Gavin Newsom is very similar to Kamala Harris

Two San Francisco local elected officials who successfully ran statewide in CA

Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom pictured in their San Francisco days. (Photo via the Financial Times)

In 2004, Gavin Newsom was inaugurated as mayor of San Francisco. He won re-election in 2007 and served until 2011, when he became lieutenant governor of California.

In 2004, Kamala Harris was inaugurated as district attorney of San Francisco. She won re-election in 2007 and served until 2011, when she became attorney general of California.

Newsom was re-elected as L.G. in 2014, the same year Harris was re-elected as A.G. Then in 2017, Harris became a United States senator from California, while it took Newsom another two years to become governor of California. In 2021, Harris became vice president of the United States. Newsom was re-elected governor in 2022, and Harris became the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2024 after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Harris lost, and shortly thereafter Newsom emerged as the Democratic front-runner for 2028.

In some respects, it makes a lot of sense that someone who is extremely similar to the 2024 nominee would be the front-runner for 2028. Oftentimes, political parties don’t want to change. Things are the way they are because people have strongly held convictions and they don’t want to abandon them.

And certainly I don’t want to stand around in February 2026 doing takes like GAVIN NEWSOM IS UNELECTABLE AND DEMOCRATS ARE DOOMED IF THEY NOMINATE HIM. Harris lost in 2024, but she was facing headwinds, notably on inflation, immigration, and Gaza. If you run an extremely Harris-like candidate in 2028 but he faces tailwinds in the form of public discontent about the economy, he could definitely win where she lost.

What disturbs me about Newsom’s front-runner status, though, is that I get the sense that most Democrats do not see this as a case of identifying the single most similar politician to Kamala Harris in the entire country and trying to run it back.

Their view is that because Harris is a Black woman, Newsom — who kinda looks like someone who might get cast as president of the United States on a television show — is a huge swing in the opposite direction. That things like accumulating a track record of unpopular stances on cultural issues based on attempting to climb the greasy pole of California politics don’t matter, and that what really matters is that Newsom is funny on Twitter.

And I would really like everyone to consider the possibility that this is mistaken, and that two politicians who followed nearly parallel career tracks while taking similar positions on issues for similar reasons are, in the ways that matter most, quite similar.

Politics is a strange tournament

To get to the Super Bowl, you need to win several playoff games against the N.F.L. teams with the best records. To get to the playoffs, you need to win a lot of regular season games. To become an N.F.L. player, you need to beat opposing football teams in college.

This is a pretty normal tournament-type structure, one that we see pretty frequently in a variety of contexts. Because the playoffs are single elimination, there’s no guarantee that the Super Bowl will feature literally the two best teams. But in a broad sense, the Super Bowl is a football game, and you make it to the Super Bowl by demonstrating skill at winning football games.

You could imagine a world where politics is like that, where a Democratic Party presidential nominee is normally someone with a lot of demonstrated skill at beating Republicans in elections, and a Republican Party presidential nominee is normally someone with a lot of demonstrated skill at beating Democrats in elections.

For that to be the case, though, you would need to live in a world where the typical election was highly competitive. And that’s actually not the world we live in. The vast majority of House members and state legislators hold seats that aren’t remotely competitive in a D vs. R sense. Senate races and governor’s mansions aren’t as skewed, but there are still tons and tons of safe seats out there. As a result, a politician can achieve an extremely prominent role in American politics — like governor of the largest state in the country — without ever winning a hard race against a Republican.

Which is not to say that it’s easy to obtain statewide office in California. It’s actually incredibly difficult.

California is a huge state, and, precisely because the general election is so uncompetitive, Democrats in a crowded field are elbowing each other for the prime jobs.

San Francisco is the core city of a large metro area, so it doesn’t sound odd that the San Francisco district attorney would become California attorney general.

But in population terms, the City and County of San Francisco is smaller than Ventura, Kern, Fresno, Contra Costa, Sacramento, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, San Diego, and Los Angeles counties.

And it’s actually pretty unusual for the D.A. of a state’s 13th-largest county to be elected attorney general. Pulling that off demonstrated real political skills on Harris’s part. By the same token, it was hard for Newsom to go from an appointed slot on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to mayor of the city to lieutenant governor. San Francisco, again, is only the fourth-largest city in the state. And even once Newsom was lieutenant governor, to become governor is hardly a no-brainer. The current L.G., Eleni Kounalakis, seemed like a front-runner to be Newsom’s successor at one point, but she ended up dropping out months ago.

My point, though, is that going from holding statewide office in California to running in a national election is not like the A.F.C. champion going to the Super Bowl.

It is hard to win these jobs, and getting them involves a real display of political skill. But that skill is not beating Republicans in elections. It’s catering to Democratic Party insiders and affiliated advocacy groups and generating media buzz and endorsements. And this environment is a bad training ground for developing politicians who are good at beating the opposition party. It’s as if you took the winning team from the Champions League and then sent those players to the N.B.A. Finals on the theory that they’re top-notch athletes. You’re selecting on the wrong thing. And it shows.

Newsom has a weak electoral track record

Gavin Newsom got 62 percent of the vote in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

That’s a large share of the vote. But 2018 was a very strong year for Democrats, and California is a very progressive state. Tom Wolf got 58 percent that year in Pennsylvania, which is way better than Democratic Party presidential candidates did there in 2016 or 2020. By contrast, Hillary Clinton got 62 percent in California in 2016 and Joe Biden got 63 percent in 2020. The 2018 cycle was better for Democrats nationally than either 2016 or 2020, but Newsom couldn’t improve on the performance of the party’s presidential candidates in either of those years. In 2021, Newsom beat a recall campaign with 62 percent of the vote, and in 2022 he won re-election with 59 percent.

