It seems pretty clear to me that Gavin Newsom has the upper hand in the Democratic primary race for 2028. His closest competitor in polls has been Kamala Harris and, as I spelled out yesterday, I don’t think anyone on the left really wants her to run again.
He’s spent more than a year positioning himself for this and it seems to have worked. On the one hand, he’s the only Democrat talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage on his podcast, making him appear thoughtful and occasionally even willing to buck the woke orthodoxy. He’s also the person who is winning applause for his aggressive social media strategy attacking President Trump. So he can claim to be the most reasonable and the leader of the resistance at the same time.
Newsom still has a lot of problems as a national candidate, but give the devil his due. He set out many months ago to make himself look electable. He took some risks and he seems to have made it happen.
And yet, I don’t think he really has it all together as much as he thinks he does. He reminds me of Zohran Mamdani who won an election promising things he literally cannot deliver, both in terms of taxes and spending. Newsom similarly, knows how to pitch himself but hasn’t actually understood, much less solved the big problems.
Community
I’m just going to focus on three points: community, confusion and building things. Start with his discussion of Charlie Kirk and faith. Newsom had Kirk on as his first podcast guest and agreed that Kirk was tapping in to the growing nihilism among young men who feel like they can’t get ahead. [Ezra Klein’s words are in bold]
And this nihilism, Kirk understood. Certainly Trump understood it, as well. He took advantage of it. But they have no prescriptions to address it and deal with it.
Of course, I only had an hour-and-a-half conversation with Charlie, but where it seems to me to have fallen short with Turning Point USA and the MAGA movement is they don’t have a prescription to actually address the real and substantive issues — but they sure as hell identify the problem.
Well, isn’t that a prescription? If I were to try to boil it down: tariffs, a closed border and Christianity?
Christianity is a big part. That was also telling.
I lazily said, “Jesus!” and he got offended. And then I said it again, and I realized: Boy, I really am offending him now. Forgive me.
I didn’t understand how deeply held his faith was and how much of an organizing principle it was for him, as well.
Oh, yes.
And how these rallies and everything — that’s interesting. Just that merger in terms of creating community, a sense of belonging, meaning, identity — it’s hard to break.
I mean, he was trying to build a new Christian right.
Yes, and Trump understands that. It gives people meaning and purpose. It’s powerful. I haven’t been to a Bernie rally necessarily, but it seems not dissimilar. Even more, there’s a religious construct to it. That’s powerful. Faith, community, belonging — we’re desperate for that. And those are universal. Those are not right and left.
They’re both right about Kirk and about faith and community more generally. In fact, I’d even say he’s right about the far left and how it has become a substitute faith/community for people who follow Bernie Sanders and AOC.
But what does he have to offer? Not much on a personal level and nothing on a programmatic level. He’s a San Francisco liberal who believes in social justice. That’s it. He’s not even part of a left-wing church like Obama was. So he sort of gets that community and faith are important but he’s not really part of that at all.
Confusion
He describes in detail how he was the person making the case for the Biden economy, but says he didn’t fully understand how bad things were (again for young men in particular) when it came to affordability. And that leads him into this really nonsensical analysis of Trump, DOGE and Biden’s big spending bills.
Trump’s success is destroying, not building. That’s easy. And you can destroy in nanoseconds. The symbolism and the substance of the East Wing — that’s destruction. DOGE — destruction. And that kind of destruction somehow satiates people in this respect. They feel like: Oh, there’s something actually happening. There’s real action here.
But to be a builder, that’s where greatness is. That’s where greatness lies.
That’s what I believe was the master class of the Biden administration. It was able to create a framework to build again at scale — a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the I.R.A. — so we can compete against our most fierce competitor, China. In low-carbon, green growth, Biden delivered $369 billion.
Every word he just said is wrong. He’s deeply confused and doesn’t even seem to know it. Let’s start with the East Wing, probably the dumbest lefty non-scandal of the last several months. The plan to take down the East Wing was telegraphed months in advance but people on the left lied about a couple of specific statements (one by Trump and one by Karoline Leavitt) to push the idea that they had promised never to tear down anything. This was a lie. They had always planned to tear down the East Wing to make room for a new ballroom. They showed photos of the new ballroom in place of the old East Wing.
There are many, many things you can say that are critical and yet fair about President Trump. That he doesn’t know how construction projects work is not one of them. When you build something, you are almost always tearing something else down. That’s the process for a house or a high-rise or a hospital. So, yes, there is an initial moment of destruction when you are clearing a path, but the whole point of that is to build something better in its place. And in this case, that’s been the plan all along. The story of the East Wing isn’t destruction, it’s rebuilding and growth.
