President Donald Trump fired off a Truth Social broadside on Thursday, accusing California Democrats of stealing the state’s gubernatorial primary — and given the Golden State’s long, sordid history of electoral shenanigans, he’s got plenty of reason to be suspicious. “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” Trump posted. “Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???” The results from Tuesday’s jungle primary are indeed dragging. With all precincts partially reporting in the governor’s race, Trump-endorsed Republican TV host Steve Hilton leads the pack with 27.6% of the vote, while former Biden Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra sits in second at 25.6% — each clearing 1.3 million votes. Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer lurks in third at 19.8%, and since most California ballots are cast by mail — with postmarked ballots accepted up to a week after Election Day — the final two finalists advancing to November are far from settled. If the results hold, California gets the rare spectacle of a true Republican vs. Democrat November showdown, with Hilton facing Becerra for the seat being vacated by term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom. Becerra, if he wins in November, would be the first Latino elected governor of a state where 40% of residents are Hispanic. Hilton — a British-born former Fox News host who became a U.S. citizen in 2021 — is hoping to follow fellow immigrant and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to Sacramento. Trump celebrated Hilton’s early lead, posting that the former television commentator “will turn California around, quickly — and the Federal Government will be there, with him, to help!” But Trump’s fraud allegations aren’t coming out of nowhere. California Democrats have spent years engineering the electoral deck. In November 2025, voters passed Proposition 50 — dubbed the “Election Rigging Response Act” — which suspended California’s independent redistricting commission and handed Democrats control of a new congressional map explicitly designed to flip five Republican-held House seats. Newsom and former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi championed it. Former California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposed it. It passed with 64% of the vote in an election that the state mailed ballots to all voters. Then, in February 2026, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — himself a Republican gubernatorial candidate — executed search warrants and seized 650,000 ballots from that very Prop 50 election after a citizen watchdog group identified a stunning discrepancy: 45,896 more votes tallied than physical ballots received. California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta immediately moved to block the count — and the ballots were scheduled for destruction in May. The question that hangs in the air: if the results were clean, why fight so hard to stop someone from counting the paper? California’s electoral history offers other reasons for suspicion. In the 2024 congressional elections, Democrats flipped three Republican House seats — including one by a paper-thin 187-vote margin that wasn’t called until a month after Election Day, with both parties deploying armies of staffers to “cure” flagged mail ballots. More Democratic ballots were cured than Republican ones — by a margin exceeding the final vote spread. Republicans are energized heading into November. Early turnout data from the primary showed the GOP outpacing Democrats in several key counties. But in California, where mail ballots arrive for weeks and ballot-curing operations can erase narrow deficits, election night results have a funny way of shifting in Democrats’ favor by the time the last envelope is opened.