Gavin Newsom spent years insisting he had no interest in the White House.
Now he’s practically running a shadow campaign while California burns through money it doesn’t have.
And the numbers coming out of Sacramento right now should make every American paying attention genuinely nervous about what this man wants to do next.
The Governor Who Wants a Promotion He Hasn’t Earned
After years of telling reporters he had “sub-zero interest” in being president, Newsom recently told the Wall Street Journal, “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold.” That’s the oldest move in the politician’s playbook — deny it until the moment you can’t anymore.
A UC-Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll found that by a 2-to-1 margin, California voters already believe Newsom is more focused on running for president than fixing the state’s problems. That’s his own voters saying it.
Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio, who served as communications director for Governor Gray Davis, put it more bluntly. “He’s been AWOL,” Maviglio said. “Parading around the country and, sadly, neglecting a lot of California’s challenges.” Maviglio also cited polling showing nearly 60% of Californians believe Newsom isn’t paying enough attention to his job.
But Newsom keeps flying to Texas to rally Democrats, launching podcasts, and positioning himself as the face of the anti-Trump resistance. Meanwhile, back home, the bill is coming due.
Four Years of Deficits. In a Row.
California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office warned that the state faces a nearly $18 billion budget deficit — and that’s the fourth consecutive year of projected shortfalls despite revenue growth. That last part matters. The state’s economy has been growing. The money was coming in. And California still managed to spend more than it had.
Legislative Analyst Gabe Petek laid it out without softening it: “After four years of projected deficits and a cumulative total of $125 billion in budget problems solved so far, the state’s negative fiscal situation is now chronic.” He also warned the structural deficit could balloon to $35 billion annually by fiscal year 2027-28.
How did California get here? In 2022, Newsom declared the state had a $97.5 billion budget surplus and used that as cover to dramatically ramp up spending. The surplus turned out to be a mirage, built on assumptions of a $40 billion annual revenue increase that never materialized. The state’s own Department of Finance later acknowledged revenues over four years would fall short of projections by $165 billion. But much of that phantom money had already been spent.
To paper over the gap, California’s leaders relied on internal borrowing, raids on emergency reserves, and accounting maneuvers — like pushing the June 2026 state payroll into the next fiscal year to make the books look better. That’s not governing. That’s buying lottery tickets and hoping the numbers come up.
$37 Billion on Homelessness. And Counting.
California has the largest homeless population in the United States. More than 187,000 people sleep on the streets and in shelters. The state’s own numbers show that figure grew 3% last year.
State Assemblyman Josh Hoover put a price tag on the failure: “Governor Newsom and the Supermajority have now spent $37 billion taxpayer dollars on homelessness over the past 6 years.”
And what did California get for $37 billion? Tent cities in every major city. Needles on sidewalks. The worst encampments in the country visible from the windows of downtown office buildings.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office reviewed the state’s Encampment Resolution Funding program and found that roughly 70% of the funds remain unspent, and no data has been provided on whether the program is effectively transitioning anyone into permanent housing. The LAO urged lawmakers to pause further spending until the state could show the program was working.
Newsom’s response? His proposed budget for 2025-26 zeroed out the main source of homelessness funding for local governments entirely. After years of spending money with nothing to show for it, he turned around and told cities they were on their own. “I’m not interested anymore, period full stop, in funding failure,” Newsom said. Cities that had built entire programs around that state money were left scrambling.
The Wildfire Numbers Nobody in Sacramento Wants to Talk About
In January 2025, wildfires tore through Los Angeles. More than 13,000 homes were destroyed. Newsom promised a recovery unlike anything California had ever seen. He signed executive orders, held press conferences, and issued statements about historic cleanup speeds.
One year later, just 28 homes had been rebuilt.
Twenty-eight. Out of more than 13,000.
A report from The Daily Economy found that “permitting may be faster in fire zones, but high construction costs, persistent administrative friction, and minimal completed rebuilding suggest that procedural reforms have left deeper economic and regulatory barriers largely intact.” The most immediate barrier? Insurance. Major insurers had been fleeing California for years before the fires, driven out by state regulations that prevented them from pricing risk honestly. By late 2024, companies including State Farm and Allstate had already canceled thousands of policies in high-risk areas — including Pacific Palisades and Altadena — months before the fires hit.
