Every state has problems, but California has some real doozies. It suffers the highest unemployment rate of any state. In January, the world watched in horror as Los Angeles city and county were devastated by wildfires; Los Angeles County suffered 12,048 damaged or destroyed buildings and, as of this writing, the county has issued just 226 building permits. It’s been nearly eight months since the last of the wildfires was extinguished.

California has one of the three highest costs of living of any state. Housing costs in California are more than twice as high as the national median, and rents are about 50 percent higher. About one-third of Californians live at or near the poverty level. In the past decade, homelessness has increased 60 percent.

As CalMatters describes it, “a perfect storm of economic, fiscal and political trends is battering California’s already deficit-ridden state budget, leading public employee unions and other interest groups dependent on money from Sacramento to explore hefty tax increases.” This is a very bad sign, as the Tax Foundation ranked California 48th out of 50 states in its state tax competitiveness index for this year, and warned, “A tax code that is uncompetitive and threatens to get worse is increasingly driving jobs to other states.” As Kamden Mulder reported earlier today, Bed Bath & Beyond announced that it will no longer open or operate stores in California, attributing the decision to overregulation and exorbitant overhead costs in the state.

In 2024, the percentage of students in California who performed at or above a proficient level was just 28 percent. The overall crime rate and the violent crime rate are significantly higher than the national average, year after year. In 2023, 40 percent of violent crimes reported to police in California were solved. (The Oakland Police Department had a violent crime solve rate of 3 percent that year.)

And the governor of this troubled state, who desperately wants to be the next Democratic presidential nominee, has decided his best strategy is to antagonize the president as much as possible.

Jeff contends that California governor Gavin Newsom is not the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. That’s true enough as far as it goes, and we can question whether polling this early tells us anything beyond name recognition.

You can see the outlines of Newsom’s strategy: fight with Donald Trump and troll his supporters as much as possible, and then hope that when Democrats are asked by pollsters who they want to see as the nominee in 2028, they think of the person they’ve heard about fighting the president the most and blurt out his name. Newsom hopes that his omnipresent combativeness, and a big fundraising network, will be enough to win the nomination.

Whether this approach will work in getting Newsom the nomination is debatable; what’s not debatable is that it’s a formula for as much hostility between the Trump administration and the state government of California as possible. (As we all know, Trump loves getting criticized and is eager to help out anyone who he feels has wronged him or disrespected him, right?) At a time when the Golden State needs all the help it can get on almost every front, this strategy represents putting Newsom’s personal ambitions over the best interest of the state he governs.

What’s more, Newsom is dedicating a significant portion of his time, energy, and attention to this pre-positioning and pre-campaign for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. In July he did a two-day tour of South Carolina. More trips to early primary states are likely to follow.

Now, if you want to run for president, go ahead and run for president. The problem is, unless he unexpectedly resigns, Newsom will remain the governor of California until his current term ends on January 4, 2027. So for another year and a half, the executive branch of the state government is going to be led by a guy who’s trying to have the worst relationship with the president possible, and who’s focused, in large part, on his presidential ambitions.

Good luck, California. You’re going to need it.