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Democratic voters are amplifying a last-minute nefarious strategy to lock Republican candidate Steve Hilton out of the California gubernatorial race, as the primary comes to a close Tuesday night.
Recent polls have Hilton as well as Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer as the top three candidates in a tight race for the top two spots to advance to the general election in November.
But some voters who openly dislike President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement want to stick it to him by voting for Steyer regardless if they support him or not — just so Trump-endorsed Hilton won’t make it, leaving it a Democrat-on-Democrat matchup.
Former state attorney general Becerra is the Democratic frontrunner and will likely secure a top two spot, so some liberals believe they should give votes to progressive billionaire Steyer to inch out in front of Hilton.
That narrative has been circulating around more intensely in the final days before the primary, political observers told The Post.
In fact, some are even calling supporters of Becerra, whose fights with Steyer have turned toxic, to hold their nose and vote Steyer. There are hints that at least some of the gamesmanship promotion is stemming from within Steyer circles.
“For the libbed out, late-voting Becerra-leaners in your life, grab that poll average and explain to them they have a chance to truly stick it to Trump and deny his fav guv candidate a spot on the November ballot,” wrote Will Jordan, a pollster with the Steyer campaign.
Others seemed to have embraced the idea. Jon Lovett, a host of the left-leaning Pod Save America podcast, said he would vote for Steyer just to get a Dem-on-Dem runoff. Alex Wong, a San Francisco-based former congressional staffer, said he’s leaning Steyer.
“I don’t think that a Dem vs Rep race would benefit the electorate,” Wong said. “The race would become a Fox News segment. All about Trump, immigration, sanctuary cities, trans in sports, the kind of things that are settled in California but Republicans can’t help but fight about.”
California voter data expert Paul Mitchell told The Post that such voters with those intentions do exist in real life outside online circles.
He pointed to a survey where a number of Steyer voters cited locking Republicans out as the reason for their vote.
But that strategy is “a fool’s game,” Mitchell said.
“I think it would be silly and risky to try to do that,” he told The Post. “It can backfire. People should vote for who they support the most.”
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For Hilton to likely not make the top two, rival GOP candidate and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco would have to pull away enough Republican support to where the two are tied, Mitchell added.
That’s unlikely given how ahead Hilton is and given today’s vocalized support from Trump to shore up GOP votes for Hilton.
A Becerra voter blindly voting for Steyer may even inadvertently help Steyer beat out Becerra and give way to a Steyer vs Hilton runoff, Mitchell said.
The assumption that Becerra is locked into the top two may not be true, pointing to some polls where it shows Steyer ahead.
“It’s kind of gamification run amok,” he said.
GOP consultant Mike Madrid told The Post such a strategy is useless anyway just a day or two before the election.
For such gamesmanship to work and make real influence, it has to be weeks in advance in the same way there were fears of Republicans locking Democrats out of the top two earlier this year.
Those fears spilled into mainstream media and actually influenced Democratic voters to hold their mail ballots to the very end so they could coalesce around the Democratic frontrunner.
Madrid blasted the state Democratic Party for fanning the flames of lockout gamesmanship, which he said hasn’t seen happen on this scale in previous gubernatorial races.
The party put out polls showing that possibility and went to media to promote that, Madrid added, in hopes to winnow down a crowded field and “limit voter choices.”
“Anybody who thought that there wasn’t going to be a consolidation of both fields has no elementary basic understanding of the way campaigns work, so that tells you either the Democratic Party was consciously manipulating the media narrative or there was something even more nefarious afoot,” Madrid told The Post.
The California Post reached out to the Hilton and Steyer campaigns for comment. The Becerra campaign told The Post that voters are consolidating behind Becerra and “no last-minute tactical voting push changes that.”
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