As California Gov. Gavin Newsom pursues the early phases of what looks like a 2028 presidential campaign, he’s running afoul of two realities about his present office:
One is that no California governor can hide for long from any issue affecting the state. It’s too big for that and governors – unlike U.S. senators – don’t get to pick and choose which issues they want to deal with. Everything eventually lands on the governor’s plate, from welfare to water, from budgets to the survival of bees.
The other unchanging reality is that Eastern pundits love analyzing the performance of California governors, since the sheer size of this state automatically propels whoever is governor into the status of a presidential possibility. So even though Newsom is mostly staying home, he gets as much national attention as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who are campaigning widely.
Newsom can’t escape these realities of his office any more than Jerry Brown or Pete Wilson could. No matter what he does in the waning months of his second term in American’s most prominent state job, it will be analyzed in terms of his presidential chances.
That put Newsom’s every move during the January Los Angeles County firestorms under the microscope. So too his podcast and his budget manipulations.
Right now, all this does not look great for him. For one thing, the 2024 Joe Biden surrogate who loved to roast candidate Donald Trump has toned down his criticism in the face of threats to the funding of everything in this state from the Coastal Commission to the University of California. Why the Coastal Commission? Trump’s golf course on Southern California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula has had disputes with the Coastal Commission, from beach access to placement of a 70-foot flagpole that exceeded height limits.
Few California features are valued more by state residents than public access to beaches fronting on private property. While Newsom likes to say he stands up for California values, he’s had little to say about that one as Trump’s administration threatens to hold up wildfire recovery funds so long as the Coastal Commission exists.
Another so-called “California value” is giving Medi-Cal health coverage to undocumented immigrants. Newsom bragged for the last couple of years that California was the first state to provide government health care to all low-income people, regardless of immigration status. But the start of this year’s budget process revealed the program (the state’s version of Medicaid) was $6.2 billion (now $12 billion) in the red because of high drug costs and unexpectedly high Medi-Cal enrollments, among other factors.
So Newsom was forced to cut back one of his pride-and-joy programs considerably and national news outlets covered the process closely. At the same time, the governor had to admit he was spending more than $8 billion tax dollars a year to assist illegal immigrants. Other states like New York, Illinois and Oregon also provide some Medicaid coverage for the undocumented, but it’s generally reserved for the pregnant or the very young.
Then there’s Newsom’s podcast, where he has featured Trump loyalists like Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon. That’s also where he chose to reveal he opposes allowing transgender girls and women to compete in major sports.
Some called this new stance a major move to the political center for Newsom, whose softer line toward Trump and his demands about some California institutions like the Coastal Commission – created via ballot initiative by a large majority of state voters – also was a move to the middle.
Here’s an open question: As Democrats’ anger simmers over some of Trump’s power-grabbing moves, how useful is a move toward the political center in a 2028 presidential campaign?
Candidates seeking that year’s nomination will surely need to create major contrasts with Trump and his potential successors like Vice President JD Vance rather than somehow blending in with them. So why make nice to the likes of Bannon, Rogan and conservative activist Charlie Kirk if Newsom wants to lead the opposition to them?
For sure, Newsom’s is a unique strategy, unless he’s merely bumbling along with hopes of becoming the de facto leader of the Trump opposition and the Democrats’ 2028 candidate.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.