A leading Republican in the California governor’s race made a recent campaign stop at a sprawling San Jose homeless camp to film a social media video bashing Democrats for allowing “third-world slum conditions” to persist across the state.
In the video posted this week to X, Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host who recently polled second in a crowded field of candidates behind Democrat Katie Porter, strode through the encampment at Columbus Park near the San Jose airport in a pair of jeans and white sneakers, motioning toward the tents, lived-in RVs and trash scattered across the park and what was once a functioning baseball field.
“This is Gavin Newsom’s California,” Hilton said, using expletives to describe the smell of the camp. “This is Democrat-run California.”
Under Newsom’s watch, the state’s homeless population has swelled 24% to an estimated 187,000 people, despite his administration spending at least $27 billion to combat homelessness since he took office in 2019. Even so, homelessness experts and service providers say the unprecedented spending likely prevented the crisis from getting even worse.
Dan Schnur, a political science professor with UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California, said the video could be an attempt to appeal to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley donors, who are increasingly turning to conservative candidates.
“The campaign may have decided that there is an opportunity for support in the tech community, so they talked about the problem in San Jose rather than Los Angeles or San Francisco,” Schnur said. “On the other hand, they may have just been in the area with an hour to kill.”
Schnur added that with former Vice President Kamala Harris and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis officially out of the 2026 governor’s race, there isn’t a candidate with “a natural advantage in Silicon Valley.” Porter, who formerly represented Orange County in Congress, has deeper ties to Southern California.
The Hilton campaign said the candidate was spending time with his family and unavailable to discuss the video.
“We decided to shoot our video at Columbus Park, home to one of the largest encampments in the area,” campaign spokesperson Hector Barajas said in a statement. “Residents have been asking their local and state representatives the same questions: What about us? What about our community?”
While Hilton was quick to slam Newsom and California Democrats more broadly, he refrained from calling out San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate Democrat, by name.
Like Hilton, Mahan has been critical of the state’s homelessness response and has pursued more forceful approaches to solving the crisis. Earlier this year, San Jose adopted a controversial ordinance that Mahan proposed to cite or arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse shelter beds.
Mahan’s office did not provide a comment in response to questions about criticisms leveled in the video.
Newsom’s office also did not provide a response and directed questions to local officials.
Starting next week, San Jose plans to clear the Columbus Park encampment, which has been the site of multiple recent fires and a fatal stabbing last year. Despite the danger, families with small children have been known to stay at the camp.
After clearing the encampment, the city plans to spend $19.5 million on revitalizing the park, including adding soccer fields, horseshoe pits and pickleball courts.
City officials say they are working to provide shelter beds for the more than 250 people estimated to be living at the park. But even as local officials open new shelters and an outdoor “safe-sleeping” site in the city’s northside neighborhood, it’s unclear how many camp residents will ultimately be moved off the street.
In the video, Hilton took particular aim at a policy known as “housing first,” which calls for accepting homeless people into permanent housing without preconditions such as getting sober, agreeing to mental health treatment or finding employment. The idea behind the policy — backed by research and embraced by state officials and, until recently, federal officials — is that homeless people are best able to take advantage of services only after they have safe and stable housing.
Hilton contends Democrats’ backing of the strategy is preventing homeless people from getting treatment and leading to wasteful spending on affordable housing projects, which can cost as much as $1 million a door in expensive parts of the state like the Bay Area. Mahan, for his part, has made similar arguments to justify shifting city funds from permanent housing to homeless shelters.
“They make it illegal to solve the problem,” Hilton said.
In an executive order last month, President Donald Trump directed federal officials to end support for housing first programs that “deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment.” Trump also demanded that state and local officials move more homeless people with mental health and drug issues into involuntary care or risk losing federal funding.
At the state level, some California Democrats have pushed legislation to amend the state’s housing first policy to allow more funding for abstinence-only treatment centers and sober living homes. But those bills have so far failed to make it through the Legislature.