On the menu today: I’ve written a bunch of profile pieces of presidential candidates over the years. I always thought the best part of them was when they told you something you didn’t already know about the candidate; by the time a politician is running, we often already know the basics. Back in the 2020 cycle, I wrote “Things You Probably Didn’t Know” columns about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Sherrod Brown, and Michael Bloomberg.
We’re still in early 2026, but two major national magazines have published profiles about Gavin Newsom that seemed more interested in his appearance, his body language, and his sartorial choices than in what he’s actually done as governor of California for the past seven years. And neither one had much to say about California becoming, far and away, the most unaffordable state in the country on Newsom’s watch. Read on.
The Glowing Profiles That Miss the Real Story
Another week brings another gushing profile of California Governor Gavin Newsom, this time in The New Yorker, which is supposed to be a much more serious and intellectually rigorous magazine than Vogue, the last glossy magazine to swoon over Newsom.
Nathan Heller wrote a long profile, more than 12,000 words, so it’s hard to succinctly summarize, but this paragraph struck me as the core contention of the article:
Since the pandemic, it has been fashionable for Republicans to stand on San Francisco street corners and point to homeless people, spinning out a story of apocalyptic decay that, they say, results from Democratic leadership. Newsom argues the inverse. Since his first year as governor, he has promoted an idea of California as a terrarium for Democratic principle — enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution, upholding sanctuary-state policies, pushing for police reform — while emphasizing its successes over its failures. California, the closest thing to a test zone for the blue economy, is home to roughly half of all American unicorn startups, which are valued at more than a billion dollars each, and technologists who made a show of fleeing because of taxes and regulations, like Elon Musk, have returned to found A.I. firms. “The Republicans’ governing thesis cannot be true if California succeeds,” Jason Elliott, a former deputy chief of staff in Newsom’s office, told me. “We disprove their ideas that pluralism is a recipe for failure, that completely deregulated capital is the only way to grow.” He added, “It drives them f***ing crazy.”
First, if you think Republicans oppose “pluralism,” you have not spent much time in places like Florida, or Texas, or Nevada, or Arizona. For what it’s worth, the whitest states in the country are GOP-leaning West Virginia, followed by Democratic-leaning Vermont and Maine and purplish New Hampshire. Also, everyone living under the current tariff regime and the expanding federal government ownership role in private businesses would be surprised to learn that Republicans promote “completely deregulated capital.”
But more importantly, if California is such an indisputable success story, you would think more people would want to move there. In 2025, California ranked dead last, again, in U-Haul’s data of in-migration states. That marked the sixth consecutive year where the state ranked last; in 2019, California ranked 49th, and the previous year, 48th. Newsom has been governor for seven years.
I noted the U-Haul data, and a bunch of other statistics, back in January 2025, and decided to check in to see if the newer studies had shown any significant improvement.
Each year, U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California remained dead last in affordability, remained at 45th for growth, and remained at 47th in energy infrastructure.
There were a few areas of minor comparable improvement; California moved from 47th to 46th in employment and from 46th to 45th in air and water quality. But more categories got a little worse: California dropped from 42nd to 43rd in public safety, dropped from 37th to 38th in K–12 education, and most glaringly, dropped from 42nd to 48th in short-term fiscal stability.
In 2025, the Tax Foundation ranked California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. It remains ranked 48th in the 2026 rankings. “California combines high tax rates with an uncompetitive tax structure, yielding one of the worst rankings on the Index. The state has a great deal going for it, with its mild climate, excellent research universities, and the ongoing agglomeration effects of Silicon Valley (which is seeing a resurgence with the rise of generative AI), but a tax code that is uncompetitive and threatens to get worse is increasingly driving jobs to other states.”
In 2024, BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. In 2025, that had improved to 43rd; the state still ranks 48th for local taxes and 46th for affordability, 43rd for safety, but ranked first for weather. At least the state government can’t screw that up.
Once a year, LendingTree ranks the states by driving safety. California ranked ninth-worst overall (an improvement from the third-worst the previous year), third-highest in accident rate (dropping slightly from the second-highest), and second-worst in drunk driving (same as the previous year). An October 2025 study rated 26.6 percent of California roads in “poor condition,” ranking third worst in the country. (This is not merely a matter of a state’s size, as Rhode Island and Massachusetts ranked ahead of California.) The Reason Foundation has a more detailed assessment of the quality of California’s roads and where all that highway spending is going; they conclude California’s highway system ranks 49th in the nation in overall cost-effectiveness and condition.
The word “affordability” appears twice in the 12,000-word New Yorker piece. The first is this: “On housing, the Governor has been an ally of State Senator Scott Wiener, one of the legislative leaders of the YIMBY (Yes in my backyard) movement, which aims to alleviate housing-supply shortages to improve affordability.”
(You may recognize Wiener’s name from one of his other endeavors, removing the automatic sex offender registry for those who engage in consensual yet illegal oral or anal “sexual relations between a teenager age 14 to 17 and a partner within 10 years of age.” Don’t get mad at me for quoting what the legislation says. Weiner passed the legislation to “ensure that California stops stigmatizing specific sexual acts.” Now, call me a prude, but maybe the backdoor with a 14-year-old ought to be stigmatized? Wiener’s press release notes, “SB 145 does not apply to intercourse of any kind with minors who are younger than 14. For those crimes, mandatory sex offender registration will continue to be the case for all forms of intercourse.” That sentence is nowhere near as reassuring as the state senator seems to think it is. Wiener’s bill was signed into law by . . . Gavin Newsom, of course. But perhaps the governor has always believed that age is just a number; as a 39-year-old mayor, Newsom dated a 19-year-old model, who was photographed drinking wine at an event with Newsom.)
