California, a place not known for its psychological normality, went crazy last night. Two separate elections show the political direction of travel for the state, with many of the details still far from certain. In a gubernatorial race that was always slated to be close, overnight results point to Republican Steve Hilton narrowly leading Democrat Xavier Becerra, while Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer trails in third. Meanwhile, in LA, Mayor Karen Bass looks set to go into a run-off election with Trump-backed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt. Unfortunately, despite much hype around the candidates on the Right, their prospects of winning are slim, a sign of how entrenched the state’s ideological views are.

In the gubernatorial race, the Democrats have overwhelmingly stumped for a disastrous candidate. Becerra is bland, uninspiring and has hardly rallied the party base. Instead, he found late support from the Democratic establishment and union machines after Eric Swalwell was forced to drop out amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Fellow Democratic candidate Steyer may be obscenely wealthy, but he ran a campaign like he was running for the old Supreme Soviet. He was never expected to win, but he has clearly split the Left vote. Sadly, Democrats overwhelmingly rejected the only two candidates offering real reforms, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

GOP candidate Steve Hilton, an ex-advisor to former British prime minister David Cameron, has performed admirably and could perhaps still take the Governor’s Mansion. He has emerged as the candidate for those who are fed up with Democratic rule and want a reasonable change from the other side of the political aisle.

LA voters followed the same split-screen approach. Bass has taken a convincing lead but was challenged by a far-Left opponent in the form of councilwoman Nithya Raman. This split has paved the way for the GOP’s Pratt to come in a convincing second. The celebrity Republican ran a clever, if sometimes tasteless, campaign, exemplified by his use of AI for promotional materials. In a run-off between him and Bass, he’s unlikely to win over Raman’s more radical backers, so it’s hard to see him winning.

Unfortunately for the media class, this seemingly inevitable Pratt loss means the November run-off will prove less interesting. People will remain upset about homelessness, crime and general deterioration, but not enough to hand over the state to a man endorsed by Donald Trump.

LA and California more broadly are so overwhelmingly Democratic, with party registrations twice that of the GOP, that it is almost impossible for a Republican to win outside a few pockets, mostly in the interior and the rural north. Unless a scandal hits, or in Bass’s case, another disaster like the 2025 Palisades Fire, the results are all too predictable. The kind of people who might vote Republican, such as young working- or middle-class families, are heading elsewhere. LA leads the nation in population loss, including young families. Those most likely to stay tend to be young, educated professionals and public-sector workers, and it is these groups which find themselves well-served by California’s government. Those more likely to vote Republican or for a private sector-minded Democrat — like construction and factory workers, truckers and small businesspeople — have not fared so well.

These economic realities are what shape politics in California. The state’s ideological views and demographic patterns are so entrenched that the Democratic base will likely remain for years to come, while California’s problems get worse and worse.

---

Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

joelkotkin

---

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

---

Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

miquelvilam

---