Gavin Newsom wants Democrats to believe he’s the grown-up who can win back the voters his party chased off.
His fans swear he keeps the far-left crowd at arm’s length.
And Newsom just told a young stranger what he really expects in 2028.
The Governor Never Checked Who Was Holding the Camera
California Governor Gavin Newsom hit the trail in New Hampshire in mid-October to stump for Democrat congressional candidate Stefany Shaheen, and somewhere along the way a young woman stepped up with a question.
She didn’t work for any campaign. She was an undercover journalist, and Townhall later got its hands on her video.
She told Newsom that young voters didn’t want another round of Kamala Harris. “We want, you know, more, I guess, democratic socialist policies,” she said. “Where do you see the Democratic Party going?”
Newsom didn’t flinch. He didn’t hedge, and he didn’t reach for the careful cable-news mush he usually serves up.
“No one is arguing to manage the status quo and fail more efficiently,” Newsom said.
Then he went all the way. “So the DSA, the energy and the desire and demand for bold change, not incremental change, is very much going to be dominant. I mean, that’s going to be a mainstream democratic movement. Absolutely. No question about that.”
Dominant. Mainstream. No question about it.
But he still wasn’t done. Newsom told her “the system’s broken. It’s completely unbalanced, and we can’t manage the decline. We have to completely reimagine.”
Reimagine. Democrats sure do love that word. It tends to show up right before somebody’s doctor, gas stove, or paycheck goes missing.
Watch How Fast the Moderate Costume Came Off
Think back to March 2025. Newsom launched his podcast with the late Charlie Kirk as his very first guest, and Kirk pressed him on boys competing in girls’ sports.
“I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair,” Newsom told Kirk. He added, “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”
Commentators fell over themselves. Here at last was the Democrat who understood the rest of the country.
And then came 2026.
In July, a Politico reporter asked whether Democrats should put some distance between themselves and the Democratic Socialists of America. “No, I’m for a big-tent party,” Newsom answered. He said he was “not alarmed” by the group’s rise and called it “where a lot of the energy in the party is.”
By September, he sat across from PBS NewsHour and described his party as “pretty aligned” with DSA thinking. When the interviewer suggested some daylight existed between Democrat leaders and DSA candidates, Newsom shot back, “But, not the ideas.” He waved off democratic socialism as “just a label” and said “we call them progressives.”
Then came the hidden camera, and the word “dominant.”
Not alarmed. Then aligned. Then dominant. Every rung on that ladder sits a little higher than the last, and Newsom climbed the tallest one when he figured nobody important was recording.
That Kirk podcast looks awfully different in hindsight. Newsom agreed with a conservative on one issue in front of a microphone built for a national audience. Then, talking to what he took for a young socialist fan, he handed the whole future of his party to the DSA.
Steve Hilton, the Republican running for governor in California, saw this coming back in July. “Newsom is a follower, not a leader. He doesn’t believe in anything other than his own political ambition,” Hilton said.
Maybe Newsom was just being polite to a voter. Politicians nod along all the time. But polite people say “thanks for coming out.” They don’t declare a Marxist movement the coming mainstream and tack on “Absolutely.”
Here’s What a Dominant DSA Actually Wants
Newsom never spelled out what he meant by bold change. The DSA did it for him.
Activists at the recent Socialism Conference passed out flyers reading “DSA for AOC for President of the United States.” The petition site behind the flyer lists the group’s 2028 goals: “an Arms Embargo, push for Medicare For All and a Green New Deal, and start a Third Reconstruction.”
Granted, the petition holds just 1,673 signatures. Nobody’s primary hinges on a number that small.
But the people organizing it don’t need numbers. They need a governor of the biggest state in the country calling them mainstream, and they just got one.
DSA national co-chair Megan Romer told Fox News over the summer that she backs abolishing the Senate, ICE, prisons, and borders. The group’s own platform calls for public ownership of major industries and an end to capitalism itself. Strip away the friendly branding and that’s old-fashioned Marxism with a fresh logo.
Medicare for All alone would blow a hole in every family budget in America. Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center estimated in 2018 that the Sanders version would add roughly $32.6 trillion in federal spending over its first ten years. Washington doesn’t create that money. It takes it from workers and small businesses, or it borrows it from their grandkids.
And the people living under government-run health care can tell anyone what comes next. The Fraser Institute’s 2024 report put the median wait in Canada from a family doctor’s referral to actual treatment at 30 weeks. Picture a retired machinist with a bad hip waiting more than half a year for a surgeon.
The Green New Deal piles on top of that. California already makes its drivers pay some of the highest gas prices in the nation. Newsom apparently thinks the rest of the country needs a bigger dose.
History has run this experiment plenty of times. Venezuela turned an oil-rich nation into a land of empty grocery shelves and mass emigration. Socialism never fails for lack of energy. It fails because it runs out of other people’s money and then starts running out of other people’s freedom.
Newsom Needs a Lane, and the Socialists Hold the Keys
A recent New York Times/Siena poll shows exactly why Newsom might be cozying up to the far left. Harris leads the 2028 Democrat field with 12 percent. Newsom trails at 9, Pete Buttigieg sits at 7, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom the DSA has endorsed before, pulls 6. A full 45 percent of Democrats still haven’t picked anybody.
That’s a wide-open field. And the loudest, most organized faction inside it already has its candidate picked, and her name isn’t Gavin.
So Newsom has a choice. He can stand up to the DSA and risk the activist base. Or he can tell them what they want to hear and hope they eat him last.
The hidden camera answered that question. When a self-styled reasonable Democrat calls a socialist movement “dominant” and “mainstream,” he isn’t holding the line against it. He’s applying for a job.
Moderate voters who swooned over that 2025 podcast should pay close attention. The fairness talk came out in front of a big audience. The DSA talk came out when Newsom thought the audience was a single sympathetic kid with a phone.
Ninety-two years ago, California Democrats handed their nomination for governor to a former Socialist Party candidate named Upton Sinclair, who promised to End Poverty in California. That November, California voters sent him home by more than ten points.
Sources: Townhall; Politico; PBS NewsHour; Fox News Digital; ABC News; CalMatters; The Daily Signal; Mercatus Center; Fraser Institute; The New York Times/Siena College poll