As debate raged this summer over whether President Joe Biden should abandon his re-election bid, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stock soared.
The California Democrat became a fixture on the national political stage as he stood behind Biden to the bitter end — a boost in profile, long cultivated by Newsom, that made him a serious prospect in conversations about who Democrats could select as a replacement nominee.
That possibility was cut short when the party quickly consolidated behind Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out of the race in July. And though her loss to former President Donald Trump this week does reopen a path for Newsom to seek the presidency in 2028, he emerges from the wreckage in a considerably weakened state.
While deeper analysis remains to be done about why the national electorate broadly shifted to the right in this election, Democrats are likely to be skeptical that another culture warrior from California represents their best chance of rebuilding the party after voters rejected Harris, who came out of the same San Francisco political circles as Newsom.
Matt Rodriguez, a Democratic consultant who worked on presidential campaigns for Barack Obama, Dick Gephardt and Bill Bradley, said a Newsom campaign would be stuck with a challenging message: “If you didn’t love the first movie, you’re gonna love the sequel.”
“Being from California is a bit of a millstone around people’s necks and that will make Democrats skittish,” Rodriguez said.
Newsom, who steadfastly denies any interest in the White House even as he appears to lay the groundwork for a future campaign, released a statement this afternoon, right after Harris delivered her concession speech.
“Though this is not the outcome we wanted, our fight for freedom and opportunity endures,” he said. “California will seek to work with the incoming president — but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.”
Newsom won’t be leaving the spotlight anytime soon. With two years remaining in his governorship, he is poised to return to the resister-in-chief that he was during Trump’s first term — a move that could boost his appeal to loyal Democrats even beyond California’s borders.
“What else is there? If you’re a Democrat today, you’re wiping your tears away,” said Democratic consultant Andrew Acosta. “They’re not going to roll over and say, ‘Well, I guess I need to give Donald Trump a chance.’”
Whether the relevance that comes with being Trump’s foil translates into votes outside of the most devoted MSNBC viewers is far less certain.
Once the fog of this election lifts, Democrats face a reckoning over the message that will carry them forward, especially as they continue to lose ground with traditionally Democratic working class and nonwhite voters. The party found itself in this position in 1988, after a third straight presidential election loss, and ascended again with Bill Clinton by co-opting conservative messaging on crime and the economy.
If the argument to pivot to the center wins out, then a staunch liberal like Newsom — whose gubernatorial record includes a moratorium on the death penalty and an executive order phasing out the sale of gas-powered cars — could be seen as too big of a risk for Democratic primary voters.
“There will be a lot of soul searching,” Acosta said. “The California baggage does become problematic.”
Republicans would be only too happy to pounce in a general election. Trump routinely made California a punching bag in his campaign, and his closing argument against Harris focused as much on painting her as too extreme on issues such as transgender rights as it did on the economic concerns that were top of mind for voters.
Jennifer Jacobs, a Republican consultant who worked across the country this year to elect Trump and GOP candidates, said voters everywhere are tired of the politics and governance that California has come to represent: high gas prices and housing costs, widespread homelessness and retail theft, mass illegal immigration.
‘He is California’
A Los Angeles Times poll in February found that half of American adults believe California is in decline, and nearly half of Republicans said California was not American.
“We just had an entire nation say we don’t want to be like California,” said Jacobs, a San Diego native who like many other residents of the state is planning to move to Las Vegas in the coming months.
Newsom himself has struggled with declining job approval among California voters, who appeared to further repudiate the governor this week when they overwhelmingly passed a tough-on-crime measure that he vocally opposed and maneuvered to remove from the ballot.
“He is California,” Jacobs said. “I hope he runs for president. It will be the biggest trouncing you’ve ever seen.”
Of course, the next election is four years away. There’s still plenty of time for the mood to change, especially if another messy Trump administration turns off voters and pushes them back toward Democrats, further upending assumptions about their priorities.
After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, unable to dent President Obama’s multiracial coalition, Republicans concluded that the party needed to be more inclusive to minority groups and take on comprehensive immigration reform to win the White House. Trump’s success trashed that theory.
“We have to see where this plays out over the course of Trump’s presidency and what’s the space that the opposition party fills,” Rodriguez said.
For Newsom, however, destiny may be set. Completely reinventing himself over the next few years from anti-Trump hero to, say, economic populist is a tall order that would would require disappointing allies and slaughtering sacred cows of California politics.
It’s not impossible, but his chances of becoming president probably depend more on the frame of mind the electorate is in several years from now than anything Newsom says or does in the meantime.
“Voters are going to have to be open to him,” Rodriguez said. “There isn’t much he can do to change that.”
This story originally appeared in CalMatters.