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The Daily Signal

Pomona Debate 2026: The California Dream is Dying—Clear Winners, Clear Losers | Drew Allen

The Daily Signal

The Daily Signal

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

4.81.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In a chaotic Pomona College debate marked by constant interruptions and deep voter frustration, Steve Hilton delivered the strongest performance by confronting Sacramento’s failures head-on, Matt Mahan stood out as the most pragmatic Democrat, while Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer turned in the weakest, most disconnected showings as 64% of Californians now believe the California Dream is no longer attainable, Drew Allen, The Daily Signal’s California Contributor, argues on today’s edition commentary. 👉For more videos like this, subscribe to The Daily Signal’s YouTube channel and enable notifications to be alerted the second a new video drops: https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Sky 7 over the scene of what police are now calling a double homicide.

0:03.3

For the first time, California Governor Gavin Newsom is publicly acknowledged that he is open to a run for the White House.

0:09.2

In L.A., homeless has jumped 16% in a year. Half of Americans living on the streets are in California. Well, I watched the second California gubernatorial debate last night on April 28th,

0:32.6

and eight candidates, they crammed onto the stage at Pomona College's Bridges Auditorium for what organizers

0:40.4

kept calling the most inclusive gubernatorial debate of the entire 2026 cycle.

0:46.0

And that's because they insisted on having some of the lowest polling individuals in the Democrat Party on that stage,

0:52.2

adding Villa Rigosa and adding

0:54.3

Thurmond. And it was kind of bizarre because, I mean, it was a bit of a disaster.

1:03.6

And the moderators seemed to have self-awareness even before the debate started, basically

1:08.8

telling you, you know, there's too many people up there and,

1:12.9

you know, this is, it was like they knew it was a bad idea, that it was going to go south,

1:17.1

and it wasn't really going to work, and it didn't really work.

1:20.3

But just a bizarre way to introduce, like, here's this wonderful, inclusive debate.

1:27.2

It's going to be bad but you know here we are

1:29.7

we're doing this anyway for inclusivity and the inclusivity is about the fact that there was a bunch of

1:34.5

hullabaloo uh for the canceled debate uh that was supposed to take place at usc a little while back

1:41.3

and um you know the quote unquote minority candidates and the Democrat Party were throwing

1:46.0

a fit saying, we're being excluded, you know, playing race cards or something like that.

1:50.0

Anyway, there were two Republicans on the stage, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco again.

1:54.2

They were up against, you know, six Democrats this time instead of four.

1:57.4

As I said, with the addition of Tony Thurmond and Antonio Villargoza,

2:01.2

the L.A. mayor. But look, the whole thing, it was messy from the start.

...

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