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Gavin Newsom Is An Overrated Presidential Hopeful [1]
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Date: 2023-09-06
If there is any individual across the country that has made it so incredibly obvious to the entire universe that he wants to run for President in the future, it would be this man, Gavin Newsom.
Newsom, much like his fellow Californian, Vice President Harris, built his political career from the ground up - after working as the owner of successful winery business, he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1998 and after serving for 5 years on the board, was elected Mayor of San Francisco in 2003. Newsom quickly became well-known in the national media for directing the city’s clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, despite it actually being illegal in the state at the time. The city also became the first municipality in the country to offer its residents universal healthcare. Unfortunately, Newsom inadvertently may have been the root cause of California voters narrowing approving a same-sex marriage ban in 2008 (yes, the state of California banned same-sex marriage just 15 years ago), because the proponents of the ban, also known as prop 8, used his own words “This door's wide open now. It's going to happen, whether you like it or not.”
In 2010, Newsom ran for Lieutenant Governor of California alongside Jerry Brown’s bid for a return to the governor’s mansion. He won the general election comfortably by double digits, unlike Kamala Harris, who as I discussed in my last article, only won her election as Attorney General by 0.8% on the same ballot as Newsom. He was re-elected in 2014. In 2018, after Governor Brown reached his term-limit, Newsom won the 2018 election in a landslide, and has been serving as Governor ever since. But now, it seems he wants to be President. I want to discuss that possibility.
Can He Win the General Election?
As I have stated numerous times, the most important factor for my vote in the Democratic primary is electability. Even if you love a certain candidate the most - if they can’t beat the Republicans, there’s no point in voting for them. To be clear, some things can override my desire for an electable candidate. I would not, for example, nominate Ronald Reagan or one of the Bushes to be the Democratic nominee just to beat Donald Trump (mortality not withstanding). But’s its a big factor.
Newsom is a good-looking Californian white guy who is slick on the stump and the debate stage, which often reverberates positively with many voters seeking the electable candidate. He grabs the attention of Democrats by taking the fight to Republicans, such as his interview with Hannity on Fox News and his upcoming debate with Ron DeSantis. Some think that he is charting a path to victory. But it rings hollow with me. In my opinion, Newsom seems like the left’s version of the “#DebateMeBro” circus clowns from conservative corners of the Internet - he essentially the brainchild of coastal liberals who wrongly believe that rural voters in people in the Midwest have turned against Democrats because they don’t “fight hard enough” on the issues. Newsom is acting like he’s trying to run a campaign from the 1980s against Ronald Reagan - where the winner of a single televised debate can sway 10% of the voters. We don’t live in that era - social media and our bifurcated sources of information have erased the advantage of the sharp debater. Quoting economic statistics faster than the other guy isn’t going to make ancestral Democrats who voted twice for Trump in West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania suddenly rise from their grave to vote for you.
When I think of electability, my immediate focus is directed towards six simple words: Wisconsin. Michigan. Pennsylvania. Nevada. Arizona. Georgia.
Gavin Newsom would have to win the lion’s share of these electoral votes
You win these states - you win the election. It’s as simple as 2 + 2 = 4. That doesn’t mean we always have to pick nominees from the battleground states - Joe Biden has just as much a connection to Arizona and Nevada as penguins have a connection to the Sahara Desert. But it does mean that our nominee has to appeal to a certain class of voters that will make the difference of whether on the morning of November 8th, 2028, we’re talking about “if only we had squeezed 50,000 more votes in those few states” or “thank God we got those 50,000 votes.”
