For months, the Democratic Party has been a massive vacuum.
Its base has been crying out for someone to go toe-to-toe with MAGA and President Donald Trump and to rescue it from its post-2024 funk. Democratic motivation to participate in the midterms has been off the charts. But leaders who are able to seize on that have been all but absent.
Until Gavin Newsom.
Through happenstance and his oft-demonstrated political guile, the California governor is quickly raising his national profile. And you could forgive Democrats for seeing him as the potential future national leader they’ve been begging for.
But whether that’s good for the Democratic Party is another matter entirely.
Newsom presents a riddle for Democrats. He often shows a kind of real and rare political talent – like he’s doing right now – that may make his party wonder what could be if he put it all together. But he’s also basically a caricature of the kind of candidate Republicans would want to run against. He’s a California governor and former San Francisco mayor who practically oozes the word “liberal.”
The last two months-plus have put him on the map.
First came a showdown with Trump over the president’s decision to send the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles amid protests over the administration’s deportations. Given it’s the first time in 60 years that a president has done so without gubernatorial approval, Newsom is now in the position of fighting a major Trump power grab – and an apparently unpopular one – in a high-profile court case.
But perhaps Newsom’s biggest opportunity has come in recent weeks. He’s become the face of Democrats’ efforts to fight back against another MAGA/Trump power grab: their extraordinary effort to re-gerrymander Texas in the GOP’s favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Newsom has promised that California will do the same for Democrats in retaliation, and this week he cued up a potential special election to make it happen.
As with the fight over Trump’s militarization of US soil, Newsom appears to benefit from where he stands. California is simply Democrats’ best opportunity to fight back and offset the GOP’s power play in Texas, because it’s where Democrats could feasibly draw more districts in their favor.
But Newsom has also seized on that opening with aplomb, as CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere documented this week.
Whether Newsom’s redistricting gambit works is a major, unanswered question given California voters need to sign off. But if it does, he’ll have been the rare Democrat to successfully get down and dirty in fighting back against Trump – something the base increasingly wants.
Newsom has also raised his profile in recent days with an effort to mock Trump’s style on social media. Liberals have eaten it up, particularly when Republicans and Fox News hosts make clear the joke has gone over their head.
Trump and his allies have gotten great mileage out of “owning the libs”; Newsom, more so than perhaps any Democratic politician in recent memory, is showing you can “own the MAGAs,” too.
(Newsom has also talked with right-wing influencers on his podcast, including Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Those moves have rubbed some on the left the wrong way, but they also suggest a politician who is willing and capable of engaging directly with the other side.)
All of which should be encouraging for Democrats. At least one of their own is showing some wherewithal in charting a path forward, which has been sorely lacking with others.
But that’s different from saying the Democratic Party needs Newsom as its leader. On that, the jury very much remains out. And Democrats might be wary of Newsom filling too much of their vacuum.
The governor remains unknown to many Americans. But among those who have offered views of him, he’s been consistently underwater – and usually substantially so.
A CNN poll last year, when Democrats were considering alternatives to then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, showed Americans viewed Newsom unfavorably 31%-21%. A Fox News poll with fewer undecideds showed his split at a negative 44%-35% among registered voters.
Perhaps tellingly, both polls showed Newsom underwater with the vast majority of demographics, from young to old, from less-educated to more-educated, from rural to urban. Even young people and voters of color – two traditional Democratic constituencies – were lukewarm on him, at best. He didn’t seem to have a real base.
Fast forward to today, and things don’t appear to be much better for Newsom – or at least, they didn’t before the redistricting fight really kicked off.
A Gallup poll conducted in mid July showed Americans viewed Newsom unfavorably by 11 points, 41%-30%.
Those numbers are hardly unheard of; Newsom had plenty of company in being double-digits underwater, including Trump, Biden and several key Trump administration figures like Vice President JD Vance. But other Democratic-aligned politicians were better off. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was plus-11, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was only 4 points underwater.
Unlike those two, Newsom engendered a lot more opposition among Republicans (minus-58) than he did support among Democrats (plus-42). And he was about as unpopular among independents (minus-15) as Biden (minus-18).
All of these numbers could shift if and when Newsom truly breaks through on the national stage.
But you could see a situation in which Newsom’s stock in the 2028 presidential primary continues to rise in the absence of other Democrats being able to take the fight to Trump like he has. And that could leave the party with some difficult choices about its path forward.
