61 Candidates, One Open Seat: Californians Vote in Wide-Open Primary to Replace Newsom

California voters went to the polls Tuesday in a sprawling, top-two primary to choose a successor to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is barred by term limits from seeking a third term after winning the office in 2018 and again in 2022. With 61 candidates on the ballot, the contest is one of the most crowded statewide races in recent memory.

Under California's "jungle" primary system — used by only one other state — every voter may cast a ballot for any candidate regardless of party, and the two top finishers advance to the November general election even if they belong to the same party. That quirk has injected real uncertainty into a race that, in a normal year, the heavily Democratic state would be expected to decide easily.

On the Democratic side, former Health and Human Services Secretary and state Attorney General Xavier Becerra led recent polling at roughly 23 percent in a late-May survey, with billionaire investor Tom Steyer at about 15 percent. Former Representative Katie Porter, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state schools chief Tony Thurmond are also in the mix, splintering the party's vote across a deep bench.

The Republican field has coalesced around two contenders: Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, who picked up President Donald Trump's endorsement in early April, and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who has run on a law-and-order platform of rolling back criminal-justice reforms and sanctuary policies. Hilton has campaigned on eliminating the state income tax on the first $100,000 of earnings, expanding oil production and slashing what he calls bureaucratic bloat in Sacramento.

For weeks, Democrats fretted that their fractured field could allow two Republicans to slip into the runoff — a humiliating outcome in a state that has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Those fears eased after Trump's endorsement of Hilton, which analysts said could consolidate GOP voters behind a single Republican and pull support away from Bianco, improving the odds that at least one Democrat survives to November. Results from the count are expected to firm up in the days ahead as California processes its large volume of mail-in ballots.

The stakes reach well beyond Sacramento. As the chief executive of the nation's most populous state and its largest economy, California's next governor will inherit a sprawling budget, a chronic housing crisis and a running series of clashes with the Trump administration over immigration, environmental rules and federal funding. Newsom, for his part, has spent his final stretch in office raising his national profile and is widely viewed as a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2028, lending the race to replace him added symbolic weight. Whoever emerges from Tuesday's jumble will spend the summer and fall trying to introduce themselves to a general-election audience that, in such a crowded primary, may have barely registered their name.