Democrats Can Do Better than Gavin Newsom

Perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets in politics is that Gavin Newsom wants to be president. Speculation about his presidential ambitions was evident as long ago as 2004, around the time he began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples as mayor of San Francisco. The chatter only grew after he was elected governor of California in the 2018 blue wave midterm.

Now, with Donald Trump back in power for a second time, Newsom seems to believe he’s perfectly positioned to make his aspiration a reality. In response to many of Trump’s controversial moves, Newsom has all but crowned himself the leader of the Resistance 2.0. The first real signs of this came as Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles to put down unrest in the streets following immigration raids. In a public address to the whole state, Newsom proclaimed, “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes. The moment we’ve feared has arrived.”

More recently, Newsom has led the Democratic response to Texas Republicans’ attempt at mid-decade gerrymandering, pushing for a referendum to allow California to redraw its own congressional map to create more Democratic seats and calling for other Democratic-run states to follow suit. He has subsequently taken to taunting Trump on X, promising to help deliver a victory for Democrats in next year’s midterms.

Newsom’s antics have generated a host of friendly headlines and social media buzz, and his confrontations with Trump have certainly boosted his standing within his party. An Emerson College poll earlier this month found that 23 percent of California Democratic primary voters supported Newsom in a 2028 presidential contest, the most of any prospective candidate, while a new Echelon Insights poll showed him gaining three points in the primary field nationally, pushing him into second place behind only Kamala Harris.

But Democrats would do well not to allow their anger at Trump to get the better of them—to not simply back a candidate with many of his own vulnerabilities just because he is willing to throw punches at Republicans.

For starters, Newsom’s appeal around the country appears to be quite limited. A polling tracker from Decision Desk HQ showed his national favorability deeply underwater at the end of the year¹: fully 49.2 percent of Americans viewed him unfavorably against just 27 percent who viewed him favorably. And though Newsom’s latest confrontations with Trump have boosted his support among California Democrats—and thus his statewide approval overall—it wasn’t that long ago that he was struggling at home as well.

Back in June, without Trump serving as a clear foil for him, a poll from UC Irvine put Newsom’s approval rating at only 38 percent. One month earlier, another poll from the university found that his approval rating trailed that of his predecessor, Democrat Jerry Brown, by 15 points compared to around the same time in Brown’s second term. Moreover, 54 percent of Californians in that survey—including a sizable majority of independents and even a small plurality of Democrats—believed Newsom was more focused on his presidential ambitions than on fixing the state.

This leads to a second strike against Newsom: California has struggled during his time as governor, which began in 2019. It is one of just seven states that has experienced a net population loss since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, shedding 91,000 residents—more than any state except New York. One of the biggest culprits has been the state’s unaffordability. California has long been one of the most expensive states to live in, a reality that has only grown worse in the last five years.

It’s important to note that during his tenure as governor, Newsom actively worked to reduce red tape and accelerate the construction of new housing to lower prices. But rather than taking a cue from another Democrat on the rise, Zohran Mamdani—who, despite his own very real vulnerabilities, has adopted an almost monomaniacal focus on cost-of-living issues in his New York City mayoral campaign—Newsom’s work on these issues has taken a back seat to picking fights with national Republicans.

This is a troubling development, especially as Americans have identified inflation as the most important issue facing the country for the last three years, and many voters, including pivotal swing voters, voted for Trump with cost of living at top of mind last year. Come 2028, with Trump out of the picture, how does Newsom plan to respond to critics of his management of the state?

Then, there are the optics of Newsom’s California ties. He has not only spent his entire career in a deep-blue state, but he was the executive of by far its most liberal major city. It would be prudent for Democrats, who just lost a presidential election after nominating a politician who also hailed from California, cut her teeth in San Francisco, and struggled to outrun her past unpopular positions, to consider whether the swing voters they need to win back in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will be interested in a very similar type of candidate just four years later.

Finally, Newsom’s electoral track record in California leaves something to be desired. In his first gubernatorial run in 2018, he received 61.9 percent support, on par with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in the state despite him running in a significantly friendlier national environment. Perhaps his most impressive performance came in his 2021 recall election, when he earned an identical 61.9 percent support as many Californians appeared to rebuke what they saw as the GOP-led efforts to oust him.

But in the 2022 midterms, his vote share dropped to 59.2 percent. While this isn’t a huge decline on its own, his final margin over his Republican challenger (18.4 points) was nearly four points behind Democrat Alex Padilla’s margin (22.2 points) in that cycle’s Senate race and more than ten points behind Joe Biden’s (29.2 points) 2020 margin. If nothing else, this suggests Newsom doesn’t have some kind of unique appeal beyond his base that other Democrats do not.

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All this calls into question Newsom’s political strength and instincts. He is capitalizing on near-term outrage against Trump in the Democratic base at the expense of a longer-term vision for the country—and for his own future campaign. Instead of honing a disciplined message about issues that most Americans care about, his team is spending its time doing its best impersonation of Trump on X, somehow forgetting that every past effort to mimic Trump in the past has failed spectacularly.

Democrats looking to reclaim the White House in 2028 must remember that there is no victory without winning voters in swing states who are skeptical of the party and who may modestly support Trump’s agenda. They are unlikely to be moved by yet another round of “threats to democracy” rhetoric, and they will surely be skeptical of anyone—especially a blue-state governor—who has failed to adequately handle the issues they care about most.

Editor’s note: a version of this piece first appeared in UnHerd.

1. It does not appear that DDHQ has continued updating the tracker this year.