Gavin Newsom has had quite a year. While other Democratic politicians have struggled to adapt their pitches to the chaos of the second Trump term, Newsom has responded with a blizzard of activity that has dramatically raised his national profile. He has also benefited from copious, if not fawning, media coverage including a splashy recent profile in Vogue magazine. At first mired in single digits with a scrum of other potential candidates, all trailing Kamala Harris by wide margins, he is now close to her or narrowly ahead in three commonly-cited poll averages (RCP, 270toWin, Race to the WH) of primary voter support for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
His rising strength is reflected in the betting markets. On Predictit, he is far and away the betting favorite for the Democratic nomination, way ahead of AOC (second) and Harris (third). And in the market on the 2028 general election, he is way ahead of other Democrats and very close to the leading Republican candidate, JD Vance.
What accounts for this remarkable pro-Newson surge? How did this liberal California Democrat win over so many in the wake of Democrats’ comprehensive defeat running…a liberal California Democrat?
The answer lies in Newsom’s ability to be everything to, well not everybody, but to every Democrat. Think of Gavin Newsom not as an ordinary politician but as a message delivery system—and a very effective one. Of course, all politicians to varying degrees are about that. But Newsom stands out as letting absolutely nothing stand in the way—principles, beliefs, prior positions—of delivering the message he deems most politically effective at any given time to any given audience.
That has enabled him to appeal to diverse Democratic audiences. Think of Resistance liberals, whose white-hot anger at Trump is sure to galvanize a large share of Democratic primary voters. Right after Trump was elected, he declared a special session of the California legislature. His office said:
The special session responds to the public statements and proposals put forward by President-elect Trump and his advisors, and actions taken during his first term in office—an agenda that could erode essential freedoms and individual rights, including women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights…A special session allows for expedited action that will best protect California and its values from attacks.
A steady stream of denunciations of Trump administration actions from Newsom and the governor’s office has followed, especially during last June’s protests against ICE actions in Los Angeles which resulted in the deployment of the National Guard to quell riots. Newsom did not hold back his rhetoric or legal actions against this development. He said:
Democracy is under assault right before our eyes—the moment we’ve feared has arrived.
He’s taking a wrecking ball to our Founding Fathers’ historic project.
And so on. Indeed, Newsom has not missed a chance to aggressively oppose everything the Trump administration has done, whether it directly involved California or not. He has traveled to Brazil to oppose Trump climate policies at COP30 and, most recently, showed up at the World Economic Forum in Davos to denounce the administration. And, in reply to Republican attempts to gerrymander congressional seats in Texas and elsewhere, he has happily torn up nonpartisan districting in California to heavily gerrymander the state for the Democrats.
In essence, he has appointed himself “Chairman of the anti-Trump Resistance” and has the receipts to back it up. In Resistance liberal land, they love this just as Newsom intends.
But for those who are concerned that the party must moderate some, not just resist Trump, Newsom also has something to offer. He started a podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, where his guests have include the late Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and other conservative luminaries. This has provided him with the opportunity to venture some cautious signals that he is more moderate than the average Democrat. In his podcast with Kirk he agreed that trans-identified biological boys in girls’ sports seemed “unfair” to him. And in his very recent podcast with Shapiro, he allowed as how calling ICE activities “state-sponsored terrorism” was not justified and that it was probably not a good idea to call for abolishing ICE. Related, in a conversation with Ezra Klein, he admitted that “we [the Democrats] failed on the border, we have to own that.” He has also, in his actions as California governor, responded to moderates’ concerns about homeless encampments by supporting moves to dismantle them and to concerns about crime with tougher rhetoric and additional tools to prosecute felonies and drug dealers.
On the other hand, he has not been shy about reassuring progressives and “woke” Democrats that he is still one of them. For example, after his podcast statement on trans-identifying boys in girls’ sports, he almost immediately walked back any implication that he would back a policy to change that situation in California or any other place. In his interview with Klein, he was quick to point out and defend the provision of health insurance to illegal immigrants as part of his overall commitment to universal health care. He refused to support a crime ballot measure, the prosecutor-backed Proposition 36, which reversed many provisions of the earlier Proposition 47 by classifying more crimes as felonies and increasing penalties (it passed overwhelmingly anyway). And of course, there’s his overall record as governor of California where he has supported one progressive priority after another through his budgets and willingness to sign the many bills sent to him by his ultra-progressive legislature.
For economic populists, besides the usual railing against economic inequality, Newsom has been staunch in his support of higher minimum wages and more generous social welfare programs. He also succeeded in getting the earned income tax credit doubled. He is tight with California labor unions, including the umbrella California Federation of Labor, the SEIU and the California Teachers Association, all of whom enthusiastically support Newsom.
Even the emerging “abundance” faction of the Democrats gets the love from Newsom. He has supported key YIMBY initiatives, especially SB 79, which has eliminated long-standing regulatory obstacles to rapid development of dense housing near transit stations. More generally, he has ostentatiously declared himself to be in favor of an “abundance agenda” and has said that the seminal text of the abundance movement, Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, “is one of the most important books Democrats can read.”
