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Notes -
Thoroughly tangential to the actual thread here, but I would not be so confident about this one. Newsom is coasting on name recognition. Personally I don’t think he’ll even be the Dem nominee come 2028. I’d put his odds below all of AOC, “miscellaneous swing-state governor” (think Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, maybe even Jared Polis), and probably even “someone no one is currently considering”. He is governor of California at a time when that state is extraordinarily dysfunctional, which makes him easy to attack. He’s not an exceptional speaker and has already been known to put his foot in his mouth in public (not damning but it doesn’t help). He is too moderate for the far-left wing and too combative (and perhaps too Californian) for the moderate wing. I think he’s quite similar to Harris actually: highly successful inside his state’s political machine, but will crumble during a national campaign.
Even if he does get the nomination, I could see him losing to the likes of Vance or Rubio for the same reasons (and being governor of California for the recent past is really not going to play well with a lot of independent voters), even with the albatross of Trump II around their necks. If the Trump admin somehow manages to right the ship over the next few years, or even if they just manage to scrape through the midterms, Newsom (who epitomizes the “vote for us because we’re not Trump” style of Democrat) doesn’t look so promising at all. And if Trump II does continue to go this badly (if they get shredded in November and/or fail to deliver in the subsequent two years) there’s always the chance of an outsider primary campaign within the GOP as well, which would shake up the picture further… 2028 is still quite a ways away.
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