The night before former Vice President Kamala Harris re-emerged on the political scene in a speech rallying Democrats to “lock in” to fight President Trump, one of Trump’s top lieutenants issued a warning.
If Harris attempts to rehabilitate her political career by running for governor of California, Richard Grenell, Trump’s envoy for special missions, reiterated his plans to consider jumping into the race himself.
“If she runs, I think Republicans have to rethink the fact that we have a shot,” he told a crowd at a private event in Calabasas, California, Tuesday night. “Yes, if she runs, I’m going to take a hard look at it.”
Right now, Grenell is serving as Trump’s interim director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and longtime foreign policy adviser. In February, Grenell was instrumental in freeing five Americans held hostage in Venezuela, and over the last day, his name, along with several others, has been floated as a possible replacement for former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. Trump announced Thursday that Waltz would be leaving the post to become United Nations ambassador in a major shakeup of his national security team.
Grenell, who refers to himself as the president’s “fixer,” is a close Trump confidante who has served in a variety of roles, including acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term. Earlier this year, Grenell, known for his blunt talk and contentious approach to foreign policy, served as Trump’s emissary during the devastating California wildfires, strongly backing his calls to attach conditions to any federal disaster aid to help Los Angeles rebuild.
During the presidential transition, Grenell was a contender for secretary of state, but that role went to Marco Rubio. Now the roving envoy role gives Grenell the freedom to keep his options open and enter the crowded California gubernatorial field if the political dynamics seem right.
Even if Trump taps Grenell to fill the national security adviser role, he still has time to determine whether to jump into the California governor’s race. The election is more than a year and a half away, and candidates have until March 2026 to file their paperwork.
Over the last few weeks, as speculation swirled about Harris’ intentions, several candidates on both sides of the aisle have joined the race, including conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Steve Hilton and Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. The pool includes Republican and former Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, and several Democrats: Rep. Katie Porter, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, State Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former State Controller Betty Yee, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, and entrepreneur Stephen Cloobeck.
Whoever decides to run, the Democratic supermajority-controlled state is a long shot for Republicans. No GOP candidate has won statewide since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s landslide re-election in 2007. Without a Hollywood blockbuster movie star or another widely recognized personality in the mix, a Republican candidate for governor faces long odds.
Still, a late March poll showing Californians warming to the idea of a Republican governor is stirring hopes amid the GOP. Nearly 50% of likely California voters said they are now considering voting for a Republican for governor in 2026, with 71% expressing dissatisfaction over Gov. Gavin Newsom’s and legislative leaders’ records on addressing California’s high cost of living. Such a large field of Democratic gubernatorial candidates could divide Democratic and independent voters, giving a conservative or independent candidate a potential opening, but only if the number of right-leaning candidates in the race remains limited.
So far, Grenell has said he’s focused on paving the way for conservative candidates across the state rather than throwing his own hat in the ring. He says his political action committee, Fix California, which he founded in 2021, registered 200,000 new conservative voters last year alone.
The group’s registration efforts have corresponded with a significant uptick in Republican voter registrations in recent years – some 775,000 new Republicans were added to the voter rolls since 2019, according to the California Republican Party. Over the last year, GOP voter registrations have increased by more than 100,000 while Democrats have declined by tens of thousands, according to reports from the California secretary of state.
The California GOP did not invest in those efforts, however, and several state conservative activists have said the credit goes to Grenell and Fix California.
Last year’s voter registration drive was particularly successful in flipping Congressional District 41 from blue, helping longtime California GOP Rep. Ken Calvert hold on to his seat in a tight re-election last year.
Grenell said he aims to replicate the results of Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization’s five-year digital voter-registration program that made once-red Georgia a swing state, and similar efforts in Florida and Ohio. Fix California officials have identified 1.4 million Californians that it wants to register to vote by the 2026 midterm elections to help Trump maintain a Republican majority, avoid another round of impeachment efforts in Congress, and give a conservative candidate a better shot at a gubernatorial win.
“I do a lot of jobs, but Fix California is one of my favorites,” Grenell told supporters Wednesday night. “I don’t get paid. … I do all this work because I think that the only way to save this state is to do something that’s very unsexy – just register people to vote.”
Trump has thrown his support behind Fix California’s efforts, raising $3 million in one Los Angeles fundraiser in 2021, while first lady Melania Trump headlined another event which raked in $1 million, Grenell said.
Some 50% of Californians aren’t registered to vote, and of the 50% who are, only roughly 40% go and vote in any given election, Grenell said.
“You can’t have this small group of the same people who vote and pick our leaders,” Grenell added. “We have to expand the pool, and I believe that if we can do that, we can change Sacramento.”
There’s a good chance, he added, that those sitting on the sidelines in California, where Democrats hold all statewide elected offices and supermajorities in the legislature, are “commonsense conservatives” who don’t believe their vote will count or “aren’t charged up or they just want to mind their own business.”
Grenell is challenging all right-leaning candidates in the governor’s race to spend half of all money they raise on voter registration drives. “I’m tired of people running, raising millions of dollars, losing, and walking away with their own lists,” he said. “They lose, they walk away, and the next person has to start all over.”
Katie Zacharia, who serves as senior adviser to Fix California, says that the group’s efforts could be instrumental in helping Republicans win back swing California House seats because newly registered voters are highly likely to vote in the next election. Two Republican House members, former Reps. Michelle Steel and John Duarte, lost to Democratic challengers Derek Tran and Adam Gray, respectively, by less than one percentage point in November, while two other Republicans lost by just three percentage points.
“Statistically, 80% of those who are newly registered turn out,” Zacharia told RealClearPolitics.
In the aftermath of the devastating wildfires, Grenell suggests that Los Angeles County, with its 9.78 million population, is prime territory to pick up registrations from conservatives and independents fed up with the Democrats’ record of failed leadership.
Grenell predicted that Angelenos would support the strings he’s pressing Trump to attach to any release of federal wildfire disaster money to the state. Congress is set to consider that disaster relief package in the late spring or summer.
He also said he’s fighting to implement conditions for those federal funds “come hell or high water.” Grenell is pressing Trump to demand that state Democrats gut the California Environmental Quality Act, a series of regulations requiring state agencies to mitigate the environmental impacts of their work, and the elimination of the California Coastal Commission, which highly regulates building and development near beaches and coastlines.
Newsom earlier this year waived many aspects of both for the post-wildfire rebuilding process in Los Angeles, but eliminating the wide-ranging environmental laws in California is an ambitious, highly unlikely task, considering the supermajority control of both houses of the state legislature. California Attorney General Rob Bonta is already fighting several of Trump’s sweeping executive orders threatening its federal funding in court.
Yet, the wildfires shined such an intense national spotlight on California government mismanagement this year that Grenell believes there’s a unique but fleeting opportunity to shift California politics.
“Unless we shift the paradigm of voter registration, we are not going to win, but we do have a chance,” Grenell said. “The fires have given us an unbelievable moment. We cannot miss this moment.”
