Gavin Newsom: the chameleon who destroyed California

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.

Few areas have more clearly exposed the incompetence of Newsomian economics than energy policy. California now has the highest energy prices in the continental US – almost 30 per cent more than the national average – thanks to the governor’s pursuit of Net Zero and his obedience to green dogma. This has hugely increased day-to-day living costs for poor and working families.

Rising energy costs have had other predictable economic consequences. Traditional blue-collar jobs in construction, logistics and manufacturing have disappeared. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the US Top 10 for well-paying, blue-collar jobs. But four – Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Diego – sit among the bottom 10. This is unlikely to inspire voters in the crucial Midwest industrial swing states.

Ironically, the minorities Newsom claims to champion have perhaps been hardest hit by his state’s economic ruin. He likes to cite ‘anti-racism’ and affirmative action as proof of his racial sensitivity, but on his watch, African Americans and Latinos in California perform far worse in terms of income and homeownership than in the rest of the country. Even immigrants, reacting to the lack of good jobs and high housing costs, are heading elsewhere. In the past decade, Los Angeles has actually lost foreign-born residents, who have been flocking to the very places – Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Miami – that Newsom caricatures as racist hellholes. Migration to California is now, on a per capita basis, lower than virtually any state, while the numbers leaving have shot up since 2020.

Yet even with its high concentration of the ultra-rich in Silicon Valley – it boasts the highest percentage of billionaires in the US – California still runs persistent budget deficits. In his presidential run, Newsom will struggle to explain the steep descent he has overseen in the state’s finances. This will be even more difficult considering that the states he criticises, such as Florida and Texas, enjoy large budget surpluses, generate more jobs and, in some cases, have introduced tax cuts. Few examples better sum up Newsom’s economic mismanagement than the ‘bullet train’ farce. Newsom has refused to kill this disastrous high-speed-rail project, which continues to devour billions of taxpayer dollars, despite its chances of being finished before his dotage looking increasingly remote. Meanwhile, far more critical infrastructure needs, such as roads and water supply, have fallen by the wayside.

California, once synonymous with opportunity and the good life, now carries an undeniable stench of decline. In 2022, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen compared the state to the late, decaying Roman Empire. California’s version of bread and circuses consists of cheques being sent to poorer Californians, effectively substituting blue-collar jobs for welfare dependency.

The liberal media may ignore these issues, like they did with Joe Biden’s mental deterioration. But the rest of the country is unlikely to have the wool pulled over its eyes so easily.

Even Californians, however attention-deficient they may be, know something is off. Most, according to a University of California, Berkeley poll, think the state is headed in the wrong direction. Indeed, the low regard in which Newsom is held by his constituents is evidence that the rubber is beginning to hit the road. By two-to-one, Californians see him as more concerned with his presidential aspirations than with delivering decent governance. Perhaps most tellingly, barely one in three state residents now thinks of California as a good place to achieve the American dream. This negativity appears to have spread: a nationwide 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times found that only 15 per cent of respondents thought California was a model other states should copy.

Gavin Newsom will have to sell a long bill of damaged goods on his way to the White House. He may be able to persuade the gullible national media, but the public and his opponents, both within the party and in the presidential election, will no doubt feast on this grist. If the Democrats still reward him with a presidential nomination, after all the damage he’s done to California, then they are even more lost than we could have imagined.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.