"What a pathetic little pipsqueak he is, honestly," the Republican nominee for governor of California said in an interview with Carlo Versano on Newsweek's The 1600 podcast. "He's such a jerk, honestly, and it shows you how thin and empty he is. He's got nothing to say except these insults." Hilton had just watched a clip from the testiest moment of their September 30 CNN debate, when Becerra, who is Mexican American, told the London-born Republican he seemed to "welcome immigrants who look like you but deport immigrants who look like me." "Obviously a ludicrous thing to say," Hilton said.
"My parents are Hungarian. They were refugees from communism. I know what it's like to grow up in a working-class immigrant home and try and climb the ladder of opportunity." "He's just a smug, lazy, arrogant, entitled nothing of a person just sort of sitting at home doing nothing," Hilton said, adding that "empty suit" is "the number one thing you hear" about Becerra from Democrats who have worked with him.
Becerra also skipped a Los Angeles Times forum the week after the debate. Hilton said voters across the state hear some version of the same excuse: "We invited Xavier Becerra to join us today but due to a scheduling conflict he wasn't able to make it. And I don't know quite what the conflicts are because he doesn't seem to be scheduling anything at all." A former senior adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and onetime Fox News host, Hilton became a U.S. citizen in 2021.
He is trying to become the first Republican to win statewide office in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Democrats hold a registration edge of more than 4 million; President Donald Trump, who endorsed Hilton, is deeply unpopular in the state, and the latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, released September 24, had Becerra ahead 58 percent to 33 percent. Hilton says he has campaigned in all 58 counties, and that the message he hears from voters at airports and coffee shops is the same everywhere.
"It's very simple what they say: you have to win," he said. "There's a sort of desperation about it." "Well, I'm my own person," Hilton said when asked about the Trump endorsement. "Anyone who knows me and has worked with me in the past knows that when back in the day, when I was senior advisor to the prime minister in the UK, I was seen as very independent-minded.
That's always been my thing." His pitch to Democrats and independents is about who has been running the state. "We've had one party running everything for 16 years," he said. "If you look back over history, you look at other countries, it's just not healthy to have one party rule.
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