OPINION:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is suddenly discovering borders, budgets and crime. The same man who spent years turning California into a liberal petri dish is now hitting pause on his own agenda, not out of conviction but calculation.
Mr. Newsom isn’t moderating. He is positioning. From Sacramento to South Carolina, every move he makes is designed to rebrand himself from the governor of a declining state to a centrist contender for national office. Voters in California and across the country shouldn’t be fooled.
Mr. Newsom had a record $97.5 billion surplus just three years ago. Now he is trying to explain away the $12 billion deficit announced last week. That’s not leadership. It’s fiscal malpractice. It has also become standard operating procedure for the governor.
Case in point: Mr. Newsom’s decision to pause the expansion of taxpayer-funded health care for undocumented immigrants. This was a program he once called “the right thing morally and ethically.” Now, with a huge deficit of his own making, he wants applause for “budget discipline.” This isn’t fiscal responsibility; it’s a carefully timed campaign maneuver to look moderate while keeping his liberal brand intact.
From crime to curriculum to homelessness, Mr. Newsom is banking on swing-state voters seeing a centrist while his political machine reassures California’s liberals. These pauses aren’t policy corrections; they’re campaign maneuvers. It’s a pattern: Concede the margins, never the message. Let’s call it what it is: a tactical rebrand, not a governing philosophy shift.
Mr. Newsom spent years defending ballot initiatives that downgraded shoplifting and other thefts less than $950 to misdemeanors. When Californians pushed back in 2024 with Proposition 36, a direct correction to his soft-on-crime policies, Mr. Newsom called it an “unfunded mandate.” He warned that it would return California to a “war on drugs” mentality.
Despite his opposition, Prop 36 passed overwhelmingly, with a majority of voters in every county in California saying yes to it. Since then, Mr. Newsom has touted his administration’s increased retail theft prosecutions, bragging about more than 14,000 case referrals as of April. Yet the governor’s May budget revision has yet to fund Prop 36). You can’t be against a proposition and then take a victory lap on progress you refuse to fund.
Lately, Mr. Newsom’s speeches sound like they were written by a Republican school board member. They are full of talk about “curriculum transparency” and “parental engagement.” His record tells another story. Last year, Mr. Newsom signed AB 1955, banning schools from notifying parents if their child changes gender identity at school. That’s not parental engagement; it’s ideological pandering to his party’s radical wing.
From 2019 to 2024, California spent about $24 billion on homelessness programs. Yet it took a Republican assembly member, Josh Hoover, to force a 2024 audit that found California failed to track the results or the spending on these programs after 2021, as well as significant gaps in outcomes. Last week, Mr. Newsom blamed cities for not cleaning up the mess quickly enough.
Mr. Newsom’s new podcast is all fireside chats featuring guests with whom he disagrees. Although he talks about the unfairness of men playing in women’s sports, he has done nothing to protect girls in California, not even backing Republican-led bills such as AB89 and AB844, which would level the playing field in girls’ and women’s athletics. That’s not moderation; it’s manipulation.
Let’s be clear: Gavin Newsom is a lot of things to a lot of people. He is a political chameleon who will go in whatever direction the wind blows, as long as it doesn’t mess with his hair. Voters should take a second look past the pristine smile and glimmer in his eye. He’s an ambitious salesman whose one goal in life has been to get to the White House. He will stop at nothing, including trying to fool you into believing he’s a moderate. Make no mistake; it is all a performance.
• Jessica Millan Patterson is a former chair of the California Republican Party.
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