Newsom staked his political capital on Democratic manipulation

from Jeanne KuangCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

As President Donald Trump prepared to send a phalanx of federal immigration agents to the Bay Area, Gov. Gavin Newsom lamented the lack of outrage over Trump’s actions and stepped up his own warnings of election manipulation.

“He’s going to try to rig this election,” he told reporters last week, referring to Trump’s drive to manipulate Republicans in red states to ensure the party retains its slim majority in Congress next year.

He called the potential deployment of immigration agents — later reversed by Trump — a move by a dictator to suppress the vote. He has repeatedly told the story of Border Patrol agents showing up at his kickoff event and said he expects federal agents and troops to monitor polling stations next week.

As the campaign for Proposition 50, the anti-Trump Democratic gerrymandering effort that California voters decide, reaches its peak, so has the rhetoric of Newsom, its chief promoter.

“God help us if we lose in California,” he said in a Prop fundraising email. 50 this month. “We may have enjoyed our last free and fair election.”

Approaching his final year as governor, Newsom is betting the next phase of his career on a proposal he initially proposed as a bluff to discourage Texas redistricting and which he now sees as central to American democracy.

After several months this year of trying to be nice to Trump, exploring on his podcast why so many voters shifted to the right in 2024 and angering the left in the process, the governor spent the summer and fall regaling many Democrats with a renewed sense of combativeness against the second president.

So far, he has reaped the benefits.

From June to August he redoubled his approval in polls of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates, rising from 12% of polled voters choosing him to 25%. Appearing on a friendly Late Show with Stephen Colbert audience in September, he touted his desire to be a Democrat who fights Trump on his own terms, using social media trolling. He got former President Barack Obama to join him in promoting Prop. 50.

“They’re going to send a very powerful message to the rest of the country that there needs to be a new approach to dealing with Trump and Trumpism,” Newsom said of California voters on Tuesday. “This is about the United States of America, what our founding fathers lived and died for.”

The big bet pays off

Whether the measure passes is not just a test of whether the self-proclaimed mainstay can capture national support in 2028, but whether he has his finger on the pulse today.

“Failure is not an option,” Newsom said last week. “We’re going to win because people understand how precious this moment is.”

It’s a bet that risks his credibility, said Democratic strategist Matt Rodriguez. While adding that he believes the measure will pass, Rodriguez said that Prop. 50 creates political “disadvantages” that “weigh the advantages.”

“His whole message is, ‘It’s the end of the world if it doesn’t go away,'” he said. “If it doesn’t go through, it will be pretty discouraging.”

Newsom remained defiant, arguing that it was more risky for Democrats to stay quiet. Asked last week if he had a contingency plan should the ballot measure fail, Newsom instead raised the stakes wildly high, promising that it would pass and that Democrats would take the House and mark the “de facto end” of Trump’s presidency.

So far, it’s working: His ballot measure, which would allow California to use fake congressional maps favoring Democrats to offset fake Texas Republican House gains, voted ahead with 56% of likely voters this month they said they would vote yes. The campaign has received so many donations that Newsom this week took the extremely rare step of telling supporters to stop sending money, in what appeared to be an early declaration of victory.

Even Democrats who have fought Trump-backed, GOP-led gerrymandering in their own states are on board.

After Newsom placed Proposition 50 on the ballot, Missouri Republicans at Trump’s behest passed their own fictional congressional mapcarving out the seat held by the Kansas City Democratic congressman. The lines cut through the suburban district of state lawmaker Kerry Ingle, who said she nonetheless supports Newsom’s efforts because red-state Democrats “depend on Newsom for representation in Congress right now.”

Missouri Republicans, Ingle said, argued that because they lead the majority party there, they should be allowed to redraw that state’s map to pick up another congressional seat.

“To that I say, ‘OK, have it your way,'” she said. “Go get them, Newsome.”

“Long Way”

If the measure passes, using it to push Democrats — and Newsom himself — further nationally is still a tall order.

There is no guarantee that the adoption of Prop. 50 will ensure that Democrats take back the House. Few other blue states have even considered launching their own redistricting efforts, and none have nearly enough population to produce more than one or two new Democratic congressional seats. This week, Virginia Democrats approved a temporary redistricting proposal similar to California’s, though they couldn’t go to the voters there until next year. Meanwhile, three GOP-led states — Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — have already passed their own mock maps. This week, Indiana Republican Governor Mike Brown called into special legislative session to do the same.

And Rodriguez said there are still few signs that Democrats have a platform to win back middle-class voters who are most concerned about crime and their economic prospects.

A A Reuters poll in September of American adults shows that Democrats are only two percentage points ahead of Republicans on “respect for democracy” and four percentage points behind on “political extremism.” A Reuters poll this month showed that 40% of American voters will vote in the midterm elections based on the cost of living. Protecting democracy is second most important with 28%.

“There’s still a long way to go as to whether this pass will jump him any further than it already has,” Rodriguez said of Newsome. “It’s just not a vote driver for most Americans.”

In red, rural Modoc County, former Democrat Sarah Merrick said she would like to see the party develop a clearer national platform “instead of just being anti-Trump” that includes curbing health care spending, campaign finance reform and a commitment to win back moderates. She and her husband left the party in recent years, feeling it was “so left-wing” and unnecessarily alienating cultural conservatives.

Prop. 50 and Newsom’s espousal of democratic principles has inspired her more than politics for the first time in years, said Merrick, who leads a local activist group, Indivisible. But she’s not sure if she would support Newsom for president, saying she wants to know more about the state’s decision to provide health care to poor undocumented immigrants and why it hasn’t reduced housing prices.

“I really like his spine at the moment, I think it’s great,” she said. “I think the emphasis on Prop. 50 and anti-dictatorship and all that is OK for now, until Nov. 4. After Nov. 4, I think a big shift in messaging needs to happen.”

The economic plan will be important to voters and party faithful alike.

Lorena Gonzalez, leader of the California Federation of Labor, led union workers across California in aggressive campaign against Trump to help pass Proposition 50. But she said the governor’s future political prospects will depend in part on how he deals with American workers’ anxiety about artificial intelligence and job losses, which Gonzalez predicts will be a major election issue in 2026 and beyond.

“It catapulted him,” she said of Prop. 50 and Newsom. “I don’t think it lasts beyond that time.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.