But in parallel with all these other commitments, Newsom is—and always has been—close to Big Tech. He has opposed, as his friends in that world demanded, the proposed wealth tax on California billionaires and has generally favored a light touch on regulating the industry, most recently on AI.
Finally for realpolitik Democrats, who don’t align with—or even care about—any of these factions but just want to beat Trump by any means necessary, Newsom also wants to be their guy. He is more than willing to fight dirty; no tactic can be ruled if it is potentially effective. His social media team out of the Governor’s office is now notorious for aping Trump’s unhinged, all-caps style and dishing out scatological insults. To paraphrase Michelle Obama, “when they go low, we go lower.” That warms the heart of super-partisan Democrats and consultants who just want to win.
Gavin Newsom: friend of the Resistance, friend of moderates, friend of progressives, friend of populists, friend of labor, friend of abundance-istas, special chum of Big Tech, and hard man for the Democratic Party. He’s got it all, twinned with a preternatural ability to deliver a perfectly calibrated message to each of these audiences when called upon to do so.
The Gavin Newsom message delivery system brings to mind another famed Democratic message delivery system, Bill Clinton, who was similarly adept at reaching a wide range of audiences and similarly willing to bend his principles to do so. Indeed, Newsom, in a fascinating profile of him written by Helen Lewis for The Atlantic (“The Front-Runner”), professes his admiration for Clinton and is clearly seeking to model much of his political strategy on The Man from Hope.
So is Newsom the next Bill Clinton? I don’t think so. Despite the similarities there is one huge and hugely important difference: Clinton’s message delivery magic was in the service ultimately of reaching a general election audience not just a Democratic audience. But the latter is what Newsom is optimized for—he’s never had to run in competitive elections and beat Republicans. Indeed, he has actually underperformed relative to the Democratic lean of his own state, according to the rigorous “Deciding to Win” report. Not only that, his 10-point underperformance relative to expectations is the worst of 21 potential candidates tested by the report.
But he does know how to appeal to Democratic audiences—which is increasingly what more and more Democrats seem optimized for. This is great for individual candidates in blue states, cities and districts but terrible for the Democratic Party as a whole. It encourages the party—and candidates like Newsom—to think their basic positions don’t have to change much and that their past record, commitments and statements don’t matter.
This is wrong and egregiously so, as the “Deciding to Win” report definitively shows (and common sense would suggest). Your record and past positions matter a lot once you have to speak to a general electorate that doesn’t share the baseline assumptions of partisan Democrats. Just ask Kamala Harris.
Could the Democrats be about to make the same mistake with Gavin Newsom? Absolutely, because he knows just how to talk to them. That’s too bad because what they really need is a Bill Clinton and Gavin Newsom, well, he’s no Bill Clinton.
Wouldn't it be nice to see a Democrat run FOR something other than being anti-Trump? And not like Abigail Spanberger who ran on this magical, mystical thing called affordability that she never defined, but once in office completely abandoned for massive tax increases and electric rate hikes.
Forget about Newsom's talent as a politician. What about Gavin the Governor? CA's list of worsts is nearly endless.
Highest official and unofficial US poverty rate. When the cost of living is considered , 1/3 of Golden Staters, some 14 million people, and change live in poverty, or just slightly better. No other state in US history as ever created such a mass of human misery.
Highest energy costs, which will soon soar even more, because Gavin's Green Gladiators have purposefully limited energy supplies, in a misguided effort to increase prices to lessen consumption. In 1990, CA had twice as many refineries, for 1/2 as many people.
Then Gavin arrived on the scene, preaching Green Energy as the Stairway to Heaven. It was actually the road to ruin. The term "energy poverty" was coined in CA a few decades ago, to describe the 10% of the state that had to choose between energy and eating at the end of each month.
The problem is now so pervasive, CA no longer disconnects most residential customers for nonpayment. This has produced billions of electric bills in arrears. Most will never be paid.
All of the above, before we arrive a the homeless industrial complex, that literally spends tens of billions of dollars each year , to grow the CA homeless population. Of course, the thousands of CA NGOs devoted to the problem, provide a lot a jobs for the children of the STEM upper middle class, that lack their parent's Math skills.
The mass failure is bad enough, marry it with the omnipresent hubris and condescension for non coastal US residents, and Americans truly cannot begin to imagine the horror of a Newsom administration.
For years, Newsom legally forbade official travel by CA state employees to Red States. Gavin feared interaction with ill educated racists, xenophobes, homophobes and the like, would infect his morally and intellectually superior state employees. Newsom only pulled the plug on the law, less than 3 years ago, when he decided to run for President.
The above is just a short list of the destruction, before failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, massive government debt and fraud, and the inability to produce new, well paying jobs, on any scale.
CA is one of the prettiest places on earth, with one of the most mild climates, and plenty of wide open space for growth, yet millions of Americans have fled under Gavin's governance. Americans should ask themselves, where will they will run, after Newsom works his magic on the entire nation.