Newsom's Biggest Problem---Newsom

In his nakedly shameless bid for the 2028 presidential nomination, California Governor Gavin Newsom will need all the good luck he can muster. Newsom’s biggest political headache cannot be resolved---it is Newsom himself. The Internet has stored 20 years of his out-of-the-mainstream policy positions that will provide his fellow Democratic nomination seekers with a treasure trove of fodder to use against him. And in the unlikely event that Newsom can outperform Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, or Maryland’s Wes Moore, his two decades of failure will be his undoing. Whoever survives what promises to be an expensive, bitter campaign would face an uphill race against Vice President J.D. Vance or Florida Governor Ron de Santis. Newsom’s newly launched podcast “This is Gavin” which features conservative guests that he often purports to agree with cannot resolve Newsom’s formidable challenges both within his Democrat party and against Republican opposition.

Beginning in 2004 when, supported by prominent national Democratic Party partisans that included Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson and California’s most powerful politician, Willie Brown, Newsom breezed into the San Francisco mayor’s office. During his 2004 election campaign and his 2008 re-election bid, Newsom promised to fix California’s homeless, affordable housing, and public education problems. Two decades after Newsom made his 2004 promise, from 2007 to 2023, California's homeless population grew more than any other state's. While the national homeless population decreased by 18% between 2010 and 2020, California's increased by 31%. The troubling trend continued from 2020 to 2022, when California's homeless population grew by 6% while the rest of the country saw an increase of less than 0.5%.

California spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years. With $17.5 billion, California could have, theoretically, paid the rent for every homeless person in California for those four years, even at the state’s high home costs. But, despite the massive outlay to end or at least abate homelessness, the state’s street population grew. Federal data show that half of all Americans who live outside, reside in California. More than 175,000 homeless people now live in California, a total which remarkably could represent an undercount that misses residents sleeping in their cars or who are huddled away out of view.

With just 22 months remaining in his governorship, Newsom knows that two interrelated promises he made to voters seven years ago — to erase or at least lessen the state’s chronic housing shortage and its extremely high homelessness rate— will not happen before he leaves Sacramento. His pledges were foolish campaign posturing. State government has little ability to build housing or upgrade homelessness’ economic plight.

The third of Newsom’s campaign vows, to improve the results of California’s public-school students, could be his biggest failure. From a parent’s perspective, public education is a catastrophe. California’s Department of Education has done some fancy footwork to put a positive spin on how students are evaluated. A student’s scores on the Smarter Balanced tests in English language arts, math and on the California Science Test fall within one of four achievement levels that provide context on how the student performed. Level 4, the highest attainable score, is now labeled “Standard Exceeded.” Level 3, Standard Met; Level 2, Standard Nearly Met, and Level 1, Standard Not Met. The target is to score at least Level 3, which indicates a student is working at grade level. In the 2023-24 results, fewer than half of students achieved Levels 3 or 4; 53% scored at levels 1 or 2 in English language arts, and 64.5% scored at Levels 1 or 2 in math. The tests are given to students in grades three through eight and grade 11. Rob Manwaring, a senior adviser to the advocacy group Children Now, said that the new labels would feed the “reality gap in the perceptions of parents that their kids are doing better than they are” in school. Regardless of the terminology used, California ranks next-to-last, 49th, among the states in college preparedness as measured by high school seniors scores on the ACT and SAT tests.

Newsom’s record on his biggest campaign promises is zero for three---a strike out not only in baseball but also in politics. This thumbnail summary is exclusive of California’s high living cost where a $200,000 annual income is, in some areas, classified as middle class, rampant “smash-and-grab” robberies, his mangled handling of Los Angeles’ deadly wildfires, sanctuary state status that now provides budget-busting Medi-Cal for all illegal aliens, a benefit that the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates will cost taxpayers $6.5 billion annually and “will only go up,” said Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones. If Newsom can fashion a winning presidential campaign out of his dismal string of broken promises, then he is either truly a political magician or voters are blind to reality.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org