Gavin Newsom Talks about Red States More Than California

Is Gavin Newsom the governor of California or a left-wing talk-show pundit? If you’re going off of his Twitter presence, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s the latter. The scandal-plagued Golden State Democrat often seems like he’s using his platform to audition for a spot as a weekend MSNBC anchor. (Jen Psaki, take note.) Newsom has posted 22 tweets in the last month. Seven of those were about California. Five were about national events — a commemoration of the Persian New Year, a condemnation of “horrifying acts of anti-Asian sentiment,” a tribute to Madeleine Albright, and so on. But ten out of the 22 were about Republicans in other states, with no discernible relationship to California. Here are a few highlights from the last three weeks alone:

It’s understandable that Newsom doesn’t want to focus on the situation in his own state. His approval rating is down 16 points from September 2020 according to a February poll from UC Berkeley. Although he eventually beat a September 2021 recall effort by a decisive margin — at least partially owing to the California GOP’s disorganization — the fact that the recall petition garnered upwards of 1.7 million signatures signaled serious dissatisfaction with the first-term governor, sparked by high-profile controversies during the pandemic. As CalMatters reported in January 2021, the recall petition 

gained a surge of signatures after news broke in November that a maskless Newsom joined lobbyists for a dinner party at the posh French Laundry restaurant, even though he was telling Californians to mask up and avoid socializing. The count grew as the state’s unemployment system paid out billions to fraudsters, and its chaotic COVID vaccine distribution left people scrambling for shots. As many schools, churches and businesses closed during Newsom’s stay-at-home orders, the recall that began as a conservative rebuke of his progressive policies morphed into a referendum on his pandemic response.

With the recall in the rearview mirror, Newsom has nonetheless continued to lurch from loss to loss. Berkeley’s February poll registered “a decline in voters’ overall appraisals of the direction of the state,” with just 36 percent saying they “believe California is moving in the right direction,” in contrast to 54 percent saying that the state “is on the wrong track.” Those numbers represent “a 10-point decline in the proportion of voters who feel the state is moving in the right direction from May 2021,” the last time the poll was taken.

On the specific issues, 65 percent of California voters “believe that crime in their own local area has increased over the past year,” and 78 percent “think the amount of crime across California overall has been on the rise over the past year, with 50% believing it has increased ‘a lot.’” Voters disapproved of Newsom’s handling of the state’s burgeoning crime problem by a margin of 51 to 20 percent. On homelessness, 66 disapproved of Newsom, with just 11 percent approving. If you measure the polling by the percentage of “disapprove” versus “approve” — without “no opinion” and the middle-ground rating of “fair” — the governor is also underwater on education, the state budget, coronavirus, droughts, wildfires, health care, and jobs/economy, as illustrated from this graphic from the Los Angeles Times:

Now, California is effectively a one-party state. So even preening, self-satisfied mediocrities like Gavin Newsom can fail upwards, provided they have a “D” next to their name — and provided they enjoy the backing of California’s gilded elite interests, who have dumped $23 million into the governor’s reelection war chest as of December 2021. (And spent a whopping $71 million — including $3.9 million from Hollywood, $3.8 million from tech, $5.3 million from real estate, and $25.7 million from Big Labor — to help him defeat the recall,) Maybe Newsom’s Twitter punditry plays well with the progressive elites who run things in the state. It wouldn’t be the first time the governor took to talk-show commentary: From 2012 to 2013, then-lieutenant governor Newsom hosted The Gavin Newsom Show on a San Francisco-based channel. But in the face of California’s colossal problems, working- and middle-class residents might be wondering if punditry is the best use of their governor’s time.