The state’s own environmental regulations, the ones Newsom spent years championing, helped create the conditions for the insurance collapse that is now blocking families from rebuilding their lives. And Newsom’s answer to all of it was more executive orders and another press conference.
This isn’t a new pattern. A joint CapRadio and NPR investigation found that Newsom had overstated the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by 690%. He claimed 90,000 acres treated. The actual number was 11,399.
People Are Leaving. Businesses Are Leaving. The Math Doesn’t Lie.
Last year, California led the entire country in domestic out-migration, with 229,077 more residents leaving than arriving on net. From 2020 to 2024, the state added over 900,000 international migrants but lost 1.46 million net domestic migrants — a net loss of nearly half a million people. Over the last 24 years, more than 4 million net domestic migrants have left California entirely.
In Los Angeles County alone, the population dropped to 9.69 million as of July 2025, meaning the nation’s largest county has now shed over 322,000 residents since 2019-2020. That’s not a blip. That’s a collapse of confidence in how California is being run.
Businesses followed. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle relocated to Texas. Tesla shifted operations. In-N-Out, after 77 years in California, announced it was moving its headquarters to Tennessee. Chief Executive Magazine ranked California dead last in its Best and Worst States for Business rankings — for the 14th year in a row.
And gas? It costs almost 50% more in California than the national average. That’s not an accident. It’s the direct result of Newsom’s energy policies, his renewable mandates, and his regulatory stranglehold on the state’s refining industry.
The French Laundry Governor Wants to Lecture the Rest of America
Remember, this is the same Gavin Newsom who spent the COVID pandemic locking down 40 million Californians — closing churches, shutting restaurants, telling families they couldn’t gather for Thanksgiving — while he personally dined at The French Laundry, one of the most expensive restaurants in the country, with a large indoor party that included lobbyists from the California Medical Association.
When photos obtained by FOX 11 Los Angeles surfaced showing the governor dining indoors without masks, Newsom admitted to Fox News’ Sean Hannity: “It was a dumb mistake. It was a terrible mistake. It wasn’t illegal, it was wrong. And I totally violated the spirit of what I was preaching, and it was wrong, and I own that.”
He owned it. Then he kept the lockdowns going. The same day he discussed his behavior at a press conference, he reversed some of his own reopening plans, placing 94% of Californians under the most restrictive guidelines in the state.
And now this man wants to be president.
What a Newsom Presidency Would Actually Look Like
California under Newsom has been a real-time experiment in progressive governance at scale. The results are in. Budget deficits four years running. Record homelessness. Billions in spending with no measurable outcomes. A wildfire recovery so slow it produced 28 rebuilt homes out of 13,000 destroyed. An exodus of residents and businesses that has left the state losing political power it may never recover.
One political analyst put it this way: “It’s not hard to imagine one of his primary opponents running an ad with 30 seconds of grainy, black-and-white footage of Skid Row in L.A. or the Mission District in S.F., with an ominous voice saying, ‘This is Gavin Newsom’s California.'”
But Newsom keeps traveling. Keeps podcasting. Keeps positioning himself as the man who can save America from Donald Trump. The UC-Berkeley poll found that California voters already see through it. The question is whether the rest of the country will figure it out before he gets the chance to bring California’s record to Washington, DC.
The voters who sent President Trump back to the White House did so because they were tired of exactly this: politicians who talk about results while producing none, who exempt themselves from the rules they impose on everyone else, and who treat their office as a launchpad rather than a responsibility. Newsom is that politician, polished and camera-ready, with a state full of broken promises behind him.
If the Democrats want to nominate him, that’s their call. But the rest of the country deserves to know what California already knows.
Sources: CalMatters; The Hill; Time Magazine; UC-Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies; California Legislative Analyst’s Office; Folsom Times; The Daily Economy; Reason Magazine; Fox News; FOX 11 Los Angeles; OutKick; California Globe; CalBudgetCenter.org; Ballotpedia