Their field consists of governors of states that people are fleeing and a VP nobody takes seriously.
Their field consists of governors of states that people are fleeing and a VP nobody takes seriously.
O n the morning of December 10, 2003, San Francisco’s newspapers announced a new era in the city’s politics. For mayor, voters had just selected a 36-year-old former head of the city’s traffic and parking commission who was perhaps best known for the copious amount of hair product he used. (The new mayor had actually joked about it in his campaign literature, stressing his qualifications by saying “it’s not what’s on his head.”)
And as the city’s district attorney, voters picked a political newcomer who vowed to be tougher on the city’s drug dealers.
Thus began the political careers of both Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.
That Wednesday morning, San Francisco voters couldn’t have known they were setting up a shadow presidential primary that would take place two decades later. Newsom and Harris are now locked in a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party, both pretending they have no interest in residing in the White House. (Newsom has said he is not running in 2024, which is about as believable as Austin Butler’s Elvis accent.)
Of course, neither will say the quiet part out loud: If reelected, Joe Biden would be 82 at the start of his second term. Of all the people born the same year as Biden, only about half are still alive. His continued presence above ground is an existential coin-flip. (And even then there’s the possibility that Biden begins showing up at press conferences wearing his shoes on his hands.)
That is why the secret primary has to take place without an express admission that any of these candidates are, indeed, candidates. Of course, Harris, a living run-on sentence that has done for the American lexicon what There Will Be Blood did for bowling alleys, is in pole position. She has parlayed her 3 percent showing in the 2020 primary into the vice presidency, ensuring that she would assume the nation’s top office if Biden is reelected only to have an unscheduled Oval Office meeting with his maker.
But Newsom, who still appears as if he combs his hair with a pork chop, continues to use his position as California’s governor to make headlines for himself. While running for mayor of San Francisco, Newsom described himself as a “radical centrist.” Yet as the state’s chief executive, California’s nepo baby-in-chief has leaned so far left he is no longer vertical.
He recently announced that California would cease doing business with Walgreens because the drugstore chain stopped selling abortion pills in 20 Republican-dominated states. When Texas concocted a “bounty” statute to allow regular citizens to sue individuals who help women get abortions, Newsom proposed his own “bounty” law so Californians could sue people who made, sold, or distributed weapons that were already banned in the state.
Under Newsom’s watch, the state has seen rail projects balloon in both cost and time of construction. Traffic has become unbearable. Taxes have skyrocketed. Housing costs have risen as building regulations have strangled new construction. Power outages have been rampant.
And homelessness has risen sharply under Newsom’s watch: His beloved San Francisco, like other cities in the state, has devolved into homeless encampments rife with open-air drug markets. The California state flag should be amended to feature a “person experiencing homelessness” dropping a deuce on the hood of a BMW.
The people of California have noticed. Disaffected Californians escaping excessive taxes and regulation have poured into Texas and other states. Between April 2020 and July 2022, 700,000 more people left California than moved in, and many took their businesses with them.
Imagine a state so insufferable that Elon Musk decided he couldn’t live there.
That hasn’t prevented Newsom from positing himself as the future of the Democratic Party. In 2022, he began running ads in Florida telling the state’s residents to “join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.” (In California, “freedom” included filling skate parks full of sand so skateboarders couldn’t shred outdoors during Covid-19 lockdowns.)
He put Florida governor Ron DeSantis in his burn book, challenging the likely future Republican presidential candidate to debate him. Yet some of Newsom’s tactics — especially attacking a private business like Walgreens for failing to comport with his political ideology — is straight out of the DeSantian Bible. (Newsom even signed a law that would have effectively sent California’s migrant detainees to other states — an idea DeSantis would make more explicit when he started buying plane tickets to send illegal immigrants to blue cities and a vacation island favored by well-to-do Democrats.)
And while Newsom survived a 2021 recall attempt, a recent Quinnipiac poll shows around 70 percent of California residents oppose the idea of his running for president. True Newsomism has been tried, and the state’s voters are happy to keep it contained.
But fear not, Democrats — if Newsom isn’t your speed, the New York Times has identified a provisional choice for you. Their new pinup boy is corpulent billionaire and governor of Illinois J. B. Pritzker, whom people appear to be taking seriously primarily because they think he is dumb enough to spend his $3.6 billion on a White House run.
It is true that Pritzker comfortably won reelection in heavily Democratic Illinois just four months ago. But it is also true that people are fleeing that state, too, as if Pritzker were serving garlic bread at a vampire convention. In the past decade, Illinois was one of only three states that lost population; Between 2020 and 2021, only New York lost population faster.
Part of the reason to bolt Illinois may be the lack of jobs. The state currently has the fifth-highest unemployment rate, perhaps due, in part, to Pritzker’s approval of a $15 minimum wage. While the state pulled itself out of near-bankruptcy a few years ago, its public-pension system is a horrific $140 billion in debt.
(Of course, Pritzker is performing the obligatory “aw, shucks, I’m not thinking of running” shtick, even doing so while giving speeches to Democrats in . . . cough . . . New Hampshire.)
Biden has given every indication he is running again. But if the Democratic Party looks up a year from now and sees that the president’s faculties have declined significantly, it will need to make a choice. A depleted Biden could beat Trump from his basement in 2020 because of Trump’s historic unfitness for office. But could a Biden with four more years of road wear beat a more mainstream Republican?
How is it that Democrats, when picking a Biden successor, could end up fielding candidates from states that voters are fleeing? What are the pitches you are likely to hear from Pritzker and Newsom? “Just think of all the people I haven’t driven from my state”?
If a blue-state governor ends up bringing his uniquely unpopular brand of politics to America at large, there won’t be any more places for government-averse residents to hide. Perhaps Mexico will start building a wall to keep Americans out.