Xavier Becerra may still lead the California polls — 58 to 33 in the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey, 60 to 38 in the Public Policy Institute of California — but Wednesday night’s hour on CNN in Burbank was a different contest. The Democratic front-runner, former attorney general and Health and Human Services secretary, arrived with a double-digit cushion and a single script. Steve Hilton, the Republican outsider, arrived with the state’s actual bill of particulars: housing that ordinary families cannot buy, gas and fees that never stop rising, homelessness that Sacramento has funded into permanence. For sixty minutes, moderated by Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, the man with the lead looked like the man with the résumé and nothing else.

Hilton ran circles around him. A former Fox host and British political operative who has spent the fall on the road, he answered on taxes, construction fees, and the cost of one-party rule, and then turned the attack onto Becerra’s own record. When the subject was immigration, Hilton did not flinch from the accusation that, at HHS, the Democrat’s department handed migrant children over to traffickers. Becerra’s replies were thinner than the questions. He called Hilton’s arithmetic a gift to the rich. He warned that a Hilton governorship would produce “Trump results.” He reached, at one point, for a charge that Hilton welcomed white immigrants and rejected Latino ones. What he did not do was explain, in any usable detail, how another term of the regime that produced Gavin Newsom would reverse the flight of people and capital. Hilton’s line landed because it was the evening in one sentence: all Becerra ever said was “Trump, Trump, Trump,” and that was an insult to Californians who are desperate for something other than more of the same.

The trap was of Becerra’s own making. Trump is deeply unpopular in this state, and the Democrat plainly wanted the debate to be a referendum on the president rather than on Sacramento. He walked into the snare anyway. Every question on affordability, artificial intelligence, or the border became another invocation of a man who was not on the stage, while the man who was on the stage kept returning to fees, fraud, and a government that has held every lever in California for a generation. Polls taken before the mail ballots go out still favor the Democrat, and a Republican has not won statewide here since 2006. Wednesday did not repeal that arithmetic. It did show that a lead built on party registration is not the same thing as a defense of the record, and that Becerra, offered his only scheduled debate, chose to prosecute a president rather than answer for the state he means to inherit.

Additional ADNN Articles: 

Nithya Raman’s Magic Mail Ballot Surge Fuels Election Fraud Claims
Karen Bass Rages as Spencer Pratt Files Election Law Complaint
Katie Porter’s CBS Meltdown Goes Viral, Sparks ‘Longhouse Scold’ Backlash in California Governor Race
Swalwell Accused of Assaulting Drunk Staffer; Trump Vindicated on Fame Quote