California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has aggressively recast himself from a genial moderate happy to banter with Charlie Kirk to a full-time Donald Trump antagonist at the helm of a party with zero leadership.
The transformation has its awkward moments. When someone mailed him a Trump 2028 hat, clearly as a joke, Newsom claimed it proved Trump was plotting an unconstitutional third term. “These guys are not screwing around,” he warned.
Politically, the image overhaul is working. Trump increasingly treats Newsom as his chief Democratic foil, inadvertently raising his profile. The Washington Post reports that Trump has mentioned Newsom more than any other potential 2028 Democratic contender since his second term began. “Democrats are so desperate for leadership right now that they’ll take anything they can get. Gavin is filling a void,” Democratic strategist Alex Hoffman said in May.
Democrats, Newsom insists, must “fight fire with fire.” In practice, that’s meant scaling up the media appearances, combative rhetoric, and casting himself as St. George squaring off against Trump’s dragon. But while his national profile grows, California’s problems continue to deepen. And so is this the model the Democrats should be following? The truth is, there are some centrist Democrats who are showing us that there’s a better way to take the fight to Trump.
Newsom has presided over a worsening homelessness crisis, an expansion of unpopular ideological mandates in schools, and a decline in public safety. After voters approved Proposition 36, which reversed a law downgrading shoplifting and low-level drug crimes to misdemeanors, Newsom delayed implementing it and even withheld funding. His leadership style appears at times to be driven by opportunism: combative on cable news, passive when it comes to governing.
The centrist-versus-liberal struggle has long bedeviled the Democratic Party, since the era of the Clinton Democrats in the 1990s. Newsom seems to have planted himself firmly in the latter camp, which works inside his state but may prove less effective on the national stage.
Meanwhile, a quiet shift is underway inside even the state’s Democratic Party, particularly in northern California. New leaders are emerging who eschew national posturing in favor of competent governance. They are charting a centrist course, and are not bogged down by jockeying for attendance in anticipation of 2028.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who unseated left-wing incumbent London Breed, has avoided ideological warfare in favor of fiscal restraint. His PermitSF initiative streamlines the city’s notoriously burdensome permitting process for residents and businesses. “Today, we are getting rid of the nonsense and focusing on common sense,” Lurie said. The city’s politics are shifting accordingly. For the first time in six years, centrist supervisors now outnumber their progressive counterparts — much to the chagrin of the city’s leftist hardliners. Supervisor Shamann Walton, for instance, labeled Lurie an “oligarch” and accused him of relegating “communities of color” to “second-class” status after the mayor proposed expanding a homeless shelter.
In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan (D) is taking a similar path. A former tech and philanthropy executive, Mahan backed the anti-crime Proposition 36 and has openly criticized Newsom for downplaying the state’s economic troubles. “The truth is that California has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 5.5 percent, and nearly half the nation’s unsheltered homeless people. We have the highest energy and housing costs in the continental United States, and, largely because of these high costs, the highest effective poverty rate in the nation,” he wrote in a recent op-ed.
This centrist model may offer a more viable path for Democrats. While support among progressives remains robust, moderates and independents are increasingly skeptical. The latest PPIC survey shows only about a third of California’s independents approve of his job performance. And nationally, many Democrats remain skeptical that a theatrical California liberal will be their best candidate in 2028.
Compare that with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican who recently told “60 Minutes”: “We’re completely about results, not about rhetoric. Potholes aren’t partisan, and governors have to deliver actual results.” He added, “I don’t work for a partisan party. I work for every single person in my state.”
For Democrats looking toward 2028, that is the contrast worth watching. The Golden State finds itself at an inflection point of political change, with signs of growing pushback against the excesses of hardline progressivism and a tentative shift toward more centrist thinking. The challenge for Democrats is they are perceived to be weak and ineffective.
Like him or not, there’s no denying Trump acts with a sense of urgency, part of which surely comes from the fact that he knows he has a very short window before potentially losing congressional support in 2026. Talking alone is not sufficient. Being a foil is not good enough. Newsom should feel the pressure to effectively realize centrist democratic policies, and be capable of delivering the competent leadership his party now needs.
William Liang is a writer living in San Francisco.