Sure, you can argue that Gavin Newsom will be a better communicator than Kamala Harris was; both he and his hair are slicker than she was.
This weekend, California Governor Gavin Newsom revealed the worst-kept secret in politics, the fact that he’s giving “serious thought” to running for president in 2028.
Now, considering the condition of the state of California, you can make a strong case that Newsom shouldn’t even be governor any longer, never mind become the next president. His expected presidential bid requires him to be as antagonistic to the president as possible, which is going to hurt the state in the long run, at a time when California needs all the help it can get.
But the experience of former Vice President Kamala Harris — Newsom’s metaphorical “sibling” in California politics, products of the same political culture, having shared the same donors and, for a while, some of the same strategists — really ought to make national Democrats ask tough questions about whether another progressive San Francisco Democrat as the nominee is the right way to go.
No offense to the remaining Republicans out there in the Golden State, but the California GOP might as well not exist. Rising to the top of the heap out west requires placating enough of the most important Democratic interest groups — the public sector unions and teacher’s unions, the environmentalists, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the trial lawyers, the California Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, the self-described “social justice” organizations, and so on. If they like you, the sky’s the limit. Few lawmakers worry about crossing anti-tax, pro-gun chambers of commerce or other right-leaning organizations.
In other words, California is a political environment where the Overton window runs from Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee on the left to, eh, let’s say Democratic Representative Adam Gray on the right. Since 1995, the only Republicans who have won statewide are Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had the unparalleled advantage of being the biggest of big-time Hollywood action stars, and state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, who was elected in 2006. You could conceivably argue that Newsom is, by the standards of the California Democratic Party, relatively moderate; in 2019, one study concluded, “Based on an analysis of the 1,042 bills that the governor signed or vetoed this year, Newsom is more conservative than any other Democratic state senator and sits to the left of only two Democrats in the assembly.”
In other words, if Democrats nominate Newsom, they will have a candidate shaped by the hard-left political culture of California, who will need to win a bunch of not-so-left states to win the presidency. Even a “moderate” in the California Democratic Party is still really left-wing in the states that are most likely to determine the winner of the 2028 presidential election.
The 2024 election came down to Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. While Arizona was covered as one of the big seven swing states, Harris’s margin of victory in Minnesota (4.24 percentage points) was actually smaller than Trump’s was in Arizona (5.53 percentage points). Heck of a job, Tim Walz!
How well do you envision Newsom connecting with all those union voters in the Great Lakes states? How about those working-class blue-collar whites in North Carolina and Georgia? For that matter, will Newsom — who banged his campaign manager’s wife, and had a 19-year-old girlfriend when he was 39 — going to do better among women? When you see that photo of Newsom on the rug with Kimberly Guilfoyle, do you say, “Yes, this is the kind of Democratic candidate who’s going to resonate with African Americans and Latinos?” You think Newsom’s explanation for breaking the Covid quarantine restrictions by eating at the luxurious French Laundry in the Napa Valley is going to play well in places like Macomb County, Mich., or Winnebago County, Wis., or Granville County, N.C.?
Sure, you can argue that Newsom will be a better communicator than Harris was; both he and his hair are slicker than she was. (The 2028 Democratic nominee is probably not going to have a bigger fundraising advantage.)
We have no idea what the political environment of autumn 2028 is, or who the GOP nominee will be. But don’t you think that there’s a good chance that the Republicans will be able to portray the Marin County mansion owning, luxury-suite-partying, wine-sipping Newsom, who always looks like a Michael Douglas villain or Robocop foe, as an out-of-touch elitist? Liberal columnists out in California called him “the living embodiment of privilege.”
There’s an excellent chance that Newsom’s weaknesses as a candidate in appealing to swing state voters won’t be all that different from Harris’s. But hey, it’s your call, Democrats.