Gavin Newsom may be saddled with an awful record. But the California governor is rapidly emerging as a leading bet – even a frontrunner in some polls – in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. How is this possible?
The simple answer is that Newsom might be the ultimate candidate for the attention-deficient generation. He is a political chameleon who changes positions compulsively – not according to facts, but to whatever best seems to fit the national mood. We witnessed this after last year’s presidential election, when he began ‘bro-washing’ his slick image with some cringe-worthy appearances on podcasts. One of these even included an embrace of gun ownership – a surprise to many of his supporters who had voted for him on the basis of his strong anti-gun record.
Newsom follows what may be charitably described as a flexible ideology. He flip-flops even on his core issues, such as climate change. Newsom, an avid supporter of Net Zero, basically fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations.
Newsom has proven equally slippery on woke social issues. In recent years, he made California a ‘refuge’ for transgender children, supporting the experimental use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy on minors. Indeed, these policies were central to Newsom’s assaults on rival states Texas and Florida. But he shocked trans activists in March by admitting that having biological males compete with women was ‘unfair’. Clearly, he had sensed which way the political wind was blowing.
Now, the chameleon has changed his colours once again. After trying to appeal to MAGA voters in the aftermath of Trump’s November victory, he is back leading the ‘Resistance’. Last week, he promised to redraw California’s congressional districts to the advantage of Democrats. In June, as US federal agents targeted undocumented immigrants in California, Newsom accused Trump of a ‘brazen abuse of power’. Like all aspiring Democrats, he regularly denounces Trump as a fascist.
But Newsom has an even bigger, more vulnerable Achilles’ heel than his shifting political positions. It is the undeniable economic and social decline he has overseen as governor of California.
A state that was once the envy of the world is now best described as a bastion of feudal inequality. Huge wealth is concentrated in a few hands, while it accommodates roughly half of America’s homeless population. It not only has the highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate in the US, it also has the highest unemployment. Nearly one in five Californians lives in poverty, while the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another third live in near poverty.
This is a far cry from when the Golden State epitomised opportunity for the middle and working classes. Today, it is the single-worst state for creating above-average-paying jobs, while topping the league for producing below-average and low-paying ones. California haemorrhaged 1.6million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade – more than twice as many as any other state. Since 2008, it has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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