Bret Stephens has an interesting column today pointing out that while Gavin Newsom seems to be leading the pack to become the next Democratic nominee for president, the case for electing him may not be as strong as Dems hope. For instance:
Affordability. That’s supposed to be the Democrats’ magic word against Republicans amid persistently high prices, especially for first-time home buyers. Yet U.S. News & World Report ranked California dead last in 2025 in its affordability rankings. The California Legislature’s own Analyst’s Office noted that “Prices for mid-tier homes are about $755,000 — more than twice as expensive as the typical mid-tier U.S. home.”
And it’s not just homes that are expensive in California. Everything else is expensive too, including energy.
In 2024, the average retail price for electricity in California was 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, more than twice the national average. Regular gas? A gallon in California this week averaged $4.37, higher than in every state other than Hawaii.
One result of the high prices is rampant homelessness. I don’t mean the kind of homelessness where someone spends a month couch-surfing between jobs. I mean the kind that results in tent cities under every overpass and the need for daily street cleaning in some cities to prevent an accumulation of human excrement.
“California alone accounted for 44 percent of all individuals who experienced chronic homelessness in the country,” according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But at least the schools are top notch, right? Well, not really. The state can boast a bunch of top tier universities including the UC system that offers schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley which get tens of thousands of applications every year from across the country. But the K-12 public schools have been struggling despite big increases in spending over the past decade.
The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University has calculated how well school systems are delivering academic results in relationship to how much money they’ve spent since 2013.
California, unfortunately, does not fare well vis-à-vis other states. Edunomics says that while California has elevated per pupil spending by 102% since 2013, reading comprehension has remained flat while math skills have dropped, based on federal academic tests.
California is not alone, since most states have seen academic declines during the period, but its lack of return on investment stands out because its 102% increase in per pupil spending is almost double the national increase of 56% and nearly three times the rate of inflation.
US News ranks the states by a series of metrics including education. Last year California ranked 24th, in the middle of the pack. But where California’s overall ranking really takes a hit is in the metric of “opportunity” where California ranked 50th.
And all of this contributes to the most undeniable metric of all. People are leaving California at a record pace.
Between April 2020 and July 2025, California had a total net loss of almost 1.3 million people who moved to other states — driven out, according to Coastal Moving Services, by housing prices that “often exceed national averages by double, while the state carries the nation’s highest income tax rate at 12.3 percent…
Last year, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation found that another Californian leaves the state every minute and 44 seconds, the fastest rate in the nation.
Newsom has made some effort to avoid being stuck on the wrong side of 80-20 issues like boys competing in girls sports. He’s even opposed some ideas, like the wealth tax proposal, that are modestly popular in the state. Those decisions to buck the progressive base may help him if he ever makes it to a general election, but as Stephens points out, the rest of his record isn’t exactly one other states would hope to emulate.
The fact that people are fleeing California for Texas and Florida suggests that, overall, people have a preference for the type of state they’d rather live in and California isn’t it. So why elect the guy who wants to turn the whole country into California? Hopefully, voters will look the state over carefully and decide that’s not what they want.
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