Burdened with a decomposing President and a clearly overmatched Vice President, the Democrats are on the hunt for a saviour. For many in the party, Gavin Newsom, the 54-year-old perfectly coiffed Governor of California, seems like the perfect solution. No doubt, given his recent trolling of Florida’s Republican frontrunner Ron DeSantis, he feels the same.
But Newsom’s ascendency faces some severe challenges. First, to get nominated, he must not only depose Biden, but also see off Vice President Kamala Harris. And she has three things Newsom lacks: she’s a woman, she’s black, and she has Asian Indian ancestry. Newsom, on the other hand, is white, was born into a well-connected San Francisco family, and is married to a film-maker and scion of a very wealthy Bay Area family.
Perhaps more importantly, things have not been particularly good for the minority Californians he was voted in to look after. In the Golden State, African-Americans and Hispanics do far worse economically than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Black residents, on a cost-of-living basis, make about as much as they do in Mississippi, and far less than in states such as Texas, Florida, or Arizona.
Class may prove an even more glaring weakness. Newsom sees his state as a model, claiming California is “the envy of the world” and the great bastion of social justice. “Unlike the Washington plutocracy,” he boasts, “California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few on one side of the velvet rope.” Yet he is the favourite son of what The Los Angeles Times described as “a coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families”, including the founders of the Gap clothing chain, the Pritzker’s and the Getty Family, who essentially adopted him, financed his business ventures, allegedly paid for his first lavish wedding, and helped launch his political career.
Meanwhile, Newsom’s green and progressive pronouncements contrasted starkly with his passion for the good life. He has long lived in luxury, first in his native Marin, and now in Sacramento. This caused Newsom some embarrassment during the height of Covid when he was caught partying in ways that violated his own pandemic orders at the ultra-expensive, ultra-chic French Laundry in Napa and more recently on a lavish family vacation.
When it comes to actual policymaking, Newsom is not much better. He backs an ineffective education system, controlled by his teacher union allies, that leaves almost three out of five California high schoolers unprepared for either college or a career. Meanwhile, his children attend one of the capital’s regions trendiest private schools. He is, in effect, an embodiment of the increasing feudal nature of modern California, which stands among the least egalitarian states in the nation and suffers the overall highest poverty rate in the country, according to the US Census Bureau. Inequality here now surpasses that of Mexico, and is closer to that of the Central American banana republics of Guatemala and Honduras than it is to developed countries such as Canada and Norway. California also suffers the widest gap between middle and upper-middle-income earners of any state, while driving up housing costs and narrowing opportunities for working-class people in blue-collar industries.