None of these results are terrible. But they speak to a total lack of crossover appeal.

If you think I’m wrong about the importance of policy and actually “vibes” are extremely important in politics, then the message of these election results is that Newsom’s vibes are not very appealing. If that feels intuitively wrong to you, and while watching Newsom perform on television and social media you know in your heart that his vibes are amazing, you should consider the possibility that this is the problem.

The way you become mayor of San Francisco and then rise to statewide office in California is by calibrating your appeal to hardcore partisan Democrats, so of course you feel that his vibes are impeccable. A politician whose vibes are attuned to maximizing crossover appeal and winning swing votes probably will not vibe that hard with you, unless you personally are a swing voter.

I would also say that these electoral results speak to the basic problem facing any statewide elected official in a deeply lopsided state. If you’re Roy Cooper in red North Carolina or Laura Kelly in redder Kansas, people in your own coalition are not in a position to ask you to do anything particularly zany. Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are dealing with divided government. It is literally not possible for any of those governors to sign an unpopular left-wing bill because no such bill would pass their legislatures and so it’s moot.

Because he has same-party supermajorities, Newsom has actually done quite a bit more than any of those other governors I named to restrain the worst instincts of the left, sometimes vetoing bills and sometimes working with moderate Democrats to keep the left bottled up in the legislature.

But the fundamentals of the situation are such that he faces a lot more asks from the left than those other governors do. And he can’t really plead political pragmatism as a reason not to do things, precisely because the state is so lopsided. If a California governor put in a really strong electoral performance and got re-elected with 72 percent of the vote, progressives would feel that he was too focused on maintaining popularity when he should be more focused on delivering policy wins.

But this is how you end up with politicians who say they want a national ban on fracking or wax enthusiastically about spending public funds on gender transition surgeries for convicts.

Newsom took what is, by California standards, a very moderate position and froze new Medicaid enrollments for adult illegal immigrants to save money. In most of the country, though, voters are going to think that’s crazy. You get a version of this on the right, too. Trump reacted to the post-Dobbs political environment by moderating on abortion. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis reacted to the post-Dobbs political environment by signing draconian abortion bans. They’d done so well in securing big legislative majorities that there was nothing stopping them from maxing out on right-wing policies.

Identity just doesn’t matter that much

I think Democrats have a bad tendency to over-index on candidate demographics as the key dimension of electability.

After Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, a lot of Democrats felt that she was done-in by the misogyny of the American people. It therefore came to be understood, in rank-and-file circles, that going for an “electable” option in 2020 meant a white man.

It was clear that Amy Klobuchar had the strongest electoral track record of anyone in that field. I’m not saying that Klobuchar should definitely have been the nominee, but a person highly interested in electability should have been very interested in Amy Klobuchar, and there just wasn’t much interest in her.

Then when Harris became the nominee in 2024, she was down in the polls. Her campaign consistently maintained that they saw themselves as underdogs running an underdog race. But when it came to selecting a vice president, the thinking seemed to be that Walz was a good choice because, while he didn’t represent a swing state or any kind of change of pace on policy, he was a white man (and neither gay nor Jewish) and that’s what Harris needed to balance the ticket.

Obviously the sample of presidential elections is tiny. But there is just no evidence from the broader set of races that should lead us to believe that voters have a strong preference for white male Democrats over other kinds of Democrats.

In Split Ticket’s list of races where candidate quality made the difference, the top performer is a white woman, followed by two Hispanic men, followed by a white woman, followed by Jared Golden. Most African-American Democrats represent very safe majority-minority seats where they don’t face strong incentives to be electoral overperformers. But when you get an exceptional case like Don Davis in NC-1, you see a strong politician.

I think it would be naive to say that personal identity is irrelevant in politics. If you sent Henry Cuellar to northern Maine and had Golden run in the Rio Grande Valley, that wouldn’t go well for either of them. But it’s also not a coincidence that the two Democrats holding down the reddest seats have the most conservative voting records.

What you say about the issues and what positions you take is fundamentally a big deal. It mattered that Trump moderated the G.O.P. positions on Social Security and Medicare in the 2016 cycle and on abortion in the 2024 cycle. It matters that he is now overreaching on aspects of immigration policy. But it also matters that Democrats have a bad brand on immigration and that a lot of politicians from the bluest states have taken stances on access to social assistance and deportations of people who’ve been arrested that are still out of step with public opinion.

If you want to like Gavin Newsom, then by all means like Gavin Newsom. But it’s important to understand that his entire career has been about trying to make Democratic Party partisans like him.

It’s true that he’s also not a wild-eyed leftist and that to people obsessed with intra-party factionalism, he is part of “the establishment” rather than the progressive wing.

But that again underscores the point. He’s very, very similar to Kamala Harris, who had an essentially identical career trajectory and political profile as someone who took a lot of very progressive positions on specific issues while retaining a strong establishment insider brand.

If that’s what you want, then that’s what you want. But polling I’ve seen shows that Democratic Party primary voters strongly prefer an electable candidate over ideological orthodoxy — and they also think Newsom is a strong electability choice. This just does not make sense. I also enjoy his tweets. But if you want to nominate someone who is good at beating Republicans in elections, then you should nominate someone who has demonstrated skill at beating Republicans in elections rather than once again going with someone whose primary achievements are in intra-party elite bargaining.