By admin 
The ad from Republican gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton was meant to be cheeky: Two young women sit on a bed beneath a Progress Pride flag, seemingly preparing to get romantic.
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“Don’t be nervous,” says a redhead woman as she brushes the friend’s hair behind her ear. “Just try it.”
Then comes the punchline: the woman is helping her friend cast a ballot for Hilton.
The conservative backlash to the ad — including rebukes from attorney general hopeful Michael Gates and Sonja Shaw, a candidate for state superintendent — in some cases centered on what Gates described Friday as its “inappropriate sexualization of young people.” But it also surfaced rifts within the Republican Party over LGBTQ+ rights, with some critics interpreting the ad as an endorsement of same-sex relationships.
That was the perspective of Pastor Jack Hibbs, a nationally syndicated TV and radio host who leads congregation in Chino and who said in a Saturday Facebook video that the ad made him “betrayed and disgusted,” calling the “issue of lesbianism” among young women “an actual pandemic of social ills.” Hibbs said he still planned to vote for Hilton.
The schisms highlighted by the ad aren’t new. In 2023, the California Republican Party defeated a proposal to remove opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion from the party’s official platform, according to CalMatters. Critics argued removing that language would have been out of step with the base, even if it brought the party closer to the values of mainstream of California voters.
A May Gallup poll of around 1,000 U.S. adults found that 35% of Republicans believe “gay or lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable” down from a high of 56% in 2022. Among Democrats, the question polled above 80% both times. GOP voters’ support for same-sex marriage showed a similar dip.
Republican consultant Rob Stutzman said that in a state as blue as California, statewide GOP candidates needed to occasionally risk offending party loyalists to broaden their appeal.
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“You just can’t keep coddling your base and expect to change 20-point deficits if you’re Hilton,” Stutzman said. “The only growth opportunity is with non-Republicans.”
Political analyst Dan Schnur, who previously worked for Republicans like Gov. Pete Wilson before becoming an independent, said some of the differences in GOP opinion could be explained by generational differences among conservatives. But he argued Hilton’s ad backfired on all fronts.
“The ad got the attention that they’d hoped for, but they might have mis-estimated how their base would react,” he said.
Not everyone agreed the ad was a bust. In a series of posts on X, former reality star and Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt called it a “brilliant ad” and panned the backlash as a “fake moral panic,” noting that Republicans “share a state with the most progressive people in the world.”
In a video responding to his critics posted to social media Saturday, Hilton said it “grieves me to understand how that made you feel” but argued Republicans needed a new strategy to win over independent voters.
He also met with the Log Cabin Republicans of Coachella Valley for an LGBTQ+ round table on Monday, telling the group, “I don’t want to tell anyone how to live.”
Some Democrats said the ad glossed over Hilton’s policy platform.
“Who’s gonna tell them that their trans friend can’t get healthcare if Hilton had his way?” posted Democratic data wonk Paul Mitchell on X. “This is an insane ad.”
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