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Will Gavin Newsom run for president? It’s the million-dollar question. Throughout his political career, there has been a sense that the California governor has been setting himself up for a potential presidential campaign.
Most recently, he’s been signaling his higher ambition in a new way: through a podcast. It has been a controversial venture, namely because of Newsom’s choices of guest. So far, they’ve included former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. Marisa Lagos, a political correspondent at KQED who has covered Newsom for two decades, sees it as a national reset.
“I gather that this might be an attempt to paint his way out of the corner of being a California liberal,” she says.
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Lagos about what Newsom has been up to and whether it has been working. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: How would you explain how Gavin Newsom has landed where he is now, like, at the tippy-top of the Democratic Party?
Marisa Lagos: You can start, honestly, with aesthetics. The guy looks like a politician. He’s got that sort of Kennedy vibe. He’s Irish Catholic. He was raised in this interesting mix of a world: He had a single mom who fostered kids and struggled financially, but he would spend weekends and summer trips with his dad, who was very close with the wealthy Getty family.
When he entered politics—his first appointment was on the Parking and Traffic Commission—he was very ambitious. He has always had his eye on the next thing, the next prize. His election and beating a recall have been relatively easy, and that speaks to the way that he’s been able to position himself in California politics.
Newsom rose to prominence as mayor of San Francisco, mostly because he allowed same-sex marriages to move forward. For a lot of people, part of the reason why this podcast turn from Newsom has been so surprising is because of that. Do you notice the disconnect too?
I see a disconnect. He might argue that there’s a connection in that he’s “willing to stand up even to the people closest to him.” That certainly was the case in 2004, with gay marriage. You had people like Dianne Feinstein, one of his mentors, warning against this just broadly for the Democratic Party and saying that it was going to hurt them. He stood up for what he saw was right, and it was politically brave. That could have been the end of his political career, you know?
At the end of the day, if he is going to lead on something, it’s a lot braver to do something like that, that really has that impact and that he can show leadership with.
Newsom was governor the previous time Donald Trump was in office as president. How did he approach the Trump administration then? And how does it look different this time?
In 2017 Newsom really was the leader of the resistance, or one of them. He came out swinging very hard.
This time around, it’s been different. When Trump came into office, Los Angeles was on fire. The state was grappling with one of its worst urban disasters in history. You could argue that Newsom walked a fine line of not wanting to alienate Trump. He greeted him on the Tarmac when Trump came to visit L.A. He has definitely been careful in the way that he is critical of the president.
When Newsom rolled out his budget recently, he was railing against tariffs. He spent the top 30 minutes of the news conference talking about how that was affecting the economy and caused this budget deficit. And then, when he was asked if he was blaming Trump, Newsom said no.
Many Democrats are trying to figure out how to push back against what feels like a stronger, more organized Trump administration. Newsom has been maybe the best example of that.
Some have focused on policy announcements from Newsom and looked at those as indications of a shift in tone from him. There’s been a lot of attention to the fact that he has said he wants local communities to start to push to get rid of homeless encampments. I’m wondering if you see this as a shift.
I don’t see it as a huge shift. Homelessness has been an issue that he’s struggled with and tried to really tackle aggressively since he was mayor. At the time, he got a lot of blowback for initiating a program that a lot of people on the left saw as overly aggressive. I mean, essentially, he told people on the streets, “You are not going to get your welfare payments directly. You’re going to have to engage in services if you want this money.”
I think what he and a lot of other people in the Democratic Party here would say is that it’s not progressive to let people sleep and die outside, right? They’re trying to get their arms around a problem that has been difficult to solve. I don’t think you can view the way he is positioning himself as inconsistent with the way he’s approached this problem his whole career.
And if you look at polling, it’s not as if homelessness is a left–right issue. People want this solved. They do not want encampments in their neighborhoods, and they feel that the state needs to step up and do something, especially given the amount of money we spend.
Newsom also announced that he wants to roll back medical coverage for people who lack permanent legal status. And this did seem like a big change to me, because when the program launched, California proudly said it was going to move forward with health insurance for this group. How do you see this?
This one’s a little more complicated. If Trump were not in the White House, if Kamala Harris were president but the budget were similarly hurting and he had proposed this, we would not be talking about it, right?
There’s an expectation that folks on the Democratic side are going to dig in and protect immigrants who lack permanent legal status. But there are a lot of people looking over their shoulder, going, “Wait, did we miscalculate? Are we on the wrong side of things?”
If you look at the details of what Newsom has proposed, the way they want to do it is to stop enrolling people come next January. So that’s a pretty long runway—create a copay for adults who are undocumented in 2027. They’re not proposing to cut off aid to kids, for example. This was not a full-throated walking away from this policy. It’s sort of nibbling around the edges.
It seems to me that if you’re a Democratic politician right now, it would be easy to say something like, “Our state budget is just going to get slammed because of everything that’s happening in Washington. And, frankly, we are getting a ton of pressure to reduce aid to this population, and I have to make some adjustments here. My hand is really being forced, and I don’t want to do this, but I’m going to do it this way, and the children will still be covered.” But those aren’t the headlines I’m seeing.
In a way, maybe that’s what Newsom wants. He wants that headline as a virtue signal to somebody in another state. But at the same time, he can turn around at home and say, “You didn’t lose your health care.” It gave him a little bit of credibility on both sides.
That is his biggest problem. A recent poll found that most Californians, even Democrats who have supported him, feel that he’s operating more with an eye toward his political future than what’s best for the state.
There’s the benefit of looking the way he does, and he seems like a natural politician. There’s the sort of double-edged sword of that. A lot of people see you as a natural politician, but people don’t really like politicians, and they don’t like people that they think are acting with their political survival in mind. He has always had that kind of problem politically.
Another problem that I think Newsom will face if he does launch a national campaign is that he was a massive Joe Biden stan. He was at the debate where Biden flopped. He was claiming, in the aftermath, that Biden won that debate. Has he dealt with that at all?
Yeah, he really went hard for Biden. He continued to. This is something that will be a huge question for him.
We’ve really explored Newsom’s trouble spots. But he’s proved so durable in the past. He literally survived a recall election not that long ago. What do you think he has learned from his experiences?
I don’t know if the recall is the best sort of learning experience. California is such a different state. We have everything nationally that you would have in a national race. You have deep-red areas; you have rural, urban, mountains, and desert. But the registration here is just so heavily Democratic that it’s a fully different conversation if you’re running statewide here than if you’re running nationally.
I think why we’re seeing him a little lost right now, perhaps with this podcast, is because it would be such a different calculation to run nationally. Even if you’ve spent so much time on cable news, preparing for that moment, it’s going to look really different when you’re actually campaigning in primaries.
How do you think you’re going to know that Newsom’s made his choice, that he’s entering the race or not? Is there going to be a tell?
I don’t think anything will be definitive, because what we’ve seen in the past is that he’s always setting himself up for the next run. I think he’ll do everything he can to do that, whether or not he’s decided 100 percent if he’s going to run.
Do you think he’s got a shot?
I don’t know. I find it hard to believe that there’s a lane for a California Democrat, but never say never. Politics feels very unpredictable these days. I would hate to count him out entirely. I think, in some ways, the folks in California are more skeptical of his national aspirations than people nationally are, even though people nationally seem to dislike him more. There’s a lot of skepticism here that the rest of the country wants a Californian in the White House.
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