What is Gavin Newsom doing? - by Nate Silver

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Politics<br>What is Gavin Newsom doing?<br>Losing support in polls, the governor is leaning into his role as the avatar of an unpopular Democratic establishment.

Nate Silver<br>Jun 23, 2026

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Newsom campaigning for the Biden-Harris ticket in Michigan in 2024. Getty Images.<br>Following the successful passage of his redistricting referendum in California last November, California Gov. Gavin Newsom began the year as the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination. But polls suggest that he’s slumping. According to Race to the White House, Newsom’s support among prospective Democratic voters in 2028 has fallen from 25 percent in January to 15 percent today.

That's a fairly big shift, given that not all that much has happened. The California gubernatorial primary was kind of a mess, with Newsom not endorsing a candidate until Xavier Becerra was the lone Democrat left standing. Still, that’s local news and this is a national primary. And redistricting has remained a big story, even if it ended on a slightly bitter note for Democrats.<br>But these early polls do have some predictive power, believe it or not. Prediction markets have tracked with them, with Newsom’s probability of winning the nomination declining from 35.5 percent on Jan. 1 to 23.3 percent today.<br>No one opponent has emerged as the obvious alternative. Bettors see the field as wide open, with the top six candidates having less than a 60 percent combined probability of winning the nomination. But it’s worth noting where the biggest gains have come from: Kamala Harris and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Each presents a challenge for Newsom. Harris, who might or might not be serious about running again, is from the same state, and it’s hard to find much daylight between her and Newsom on policy. And Ossoff, you could argue, mogs Newsom in the “good-looking white guy” category, only with youth on his side and the credential of actually having won elections in a swing state.

If you ask me, though, the reason for Newsom’s decline is simple: this is reversion to the mean. He doesn’t have a particularly persuasive argument for being the nominee, and his early support may reflect name recognition as much as anything else.

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Newsom is as “establishment” as it gets

As the governor of the nation’s largest state1, Newsom is the logical “next-in-line” candidate for the establishment faction of the Democratic Party. He’s perhaps also the best-known Democrat who isn’t Harris or 80+ years old (Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders). But this comes at a time when that establishment is highly unpopular, including with Democratic voters.<br>Last year, Newsom made a few conspicuous moves toward a more “heterodox”, centrist side by inviting people like Charlie Kirk on his podcast and shifting to the right on transgender athletes. And in January, he announced his opposition to California’s proposed wealth tax that might appear on this November’s ballot.<br>These moves, although not necessarily popular with Democratic primary voters, might suggest a candidate trying to break out of the establishment box. But Newsom’s strategy has been a little contradictory. Who was one of his most recent podcast guests? Hunter Biden, the pardoned son of the former president.<br>Indeed, as Axios notes, Newsom has made a show of embracing Biden and his legacy — somewhat ironically given that Newsom essentially ran a shadow campaign against Biden in 2022. The Biden admiration isn’t new, however. Last October, Newsom described Biden as “one of the most successful presidents in the last century.”<br>We’ve written a lot about Biden and his legacy at Silver Bulletin, and I’ve urged Democrats to get over it and move past him. Newsom is conspicuously doing the opposite.<br>Because it’s not as though voters are warming to Biden’s legacy, as they sometimes do for former presidents. In fact, CNN just released a poll of favorability ratings for living presidents. Only 30 percent of voters had a favorable impression of Biden, actually lower than the 38 percent approval rating that Biden left office with. By comparison, Donald Trump had a 34 percent favorability rating in the poll, Bill Clinton was at 38 percent, George W. Bush was at 42, and Barack Obama is the only actually popular former president with a 57 percent positive rating.<br>As you might imagine, voters who do hold a favorable view of Biden are nearly all partisan Democrats. Among self-identified Democrats in the poll, Biden has a 71 percent favorability rating. But it’s just 51 percent among voters who merely lean toward the Democratic Party.2 And it’s just 20 percent among independents — compared to 56 percent for Obama. (It probably hasn’t helped that the Biden family is constantly making news in the wrong way, by re-litigating the Democratic Party’s decision to push Biden aside.)

True, every Democratic candidate is going to face difficult decisions on issues like trans rights or policing where...