Dare I say it? If Gavin Newsom’s dreams come true, he may be president in 2029 and he’ll literally be the person making use of the fabulous new ballroom which President Trump built. He will not tear it down as some loons have demanded. He will use it as intended (again, if his dreams come true). Has this even occurred to him? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. He seems to be running entirely on dumb talking points about the East Wing.
Moving on to his comments about Joe Biden’s big spending bills. Does he not know that Biden’s spending bills, including the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act, contributed to the spike in inflation? Opinions differ on the degree to which government spending contributed to inflation. Maybe it was 40% (with the rest being caused by a shortage of goods created by the pandemic) and some say it was less. But it almost certainly contributed to the problem.
Newsom is on both sides of this at once. He’s simultaneously saying that affordability caused by inflation is killing us and that the spending that helped create that inflation was a master class in policy. Again, it feels like his brain is a database of talking points which can’t make sense of how things really work. Let me simplify it: If inflation is bad, giant spending bills that spur inflation are bad.
Building Things
The solution to that affordability crisis, he agrees, is building more, especially more homes. He has a plan to do that in California. How is that plan going? To his credit, Ezra Klein tells him pretty directly that it’s not going well in California.
The big political issue of the day is affordability. California — U.S. News and World Report on Wallet Hub looked at all these different rankings — ranks 50th on affordability. These measures combine housing costs and other measures of the cost of living.
Why and what is the affordability agenda that is credible coming from the governor of California?
It’s interesting. Wallet Hub also talks about the happiest city index. Five of the Top 10 —
Listen, man, I’ve got redwoods tattooed on my arm. I grieve every day I’m not in California. You don’t need to tell me it’s the happiest place to live.
And in terms of taxes, which is interesting — Wallet Hub comes out with their annual survey on taxes saying we’re slightly above average on taxes. Total mythology there — it’s the highest tax rate in the country, but not the highest taxes across the board when you add in everything.
That said, the affordability issue in California is real. It’s been the original sin going back decades and decades. Housing — period, full stop. More things and more ways on more days. Explains everything. It’s the original sin in California. NIMBYism — we haven’t gotten out of our own way. We haven’t produced enough housing stock. It’s Economics 101: supply and demand. It’s not very complicated.
It’s simple he says. So how is California doing on solving the simple problem?
We completed 110,000 housing units last year. It’s completely, completely underwhelming. And so we have more work to do.
Why is it so hard? Because you’ve wanted to do this. You set a 3.5 million housing production goal.
That was the aspirational goal. And then the legal goal, 2.5 million by 2030, became what we call the arena goals —
Great. Let’s use 2.5 million —
And that is the established legal — and by the way, it’s the first time we had goal setting that was this prescriptive.
But you’re not on track for either goal?
Well, no one is.
Yes, no one is.
Except it’s not true that no one is. In fact, some places have built so many homes that prices have crashed. Again, Klein deserves credit for not letting Newsom dodge this.
I spend, because I’m a nerd, a fair amount of time looking at statistics on housing starts in Austin and Houston —
Well, Austin is now having a big downturn in terms of costs because of some of the overbuilding. But it’s interesting.
Listen, I think of California having a big downturn in rents because of overbuilding —
You want to see that happen? [Chuckles.]
I think that would be a welcome change of problem.
No, I get it. But no, we have to build more houses.
There have been articles all year about how home values in Austin have dropped. Here’s one from July.
Austin home prices are continuing to decline at a rate of nearly 5 percent as the real estate market reacts to rapid supply increases and weakening demand.
Austin median home prices dropped by 4.9 percent from 2024, according to Realtor.com’s July housing report. Nationally, median list prices climbed by 0.5 percent…
While Austin home sale prices surged between February 2022 and May 2022 by more than 60 percent, according to Redfin, the pandemic boomtown has been on a downward trajectory since its peak of $659,500.
I live here in California so I can tell you that surging home prices are great for people like me who already own homes. But that same surge is terrible for my kids who can’t possibly afford a house here in Orange County. Even a married couple where both spouses make six-figure salaries is going to struggle to buy a small home that costs well over a million dollars. Part of that is interests rates but most of it is just the crazy home values. When you compare what a home costs here in California to a home in Texas it’s night and day.
So, there you have it. Gavin Newsom is probably going to be the Democratic nominee and he’s certainly positioned himself well for that. But there’s a lot of road between identifying the problems and solving them. I’ll give him some credit on the identifying part, but when it comes to solving these problems I still see a lot of confusion, deflection and empty talk.
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