The Democratic nominee must therefore do three things -
Win enough moderate suburban voters in the outlying metro areas of cities like Philly, Pittsburg, Detroit, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Reno, and Atlanta Hold the line with Latino voters (winning at least 65% of the Latino vote) and turn out black voters to the polls like crazy Limit the gains for Republicans among non-college educated voters
When it comes to Gavin Newsom, he can definitely satisfy criterion #1. Much of the socially liberal suburban areas of America that contain a higher percentage of college-educated families are still incensed by the extremism of the Republican Party, and it may not be going away even when Trump is gone. We saw in the 2022 midterms, the first election cycle since 2014 when Trump was neither in the White House or on the ballot, that these voters were still bothered by the crazy. Democrats scored big victories in the suburban areas of Phoenix, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas - and that’s the reason we kept the Senate. Whoever the Republican nominee is in 2028, whether its Donald Trump for the 4th time, some infragrant joker like Vivek, or even a “normie” conservative like Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, those voters are going to be completely turned off by the complete absurdity of the anti-woke crusaders who also think we should all be working in the office until the age of 70 before we get our Social Security benefits. I have no doubt that Newsom can prosecute the case against Republicans among the electorate of educated, high-society moderates who are tired of the culture wars. Here’s my problem:
Criterion #2 scares me. I do not have faith in Gavin Newsom’s ability to keep enough Latino voters and black voters on our side. Being a good-looking, rich white guy does not mean you are toxic to black voters, but you have to prove you’re one of them and that you’re on their side. Bill Clinton and John Edwards, the epitome of nice-looking rich white guys, certainly knew how to talk in the right language of working class Latinos and black voters who live paycheck to paycheck and have to worry constantly about their rent, feeding their family, and what happens when they fall sick and get a nasty hospital bill in the mail. They say Bill Clinton could sit down in a bar, drink a beer with half a dozen Republicans, and by the end of the night, they’d all be ready to vote for him. You might be able to share a beer with Newsom, but you’d have to do it at the French Laundry, not the Cherry Street Tavern in Philadelphia. I bet he’s a nice guy, but I worry that too many working-class minorities - especially those without college degrees - will see him as nothing but an out-of-touch tea sipper living in the clouds.
Why Gavin?
Gavin Newsom has been in the presidential conversation since his successful campaign against a recall election in 2021 (especially when we thought Donald Trump was going to fade away), and I truly have never understood the excitement behind this guy. He’s not really that special. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to name a single piece of landmark economic legislation that Newsom has pushed through the California legislature, you would have me dead to rights. I would absolutely have an answer for some of the other governors. Without even searching on Google, I can say that in Minnesota, which has a Democratic senate majority of just 1, the state just implemented a free school breakfast and lunch program that eliminates means-testing (more paperwork for poor parents). In Michigan, Democrats repealed the state’s right-to-work law. In Pennsylvania, they’re about to pass a bill that cuts down on unregulated charter schools and makes huge investments into public schools not seen since the ‘70s.
Gavin, on the other hand, has been enjoying a ginormous Democratic majority. But as I have said before, Gavin Newsom, along with a lot of California Democrats, seem to have taken the fact that they simply can't lose an election, and have chosen to forsake their duty to make the state better. Newsom feels no pressure from the fact that the voters of his state were guaranteed to re-elect him and his Democratic majority in the legislature. He no longer sees his purpose as working every day to improve the state's increasingly perilous homeless crisis, fixing the state's downright embarrassing inability to build quality public transportation, or lowering the exorbitantly high cost-of-living brought upon partly by private equity's acquisition of millions of livable homes. Instead, he sees his purpose as catering to liberal Twitter's fantasies in order to build a brand of personality and run for President. Right now our party has 24 governors, 51 senators, and 213 members of the House, and this is what some liberals think is the best face to put on our party. I simply cannot comprehend this. Is this really the best we can do?
Newsom delivers his State of the State address
I honestly think the buzz around Gavin is actually being largely driven by right-wing media more than what you’d might expect. As I have long-believed in the post-2020 era, the Fox News worldview has spread beyond its original intended boundaries of the uneducated Republican base within middle America to also infecting the conservative donor class and campaign consultants. This was never intended to happen - the conspiracy theories and cultural outrage were always supposed to feed red meat to the disgruntled 65-year olds on Social Security and Medicare while the elite Republicans of the ivory towers would have an unwritten understanding that the evening rants of Glenn Beck were not intended for their ears. This may have been the case 20 years ago, but it has changed drastically in this decade. There is a reason that educated Republican elite donors are holding back their money from Tim Scott because he’s single - they think he’s gay, and have been infected by the same cultural war content that was never intended for them, but for people in Southeast Ohio and West Virginia. When the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board (who is just as far from being right-wing populists as you can get) is pumping out talking points about Joe Biden being senile because they watched clips of him supposedly “not knowing where he is on stage” or “tripping on a sandbag” it is blatantly obvious that these conservative intellectuals are getting their worldview from Fox News. There are conservatives with ivy league degrees and literary awards that I read in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post opinion sections that - just by reading their own words - are clearly getting their information from Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN. The entire Republican apparatus is now essentially operating on the same brain cell.
