Gavin Newsom is currently in the lead for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. Newsom’s early advantage is especially impressive for the way that it puts him well ahead of candidates with better name recognition, including Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. Every other Democrat who hasn’t already run for president is stuck polling in the single digits.
A key source of Newsom’s appeal is the belief that he’s electable. It’s easy to see why the party’s voters have such a favorable view of his political skills. The California governor has combined an ideological flexibility—lately embracing both the “abundance agenda” and dialogues with conservatives—with a relentless mockery of President Trump. His new persona as a fighting moderate, a Democrat in tune with the country’s shifting desires and ruthless toward the man at the top, deftly speaks to the needs of a party desperate to regain the White House.
But Newsom has a problem: He has been a California politician for decades, and has held the state’s governorship since 2019. During his tenure, the state has been a laboratory for some of the Democratic Party’s most politically fraught policies and instincts, which has left it less affordable and more culturally radical than it used to be. His record not only raises pressing questions about how effectively he could govern as president; it also provides opponents an endless buffet of vulnerabilities across social and economic issues.
Indeed, many of Newsom’s positions read as if they were reverse-engineered from Republican attack ads. California has spent billions of dollars offering Medicaid to undocumented immigrants, and millions more on providing transgender surgeries for prisoners, some of them on death row. But because these policies either command majority support among Democratic voters or matter enormously to progressive interest groups, Newsom could very well make it through a primary despite a record that would repulse swing voters come November 2028. Just about everything people don’t like about the Democratic Party has come true in Newsom’s California.
Democrats have turned affordability into their most effective cudgel against the Trump administration. Should he run for president, Newsom’s record in California would seriously compromise this message.
The state’s long-standing aversion to new construction has made housing notoriously expensive. Its median home price is nearly $1 million, and building multifamily housing costs more than twice as much in California as it does in Texas, and 50 percent more than it does in Colorado. This is one reason that California is among only seven states to have lost residents since 2020.
[Helen Lewis: The front-runner]
The state’s high home prices have also driven a surge in homelessness, which has risen by more than 20 percent since Newsom took office. In the absence of shelters and other arrangements, California has allowed public spaces to host homeless encampments. The ubiquity of the state’s homelessness has become one of its most distinctive traits—a haunting tableau of its unaffordability and social disorder. If Newsom wins the nomination, Republican attack ads will inevitably roll the tape of children walking home from school past unsheltered people using drugs in public.
Newsom doesn’t deserve all of the blame. The most serious barriers to housing predate his tenure, and California’s temperate weather makes it easy for homeless people to gather and sleep outside, rather than finding shelter somewhere. He has also lately endorsed policies designed to permit more and cheaper housing, such as a bill he signed in 2021 that ended single-family zoning in the state and legalized building up to four units on every lot. But these changes have yet to move the needle on housing supply in the state. In the first 10 months of 2025, Florida issued permits for three times as many new housing units than California did for every 1,000 residents.
Any welcome, belated moves that Newsom has made to lower costs must also be weighed against other steps he’s made to raise them. Newsom has sought to phase out gas-powered cars, banning their sale by 2035 and their use after 2045. This past spring, Congress stepped in to revoke the waivers that allow California to set such rules, a move that was backed by 35 House Democrats, which Trump signed into law in June. Newsom responded with an executive order doubling down on his aggressive emissions standards.
California has the most expensive gas in the continental United States. It has the highest state-excise tax in the country, at 61 cents a gallon; imposes a sales tax of 10 cents a gallon; and charges another 54 cents a gallon to cover the costs of complying with the state’s environmental regulations. Newsom opposed a repeal of the gas tax in 2018.
There are sound reasons to tax gasoline. But the politics of it are awful. That the state has made gasoline-powered cars more expensive without providing affordable alternatives hardly helps. A grand scheme to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with a high-speed train has already consumed $14 billion in tax revenues and has gone nowhere. The plan now is to build a line connecting Gilroy (80 miles from San Francisco) and Palmdale (more than 60 miles from L.A.) by 2038, at a cost of $87 billion—though both the price and the timeline should be taken with bulldozers of salt. The costs and challenges of building infrastructure may be a national problem, but California’s case is the most embarrassing white elephant.
California’s affordability problems are dire, but Newsom’s greatest vulnerabilities may be cultural issues. His tenure has seen the state fall hard for faddish progressive policies on immigration, education, and crime that either didn’t work, violated the intuitions of most Americans, or both.
