No Republican has won statewide office in California in roughly two decades. Steve Hilton, the Republican on the Nov. 3 ballot for governor against Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general, is trying to close that gap with an ad series that addresses liberal voters in the language of seduction, as CalMatters’ Jeanne Kuang reports. The series cost $125,000 to produce. Its most notable effect so far has been on Hilton’s own party.
In the flagship spot, the room is dim and the music croons. Two young women — hair dyed, faces pierced — sit in front of a rainbow Pride flag while one coaxes the other into trying something she has never done. “Give me your hand, close your eyes, and I’ll do all the work,” she says, guiding the other woman’s hand to a mail-in ballot marked for Hilton. The ad closes by telling viewers to “lick it” — the envelope — under the tagline “Just try it!”
The intended targets were liberals who have never considered voting Republican. The people who responded were conservatives. Sonja Shaw, a Southern California school board president now running for state superintendent of public instruction, called the ad “creepy, weird, disturbing garbage” and wrote that “this is a clear example of exactly why good people are walking away from the Republican Party.” Her ally, evangelical pastor Jack Hibbs, responded with homophobic remarks, describing the ad as depicting “an issue regarding lesbianism among college girls and some high school girls that right now is an actual pandemic of social ill.” He said he would still support Hilton.
Michael Gates, the Republican candidate for attorney general, condemned the ad’s “sexualized portrayal of young women” in a press release and singled out the line “What if my dad finds out?” as undermining “the sanctity of the relationship between parents and their children.” The woman in the ad is presumably 18 or older, since the script has her casting a ballot, but the line was written to land the way it did.
A 1990s adman’s playbook
Hilton came up as an adman for the U.K. Conservative Party in the 1990s, moved into marketing, and, as a close adviser to former Prime Minister David Cameron, is widely credited with softening the British right’s posture toward LGBTQ couples. His California campaign runs in the other direction on one front: it targets transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports. The modern California Republican movement he is courting was built in part by the parental backlash over gender and sexuality in schools that pushed activists like Shaw into politics. An ad that jokes, however obliquely, about a father discovering his daughter’s experiment was always going to hit that nerve.
The second ad in the series applies the same treatment to a different stock character: a meditating hippie at a coastal spiritual retreat, nudged toward voting for Hilton as a way to “expand his mind.”
Attention, minus persuasion
Fred Davis, the Republican admaker behind the 2010 “demon sheep” spot — a three-minute production for Senate candidate Carly Fiorina that cast her opponent Tom Campbell as a fiscally liberal wolf among conservative sheep — called the Hilton ad “brilliant” at getting attention. He predicted it would not move Hilton’s numbers, on the grounds that the blue-haired, “Resist” T-shirt-wearing women it depicts are not going to vote for him. “I’ll go to great lengths to attract attention,” Davis said. “But why am I voting for Steve Hilton? … It accomplished half of the man’s goal really really well. But you’ve gotta have both.”
Hilton, in a weekend video and a Monday phone interview, framed the backlash as a tactical disagreement inside a party whose support he says he retains; he had just campaigned alongside Shaw, who did not return CalMatters’ call. “It’s not how I think about it,” he said of the suggestion that he had misread his base. “That may be an analyst’s way of looking at it but I’m a participant.” On the ad itself: “Anything that’s strong has a strong reaction. You see that in art, you see that in everything.”
Unlike Hilton’s other spots this cycle, the “Just try it” ads use real actors rather than AI generation. They were made for $125,000 by Gabriel Mann, a filmmaker who previously cut ads for conservative reality star Spencer Pratt’s Los Angeles mayoral run. More episodes are coming, Hilton said. The number that settles the argument between Davis and his client arrives Nov. 3: whether a campaign can spend $125,000 depicting its opponent’s voters more affectionately than its own and still hold the voters it already has.