Gavin Newsom is insulting your intelligence.

Last night wasn’t the first time California Governor Gavin Newsom expressed his concern that the 2024 election may be the last presidential election in the United States for a long time. “I fear that we will not have an election in 2028,” he told outgoing Late Show host Stephen Colbert, to the sound of wildly inappropriate applause from the audience. “I really mean that.”

Newsom has been predicting America’s descent into something like despotism for some time. The governor assured an audience in late August that he is “absolutely convinced” there will be no presidential election three years from now.

If Newsom were, indeed, so convinced, there are a lot of things he would not be doing. He probably wouldn’t be replacing the “seasoned Sacramento operator” serving as his chief of staff with Kamala Harris veterans who have more experience in Washington and working on presidential campaigns.

He might have passed on the two-day speaking tour of South Carolina, which he wrapped up in July. Newsom insisted he was swinging through a critical early primary state only to help Democrats out ahead of the 2026 midterms, but, as the Associated Press noted, “South Carolina has virtually no competitive midterm contests.

He wouldn’t have been telling reporters, as recently as June, that running for president is “a path that I could see unfold,” nor would he be sending “daily queries to his fundraising list” whenever he finds himself in a spat with the president, which is often.

It’s not unreasonable to conclude that Gavin Newsom does not, in fact, believe that the next presidential election will be canceled. But he knows that there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Americans whose heightened state of political anxiety is such that they will not critically evaluate the claims they hear from influential figures who share and validate their apprehension.

Surely, many Democrats — particularly those with some experience following politics — can see the game that Newsom is playing, but they don’t seem to resent the insult to their intelligence. Nor have they shown any inclination to warn their fellow Democrats against falling for the radicalizing deception that Newsom is engaged in. They should. And if they had a little more respect for themselves and their political allies, they might.

This is not just another angle that can set him apart from the rest of the field of invisible primary candidates, of which Newsom is most certainly one — and an aggressive competitor, at that. It’s predatory, manipulative, and dishonorable.

But the strategy does seem to be working for him, and you can’t argue with success.