David’s view
What is Gavin Newsom doing? It’s been the most interesting question in liberal politics since November, with a different answer every month.
First came his listening tour of Trump-won towns in California, which had multiplied, even with a California-born Democrat on the ballot. Then came the podcast; empathetic conversations with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, and Newsom agreeing that it was “deeply unfair” for trans athletes to compete against women. Skip ahead to this week: Newsom aping Donald Trump’s syntax on social media, and setting up a special election to zap five Republicans out of their House seats.
Did the governor want to understand the MAGA movement, or did he want to lead the resistance to it? The answer is: Yes. The Trump administration is working to make California’s brand of liberalism not just impossible (repealing its electric vehicle mandate) but illegal (suing to roll back its diversity programs). The Democratic Party, which needs to win in much more conservative states to take power nationally, is sometimes embarrassed by California liberalism.
Newsom is not. Last week, at the pre-vote launch of the gerrymandering ballot measure, he noted that he was speaking from Los Angeles, “the most diverse city, in the most diverse country, in the most diverse state, in the world’s most diverse democracy.” Every governor is an evangelist for his or her state. Newsom defends California as it exists — not perfect, just superior — against the idea that it’s a disaster that other states should learn from and avoid.
In the short term, he is doing this to cancel out Texas’ gerrymander, convincing Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents that they need to make their state a bulwark against Republicans. (He’ll win the ballot measure if those voters turn out, because there are not enough California Republicans to stop it.) Newsom has pulled much of the party along with him, crippling the “good government” groups like Common Cause that spent decades arguing that it’s inherently unfair for one party to keep power by drawing its own electoral districts.
After his short self-tutelage in MAGA country, Newsom figured out that the modern GOP’s tactics and rhetoric are effective. Would Democrats prefer it if voters read more political essays and fewer AI-generated memes? Absolutely. They are, increasingly, the party of the college town. Do they prefer Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech to ALL CAPS TWEETS? Do they ever! It doesn’t matter if they lose.
Newsom and his team have grown more confident about this approach as Republicans grew more annoyed with it. Nothing validated their thinking like the vice president, who transformed himself from Trump critic to wingman, telling Fox News that Newsom “ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump’s political success, which is that he’s authentic.”
Republicans don’t see Newsom pulling this off. He has a math problem; they have more states they can gerrymander Democrats out of, and their lower-tax communities are attracting high-tax exiles every day. He has a reality problem; Republicans are winning more “diverse” electorates without any California-style policies. In Texas, the five-seat GOP gerrymander assumes that the party will keep gaining ground with Latino voters, and it’s being cheered on by a party chairman who immigrated to the United States from India.
It’s too simple to look at Newsom and see a 2028 presidential campaign. The party’s primary voters are going to be hyper-focused on electability, which their last California nominee couldn’t give them. The drive to draw five more Democratic seats, overwhelming rural Republicans with votes from blue cities, is a test of Trump-infused, MAGA-hating liberalism.
Notable
For the Associated Press, Meg Kinnard reports on Barack Obama’s endorsement of the Newsom strategy.
In Politico, Adam Wren covers the Newsom social media approach: “Newsom’s MAGA-flavored posts have birthed an organic outburst of user-generated memes — not dissimilar to the dynamic Trump has inspired.”
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