How does that relate to Gavin Newsom? These American conservatives, who are now all on the same wavelength, have a primal inclination for a leader who is the “alpha-male” - the strongest, meanest warrior who picks fights with all the bad guys. They are like the most corrupted characters from Lord of the Flies; it’s not the policies that matter, but they will follow whoever is willing to hunt down the pig and march around the island with its head on a pike. Gavin Newsom meets every conservative archetype of the desired leader - he fights Republicans on the airwaves and in the state legislature, and is now in a feud with Ron DeSantis as they have challenged each other to a debate on Fox News. In the conservative mind, Biden is not the “alpha-male” because he looks 90 years old, he’s soft-spoken, he’s empathetic, and he refuses to throw political firebombs at Senate Republicans because it has given him the chance to pursue bipartisan solutions. The idea that Joe Biden could be the Democratic nominee in 2024 simply doesn’t compute with the conservative worldview, which is why you hear Republicans on television and on print insist that Gavin Newsom will somehow supplant Biden as the nominee. Why? Because that’s what they would do. Conservatives do not have the ability to see beyond any other worldview or perspective than their little bubble of existence, and when all the evidence in the world is telling them “Joe Biden is going to be the nominee,” they don’t think to themselves, “maybe not everyone on the Democratic side sees the world like I do.” Instead, their sense of logic and reason just shuts off.
In fact, just recently, progressive congressman Ro Khanna from California did an interview with conservative podcaster Hugh Hewitt, and during the interview, Hewitt asked Khanna about the possibility of Gavin Newsom replacing Joe Biden in 2024 (skip to 12:40 in the video):
You know when a conservative is hyping up a Democrat’s electability more than a congressman from that Democratic governor’s own home state, there is really a disconnect with reality happening in the right-wing about Gavin Newsom.
We know for a fact that conservative talking points drip into the mainstream media, so it shouldn’t surprise us when we hear Gavin Newsom’s name mentioned as the “leader-in-waiting” for the Democrats. But liberals are not drawn to the alpha-male candidate like the Republicans are. If we were, Jimmy Carter wouldn’t have made it 100 miles from the White House, and we would have never nominated Michael Dukakis, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden. I suspect that Gavin Newsom exists within a bubble, and when he transforms from “could-be” candidate to “is a candidate,” that bubble will burst like a wafer-thin balloon.
Can He Actually Win the Primary?
In the Republican party, it really is possible for a candidate to win the presidential primary simply by carrying a single constituency of voters: non-college-educated whites. In the 2016 primary, 88% of Republican voters were white, and 71% of those voters did not have a college degree, meaning that 63% of all Republican voters are white and have no college degree. Donald Trump, who is treated like radioactive waste in the other corners of his party (especially whites with advanced degrees), doesn’t even have to concern himself with those people. His party is so monolithic that he can hijack it with ease just by catering to the interests of white, uneducated Republicans.
If 63% of the Democratic Party consisted of stereotypical over-educated white liberals with a double degree in philosophy and English who eat avocado toast for breakfast with their triple venti, half sweet, non-fat, gluten free, non-GMO, locally-sourced caramel macchiato latte from the Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks - perhaps Newsom might have a better chance of winning the primary. But reality tells a much different story. Democrats actually have a smaller percentage of all white people (60%) than the Republicans have white people without college degrees, and only about half of all Democratic voters actually have a college degree at all. A mere 26% of the Democratic party is white and has no degree, and only 34% of the Democratic party is white, and has a college degree. You simply cannot win a primary in this party without appealing to Democrats that truly represent a healthy, multicultural, and multiethnic coalition.