In a recent podcast interview with Ezra Klein, Newsom acknowledged some of his political vulnerabilities. He admitted that the state has bungled illegal immigration. (“We failed on the border. We need to own up to that. Largest border crossing in the Western Hemisphere, in my state.”) Unlike Texas and Arizona, which anticipated a surge of migrants in response to the Biden administration’s policies, and deployed state troops to fend them off, California greeted arriving migrants with a “safe and welcoming border,” according to 2023 praise from Newsom.
[Jonathan Chait: The coming Democratic civil war]
Newsom’s record on immigration will not be helped by his move to expand Medicaid to cover those who entered the country illegally. On Klein’s podcast, Newsom defended this on moral grounds: “I believe in universal health care. Others may say it—I did it.” He did not talk about how the policy may have contributed to the border surge, or acknowledge that allowing people who break the laws to get the same benefits as those who follow them undermines the point of laws.
Newsom also failed to mention just how unpopular the policy is, at least outside of California. When the Democratic polling firm Blue Rose Research asked half a million Americans to rank their support for 190 Republican and Democratic policies, they found that providing free health care to undocumented immigrants placed 187th, making it a touch more popular than abolishing prisons and abolishing the police. Newsom also declined to note that the state, at his direction, is suspending Medicaid enrollment for new undocumented applicants this year due to budget shortfalls.
Under Newsom, California’s schools de-emphasized academic rigor and embraced left-wing pedagogy. In 2021, he signed a bill mandating an Ethnic Studies course about power, identity, and social justice for all high-school students. The model curriculum, which in its first draft taught “cisheteropatriarchy” and “hxrstory,” and likened capitalism to white supremacy and racism as a form of power and oppression, sparked concerns and revisions. Newsom quietly defunded the measure in the latest budget just before it was meant to take effect this year. He did not explain why.
During Newsom’s tenure, the state has flirted with various misguided education reforms in the spirit of increasing equity. The governor-appointed University of California Board of Regents committed in 2021 to ending the use of test scores in evaluating applications, in a bid to diversify the student body—despite research suggesting that test scores are perhaps the least biased part of a college application, compared with grades and personal essays. Predictably, the UC San Diego campus—one of the system’s most exclusive—has seen a 30-fold increase in students requiring remedial math instruction since 2020. About 70 percent of those students do not meet even middle-school math standards. If only there were a way of measuring their math abilities before accepting them into what was once one of America’s finest public universities.
Newsom has thrown himself behind progressive stances on affirmative action, crime, and reparations, having recently signed a bill to create an agency that will deliver restitution to the descendants of slaves. These positions put him in lockstep with progressive interest groups but are well to the left of most Democrats, to say nothing of swing voters. In 2022 he signed a law that bars police from arresting anyone for loitering with intent to engage in prostitution, which has left corridors in L.A. teeming with prostitutes. A tough-on-crime ballot measure—opposed by the likes of the ACLU and other progressive groups—passed overwhelmingly in 2024, despite his opposition.
Newsom seems to have recognized that appeasing California’s Democrats puts him out of step with the country. He began tacking toward the center as early as 2023, when he vetoed labor-backed measures to give unemployment benefits to striking workers and extend workplace-safety standards to domestic workers such as nannies.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Gavin Newsom is not governing]
Following Joe Biden’s political collapse and Trump’s victory, Newsom has more plainly been playing to a wider audience. He recently announced that he was working behind the scenes to stop a union-proposed wealth tax on billionaires. He has expressed his discomfort with policies allowing trans girls and women to compete in women’s sports—something that California currently and controversially allows—and he launched a podcast in early 2025, on which he swiftly hosted Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. He signed a measure in September increasing oil drilling in the state and has spent much of the past year crudely trolling the president online, signaling a breakup with the hall-monitor elements of the left.
Newsom has capably sensed what Democrats want right now, and is delivering it with a roguish charisma. The trouble is that before this awkwardly recent pivot, the governor spent years trying to satisfy every Democratic whim in a state where there was little incentive to appeal to anybody who would even consider voting for Trump.
In political terms, 2028 is ages away. Any Democratic nominee could very well face a Republican candidate so discredited by Trump’s governing failures that their own vulnerabilities pale by comparison. But Newsom’s own missteps are considerable enough that, in a close race, they might well prove decisive.
