The room is dim, the background music crooning, the vibe suggestive. Two young women (hair dyed, faces pierced) sit in front of a rainbow Pride flag, one of them cajoling the other to try something she’s never done before.
“Give me your hand, close your eyes, and I’ll do all the work,” one says to the other, guiding her hand to … fill out her mail-in ballot for California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton.
To put a fine point on it, the campaign ad ends with a directive to “lick it” — the envelope, surely.
The new eyebrow-raising digital ad is part of the British American’s campaign strategy of “all of the above” in attempting to persuade California voters to elect a Republican statewide for the first time in two decades. He faces Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general, on the Nov. 3 ballot.
It’s no surprise many were offended by a political ad inviting audiences into an imaginary woman’s tryst. But Hilton’s attempt to seduce liberals into experimenting with Republicanism — complete with the tagline “Just try it!” — landed him most in hot water with fellow conservatives. Some of Hilton’s supporters lit him up on social media criticizing him for what they consider inappropriate content.
Sonja Shaw, a conservative Southern California school board president who is running for state superintendent of public instruction, called the ad “creepy, weird, disturbing garbage” on social media. Her ally, the influential evangelical pastor Jack Hibbs, made homophobic comments in response to the ad, saying it portrayed “an issue regarding lesbianism among college girls and some high school girls that right now is an actual pandemic of social ill.” He said he would still support Hilton.
“This is a clear example of exactly why good people are walking away from the Republican Party,” Shaw wrote.
Michael Gates, the Republican candidate for attorney general, also piled on, condemning the ad for its “sexualized portrayal of young women.” Gates took particular offense to the line “What if my dad finds out?” and said in a press release that the advertising undermines “the sanctity of the relationship between parents and their children.” (While the woman portrayed in the ad is clearly young, she’s presumably of age, as one must be to vote.)
Provocative, headline-grabbing media stunts are familiar territory for Hilton, who cut his teeth in politics in the 1990s as an adman for the U.K. Conservative Party. So is social liberalism: He parlayed that ad work into a career in marketing and is widely credited, as former Prime Minister David Cameron’s close adviser, with softening the British right’s approach toward LGBTQ couples. His campaign for California governor takes a harsher stance, targeting transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports.
A second ad features another parody of a California liberal, a meditating hippie, being nudged into voting for Hilton as a way to “expand (his) mind” at a coastal spiritual retreat.
Parental backlash over issues of gender and sexuality spurred a wave of California conservatives, like Shaw, to get involved with state and local politics in recent years. So did Hilton underestimate the cultural conservatism underpinning the modern California Republican movement?
“It’s not how I think about it,” he said over the phone Monday. “That may be an analyst’s way of looking at it but I’m a participant. I’m doing everything I can to win the election because the state desperately needs change.”
Republican admaker Fred Davis called the ad “brilliant” and said it’s succeeded in getting Californians’ attention. But he predicted it won’t result in a bump for Hilton, because it won’t convince the supposedly blue-haired, “Resist” T-shirt-wearing young women out there to vote for him. Davis is known for producing the “demon sheep” ad, an eccentric three-minute expose for 2010 Senate candidate Carly Fiorina that portrayed her opponent Tom Campbell as a fiscally liberal wolf hiding among a flock of true conservative sheep.
“I’ll go to great lengths to attract attention,” Davis said. “But why am I voting for Steve Hilton? … It accomplished half of the man’s goal really really well. But you’ve gotta have both.”
In a video he posted this weekend, Hilton explained the ads are part of a strategy to reach Californians who may have never considered voting for a Republican, and said he understood the criticism but stood by his tactics.
In an interview, he brushed off the backlash as a minor disagreement with fellow Republicans on strategy. He said he still enjoys their support and just finished a campaign event with Shaw. Shaw did not return a call from CalMatters seeking comment.
“Anything that’s strong has a strong reaction,” Hilton said. “You see that in art, you see that in everything.”
Unlike other Hilton ads, the “Just try it” series features real actors and was not generated with artificial intelligence, he said. Gabriel Mann, a filmmaker who made campaign ads for conservative reality star Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, made the ads for $125,000. More ads are coming as part of the series, Hilton said.