Democrats are much more diverse than the Republicans
You hear Gavin Newsom’s name mentioned more on the cable channels and the editorials because the people talking on TV and writing the articles live in a bubble of educated urban liberals. Those sections of the Democratic Party simply produce more background noise in the political culture than non-college educated working-class liberals in urban America who reliably vote for Democrats, but tune out the day-to-day news because they have paychecks to collect, rent to pay, and children to feed. Those people are not going to care if Gavin Newsom can memorize a monthly report from the Department of Labor Statistics and use it on Fox News’s primetime shows. All they want is a candidate who can demonstrate that they’re going to fight for civil rights, abortion rights, better healthcare, better wages, better roads, and better governance.
I can’t pick out a single state in the early primaries where this guy could plausibly win a plurality of the votes.
South Carolina? No. The guy is whiter than Pete Buttigieg, and has never had to earn a black vote in his life. A majority of the voters here are black. They ain’t voting for him.
Nevada? No. The culinary unions will hate his guts for being too pro-business and too ambiguous on unions, including him threatening to veto a farm union bill (he was against the bill before he was for it).
New Hampshire? No. The regionalism speaks for itself.
Michigan? No. Any Midwestern governor who runs for President and makes it to the Michigan primary will trounce him here.
No person in the modern primary era has ever won the presidency without winning at least one contest that occurred before Super Tuesday. If he doesn’t win one of these contests, the Gavin train is not leaving the station. Call me crazy, but I just don’t see how he pulls off a win in this primary.
Will Newsom Be a Good President?
I’ll vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is in the 2028 election. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to feel good about the prospect of Gavin Newsom being in the White House, or not feel that we could do so much better than him.
I don’t like Gavin Newsom, because he seems more like a performance artist than an actual leader. As I complained 3 months ago (see here for context), Gavin Newsom has been pursuing the passage of the so-called “28th amendment” that would implement gun control measures via a federal constitutional amendment. The bill recently passed committee, and is working its way to passage in the legislature. I don’t want to revisit my grievances with his proposal, but there’s a broader point to be made: California has so many issues that it needs to solve - 30% of the country’s homeless live in California, housing is downright unaffordable, income inequality has gotten worse in the last decade and a half, the state can’t build a high-speed railway to save its life, and its almond industry is sucking the state’s water supply down to nothing. Those problems are not anyone’s fault - bad things happen - but it does become your fault when you don’t make an effort to propose and pass policies to make it better. Every person in a position of power will be presented with problems. What makes that person a leader is when they use that power for good. Standing around and passing a performative constitutional amendment that will never become law just so you can get media attention is downright insulting to the millions of people in the state of California who actually have problems they need solved. And more importantly, it’s not leadership. It’s showbusiness.
This proposal was a good idea on paper, but it doesn’t solve one problem for anybody
If Gavin Newsom is elected president, it is very likely that at some point in his presidency, he will have to face the possibility of dealing with a Congress controlled by Republicans. That’s okay - we live in a democracy that frequently elects a majority for the other party. But here’s where I have issues: California, like many states, has a constitutionally mandated balanced-budget amendment. Balanced-budget amendments are truly a fiscal self-own, but that’s the reality the state’s leaders face. This year, California was faced with a $30 billion budget deficit, meaning that they would have to fill in the hole with either cuts or tax increases. When progressives from northern California proposed a temporary 2% tax on business, Newsom shot it down, and instead cut money from renewable energy investments, child care, and public transit. To be clear, the federal budget is not burdened by such a balanced-budget amendment (and probably never will be), but I simply don’t trust Newsom to put progressive spending proposals that benefit millions of people on the chopping block the next time Republicans attempt to use the debt ceiling in budget talks. That fear is not based in unfounded assumption - he’s already done it in his own state.
I agree with Newsom on a lot of the issues, including his steadfast opposition to the death penalty and his unwavering support for gay marriage when it wasn’t necessarily the popular thing to say. I’m proud of him for immediately responding to the Dobbs decision in 2022 by calling a special session to pass a constitutional amendment through the legislature (and passed by 67% of the voters, including me) to codify the right to abortion in the state constitution. He is a big supporter of public education and the human right to basic healthcare, including for little brown children who come to this country from central America with only the clothes on their back seeking a better life. I’m happy that he has been a leader in cracking down on police violence against black people and passing commonsense gun control. But given the choices, Newsom is far from being my first.
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