The other reference to “affordability” comes in a later discussion of Democrats’ options for a 2028 strategy, contending the party “can do without buckets of cash if they truly embrace affordability populism, which will let them peel off voters who drifted to Trump for cheaper milk.”
Despite all of its agricultural production, California has the third-highest grocery bills in the country, behind only Hawaii and Alaska, states that have their own unique food transportation costs and challenges. What’s more, California grocery inflation is rising faster than the overall cost of living; California groceries are 26 percent costlier over five years, as the overall cost of living rose 23 percent.
According to research from California Polytechnic State University, “Regulatory compliance requirements through 2024 bring lettuce grower total costs of regulation to $1,600 per acre, an increase of 1,366 percent since 2006.”
As our old friend Dominic Pino observed, “The lowest average gas price that Californians saw in any week of 2025 was 88 cents higher than the highest average price New Yorkers saw.” California taxes gasoline at 70.92 cents per gallon, the highest of any state and double the median state. The state’s mandatory cap-and-trade programs, blending requirements, lack of inbound pipelines, and the Jones Act all add up to make gasoline in California significantly more expensive than in any other state.
Labor costs in California are significantly higher than most other states for almost any job; the minimum wage in California is $16.90 per hour, 2.3 times the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Defenders of the Golden State will insist the exorbitant cost of living is partially offset by the state’s higher wages; California ranks fourth in the country in average hourly earnings. Alas, the higher wages aren’t keeping up with prices. According to a GOBankingRates analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Affairs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Zillow, your dollar buys less in California than in any other state; $100 buys $87.42 worth of goods in the Golden State; the second-worst was New Jersey at $91.12.
According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “California has the most expensive housing market nationwide. Even with above-average incomes, the income-to-home-value ratio is the lowest in the U.S.,” with the average price $813,110, 228 percent of the typical U.S. price. California’s electricity is the second-most expensive in the country, behind only Hawaii and double the national average.
Under Gavin Newsom, the state of California has developed a severe and all-encompassing affordability problem, one that is heavily driven by state government decisions in taxation, regulation, labor costs, energy policy, and more. But the New Yorker just isn’t that interested in that topic. As far as I can tell, the biggest institutions in the mainstream media are only marginally interested in Newsom’s record as mayor, lieutenant governor, and governor.
The last day that Gavin Newsom wasn’t in a government position or elected office was February 12, 1997, when he was appointed a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by former Mayor Willie Brown. When Newsom was appointed, the San Francisco Examiner ran the headline, “Board gets a straight white male.” Newsom told the paper he was a fiscal conservative.
Instead of California’s affordability issue, the New Yorker preferred to focus on topics like this:
For Newsom, a middle-aged man with a large, young family, a glow of professional attainment, and, most days, enough Oribe Crème in his hair to dress a good Crab Louie, the challenge has been to look both humble and concerned. He slumped his shoulders as he listened, as if to shrink his frame. When he nodded, he bent from the waist — not just agreeing but offering small, grateful bows.
“Enough Oribe Crème in his hair to dress a good Crab Louie” feels like an extremely New Yorker phrase. I confess, dear reader, that if you asked me if Crab Louie was the singing and dancing critter in The Little Mermaid*, I would have a 50-50 shot of getting the question right.
Much like in the Vogue profile, Heller repeatedly felt the need to describe Newsom’s body language to readers:
Behind a lectern, his gestures still have a rehearsed feel. When he takes the microphone and roams, however, he moves like a boxer, holding his forearms up and parallel, wrists toward each other, right hand crossing to left shoulder, as if blocking. His knees bounce as he comes to a rhetorical peak. . . .
Six feet three, he had curled himself, like Gumby, into an “S” shape, knees sideways, in the corner of a blue-gray sofa. . . .
He was dressed in a white shirt, dusky-blue suit trousers, and a blue tie knotted, with two crisp dimples, into a four-in-hand. The social-media menswear guru Derek Guy, in a post on Newsom and neckties, pronounced him “one of the few politicians left who knows how to wear one.”
Surely, this is the finest, deepest, and most revealing analysis of a political leader since David Brooks described Barack Obama’s “perfectly creased pant.”
Like all governors who want to be president, Gavin Newsom wants to do to the country what he’s done to his state. If you think America had a cost-of-living problem during the Biden presidency, just brace yourself for what would come under Newsom.
*The crab’s name was Sebastian.
ADDENDUM: Last Monday’s Morning Jolt noted the comparable lack of ire at American-born, Chinese-competing freestyle skier Eileen Gu, compared to U.S. skier Hunter Hess. A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, “In 2025, the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau was set to pay Gu and another athlete a combined $6.6 million.” In other words, Gu is not merely being paid fortunes for modeling and endorsement deals by Chinese companies; she’s being paid a fortune directly by an agency of the state in the People’s Republic of China, a government that does not recognize dual citizenship . . . while Gu lives and trains in the U.S. and attends Stanford University.
I must also ask . . . how often does a member of the Chinese Olympic team get featured on the cover of Time magazine’s Olympics issue in the U.S.?