With just a few more months until Californians can begin voting in the 2026 general election, Orange County residents are virtually split on who they’ll back in the race for governor, new polling shows.
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The race between Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton is a genuine toss-up here, meaning Orange County is very much in play for the gubernatorial contest, according to the latest survey conducted by the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology.
And that competitiveness only underscores not only how deeply purple the county’s electorate is, but also some fundamental shifts in how younger folks, Latinos and Asian Americans are — or are not — voting, the polling found.
Hilton has a slight edge among the likely Orange County voters surveyed June 9-12, the survey found: He leads Becerra only 47% to 44%, but that is within the poll’s +/- 4.2-point margin of error.
Hilton, though, does have stronger support with his party.
The poll found 94% of likely Republican voters surveyed said they support Hilton, while 3% picked Becerra. Flip it around, and 82% of Democrats surveyed backed their party’s candidate, while 9% said they support Hilton.
Among independents, 46% picked Becerra, and 38% chose Hilton.
And Becerra, the poll found, has support among groups that are less likely to vote in the fall: Asian Americans, independents, Latinos and women.
Still, statewide, Becerra leads Hilton by wide margins in California, where about 45% of the state’s 23 million registered voters are Democrats. (Republicans account for about 25% of registered voters in California, and another 23% are no party preference.)
Becerra led Hilton by 61% to 36% in a survey of likely voters polled from June 29 to July 2 by the Public Policy Institute of California.
And that statewide survey found Becerra with stronger support within his party than Hilton — the opposite of what UCI’s survey found with Orange County voters. That poll found 93% of Democrats said they’d back Becerra in the fall, while 6% chose Hilton. But 90% of Republicans picked Hilton, with 9% bucking the party for Becerra. As for independents: 60% support Becerra, and 34% Hilton.
So why is Hilton finding somewhat stronger footing among Republican voters in Orange County than Becerra is among Democratic ones?
“Republicans may have gotten to the point where if you are a Republican, you are there because you are on ‘Team Red.’ So it doesn’t really matter who you put forward as a candidate; they’re voting red,” said Jon Gould, poll director and dean of the School of Social Ecology.
“The other thing is: As potential candidates go, Hilton kind of presents himself like we may have seen in the past with some of the more moderately conservative Republicans. He’s not as right-wing as, say, Chad Bianco,” Gould said in an interview, referring to the Riverside County sheriff who lost in the gubernatorial primary.
One thing Hilton could do to expand that slight advantage, Gould said, is distance himself a bit from President Donald Trump. And he may be doing a bit of that, despite earning the president’s endorsement in the primary election. Hilton has, in recent days, actively courted anti-Trump voters, during campaign rallies and advertisements offering a “simple test” to assuage those voters.
But it would also behoove the candidates, Gould said, to home in on their plans to address cost of living issues — particularly housing.
After all, it’s housing, the UCI poll found, that really “dwarfs everything as the No. 1 issue,” Gould said.
And not only is it a “defining issue,” as the poll called it, but the cost of housing crosses party lines and generations.
In the poll, 61% of likely Orange County voters named the cost of housing as one of the top issues facing California. That was followed by homelessness at 46%, gas prices, also at 46%, and taxes and government spending at 40%.
When asked to pick the single most important issue, 37% of those surveyed picked housing. The next issue was taxes and government spending, which came in at 20%. Only 9% of those surveyed picked immigration as their No. 1 issue.
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“Housing is an issue where Republicans could probably make inroads because Democrats have had control of state government for so long, and voters believe that housing prices have not gotten better and housing opportunities have not gotten better,” said Gould.
“If, however, we see gas prices continue to rise, and that remains a top issue for voters, Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer on that because voters see that as being something Trump created,” Gould added.
The new survey also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, older voters and Gen Z voters differ the greatest when it comes to top issues, the direction the country is headed and who they’ll back in gubernatorial and congressional races.
But younger voters — who gave Trump a 14% approval rating, compared to 53% of boomers who said they approve of the president — are less likely to vote. The UCI survey found only 45% of Gen Z residents said they will definitely vote in the general election this fall, compared to 87% of their boomer counterparts.
Another shifting dynamic in Orange County is the rise of independent voters, the poll found.
Orange County voters are in a virtual three-way tie, with 34% identifying as Democrats, another 34% as independents and 32% as Republicans, the poll found.
Of the nearly 2 million registered voters in Orange County, 36.4% (or nearly 695,000 people) are Democrats, according to from the California secretary of state, and 33.8% of the county’s voters (about 644,00 people) are Republicans.
That leaves 23.4% (446,500 people) of the county’s voters registered as no party preference, with the rest of the electorate picking the American Independent, Green, Libertarian or Peace and Freedom parties, or “other” or “unknown” for party registration, according to the secretary of state’s figures.
The rise of independents in the county — this is the first time in poll history, UCI said, that independents have polled even with Democrats as Orange County’s largest political bloc — is largely driven by Millennial and Gen Z voters.
But among racial groups, 44% of Asian American and 39% of Latino voters identify as independent rather than either of the two major political parties, the poll found.
That’s a change from just two years ago, when UCI’s surveys found a leftward shift among Asian American voters and an opposite rightward one among Latinos.
Even still, both racial groups are leaning more Democratic in head-to-head races, including the gubernatorial contest, the poll found. There, Becerra was the choice for 54% of Latino voters surveyed and 50% of Asian American voters.
There are very few counties in the U.S. that are truly purple areas, Gould said, and Orange County is one of them.
“We’ve become kind of a bellwether for what’s concerning people,” he said.
But whether those concerns actually drive people out to vote in the fall, well, that remains to be seen.
“I really want to see who ends up coming out to vote. It’s one thing for people to tell us all these things; it’s another thing to see if they actually do come out to vote, and if they do, what moved them,” said Gould.
County election officials will begin mailing ballots to registered voters on Oct. 5. Election Day is Nov. 3.