s politics or their chances. Steve Hilton finished with 44% of the delegate vote. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco pulled 49%. Neither hit the 60% threshold required to walk away with an official party blessing. So neither did.
That’s the situation heading into the June 2 primary.
Trump had thrown his weight behind Hilton, a British-American businessman and one-time Fox News host who currently leads the field in polling and has raised $6.6 million for the race. Bianco’s fundraising sits more than $2 million behind that. The math favors Hilton on paper. But the most forceful endorsement available in the Republican Party didn’t move enough delegates in a San Diego ballroom to put Hilton over the top. That’s worth sitting with for a moment.
Hilton tried to spin Sunday’s outcome as a victory. “Chad Bianco came into this convention assuming he’d got the whole thing in the bag,” Hilton said. “I think we made great progress this weekend to make it roughly even.” He called denying Bianco the endorsement “a major success” and said he’s confident he’ll clear the top-two primary system and land one of the spots that advances to November. Maybe so. But winning a primary isn’t the same thing as winning a convention room, and Hilton clearly hadn’t won this one.
Bianco wasn’t conceding anything.
Standing firm after the vote, the sheriff rejected the idea that the delegate count told the real story. “I have the supermajority of the support from this room, way more than what that total indicated,” he said. He dismissed endorsements as “silly,” then acknowledged, in the same breath, that one “would have been nice.” That’s not a quote from someone who’s comfortable with how Sunday went.
Bianco spent months cultivating party insiders and building his delegate operation. He came in expecting to close. The 49% showing wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t what his camp had built toward either. And while he’s right that the convention vote doesn’t decide the primary, he can’t be thrilled that Trump’s backing didn’t fully break against him.
The delegates themselves, many of them paying over $1,000 in travel and lodging to show up at a San Diego waterfront resort, weren’t shy about their 2028 loyalties. Ball caps marked “Trump 2028” were everywhere. The harbor backdrop and mid-60s temperatures helped the event feel more festive than fractured. But CalMatters reported on the deeper anxieties running through the weekend, including a congressional panel where several conservative voices openly acknowledged the party’s difficult position heading into the fall midterms.
Bianco’s profile extends well past convention politics. Last month, his office seized hundreds of thousands of ballots from the special election for Proposition 50, a Democratic redistricting measure that voters ultimately passed. The seizure triggered legal fights almost immediately. CalMatters and other outlets went to court to unseal the warrants behind the move. It made national news and it’s the kind of hardline maneuver that turns on a specific wing of the California GOP, which is part of how Bianco built his delegate count in the first place.
It’s also part of why the party’s coalition looks so difficult to hold together. The delegates who love Bianco’s ballot seizure tactics don’t necessarily trust Hilton’s path through Trump country. The delegates impressed by Hilton’s fundraising numbers and poll position don’t necessarily want a sheriff who’s fighting election battles in court as their standard-bearer. That tension didn’t resolve in San Diego. It just went home with everyone on Sunday.
What’s clear is that 2026 won’t get easier from here. California Republicans don’t win statewide races under normal conditions, and there’s nothing normal about trying to consolidate behind a candidate when the convention can’t clear 60% for anyone.
June 2 will tell the real story. But Sunday didn’t help.