Admit It. Gavin Newsom Is The 2028 Front-runner.

SAN FRANCISCO — No Democrat has had a better two years than Gavin Newsom and because of it, the California governor — a national figure since he was a 36-year-old boy mayor — has claimed a new title: front-runner.

It’s easy to find Newsom naysayers. In fact, there may not be a modern political figure who was simultaneously so well-positioned to be his party’s nominee and so doubted by the smart set since, well, Joe Biden in 2020.

So let’s not make the mistake of ignoring what’s in plain view and give the governor his due.

By the old rules of Democratic nominations, Newsom fits neatly in the tradition of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama: younger, outsider candidates who could credibly run fresh campaigns against the Washington status quo of both parties while claiming enough insider credentials to reassure party mandarins who care about such things.

The San Franciscan has never lived a day outside of California, presents younger than 58 because of his hair and genes and has endeared himself to his party rank-and-file by criticizing Democratic leaders for not fighting harder before leading by example to confront Donald Trump. Newsom also attended and scribbled notes at the first Clinton Global Initiative meeting in 2005 and has to be the only first-term lieutenant governor to have Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and Arianna Huffington blurb his book (a tome we shall come back to).

Newsom is also the best-positioned Democrat according to the new rules of politics — namely, whether you are or can become famous by breaking through on social media. Ask yourself: How many other potential candidates are plausible celebrities who can transcend the political-pop culture divide a la Obama and Trump? If you believe the phone in your hand will, more than any factor, determine the next Democratic nominee, it’s hard not to grasp Newsom’s strength. As the kids say, he gives main character energy.

There’s also the fact that his looks can be deceiving. To overcome his dyslexia, Newsom has committed an enormous amount to memory and should be able to acquit himself as well as any of the party hopefuls on the debate stage.

And on which side of the party’s liberal-versus-moderate divide will Newsom position himself?

Neither.

“I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party. I want it to be inclusive,” the governor told me last week.

Sitting in an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers conference room immediately after the final rally of what seemed like a daring bid to redraw California’s congressional districts, his fourth statewide campaign in seven years, Newsom was confident about the referendum and already thinking about tomorrow.

So where, I asked, in that Manchin to Mamdani centrist to socialist axis is one Gavin Christopher Newsom? That would be the man who, as a youthful mayor, ushered in San Francisco’s “Winter of Love” by marrying gay couples and the former small business owner who hosted an array of far-right figures on his podcast earlier this year and lamented government mandates.

“Where he’s always been,” Newsom shot back, indulging my drift to the third-person.

Are you a progressive?

“I’m a hard-headed pragmatist,” he said.

Are you a progressive, I tried again.

“Once a mayor, always a mayor — get things done,” Newsom came back.

He then said flatly: “I don’t want to be labeled,” explaining that he finds it “reductive.”

This is Peak Gavin. It’s who the world will learn more of in February when he releases what he told me (and others who’ve seen it confirmed) will be different from most sanitized political memoirs.

Newsom doesn’t want to choose.

He’s the son of a mother who worked multiple jobs and whose straits made Newsom acquainted with Wonder bread — and he’s the son of a prominent judge whose friends, the Getty family, groomed him for greatness. He’s the proud bearer of a three-digit SAT score, he’ll tell you the exact number, but he also wants me to know: “I’m a policy guy.” Nancy Pelosi is family, literally and politically, but he was thrilled to have Charlie Kirk on his podcast and charmed the late conservative influencer by revealing that his son wanted to come to the taping.

If you closed your eyes and changed the accent from California cool to Arkansas rasp, you could almost hear the Bill Clinton in him, waving me off from my “false choice.”

Newsom would be thrilled at the comparison — he makes no secret of his admiration of the former president and the Californian’s oratory and mannerisms, consciously or not, echo the Arkansan.

But even Clinton didn’t have that hair.

The former president, who interviewed Newsom at this fall’s Clinton Global Initiative, has told people how impressed he is by Newsom’s talent, a well-connected Democrat relayed to me recently. Clinton said he thought his dedicated student had what it takes to be elected president.

Another Master of Politics who knows Newsom even better told me the same when I met him for lunch after seeing the governor.

“Big time,” said Willie Brown, the state house speaker-turned-mayor who gave Newsom his first break by appointing the 28-year-old owner of the Balboa Cafe to San Francisco’s Parking and Traffic Commission.

Why is he so formidable, I asked.

“He’s the movie star,” Brown explained, simple as that.

And is it clear what Newsom actually believes?

“I don’t know,” Brown said, grinning and pausing to deliver the best deadpan of any 91-year-old I know. “I’ve never asked him.”

Wait for it…

“For fear he doesn’t know!”

For all his blurring of ideological lines at different stages of his career, Clinton very much did make a choice about which wing of the party to align himself with when he ran in 1992.

Newsom isn’t fully comfortable in either faction and doesn’t want to pick.

He’s become the early front-runner thanks to his political skills, how adept he is at reading the moment. Running wire to wire for two and a half years as the favorite and claiming the nomination is no easy task, which is why few candidates want to begin as the front-runner.

But if Newsom fails, it won’t be, because he’s from liberal California or once had an affair with his best friend’s wife or was first married to Kimberly Guilfoyle. It will be because he is too much of a politician and, in an era where authenticity is the coin of the realm, he never revealed his true self.

The last election I spent with Newsom had a decidedly different feel. It was 2022, and he had just cruised to re-election, a year after fending off a recall. That was three wins over five years in the world’s fourth-largest largest economy and some in his inner circle saw that momentum as leading naturally to a presidential bid.

Yet as we watched the eastern time zone returns come in at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, it became clear that Democrats had held their own in Biden’s midterm. There was no red wave, and the octogenarian president would be even more emboldened to run for re-election.

If there was any question about Newsom’s intentions, he quashed them, first by telling me that he wouldn’t run for president and later that night outside his victory party when I overheard him on the phone telling Biden he was all in for the re-elect.

But that was then.

Instead of staring down the prospect of Biden’s re-election and a likely Kamala Harris nomination four years later — which would have pushed Newsom’s White House ambitions back to at least 2032 — the governor watched as the two leading Democrats collapsed months apart last year.

Then, after the political fates turned his way, the governor made his own luck this year. With a little help from Trump.

The newly-elected president, perhaps the most galvanizing political foil the country has ever known, picked a fight with Newsom over the Los Angeles wildfires shortly into 2025. And then Trump elevated the governor further by deploying the National Guard and active-duty Marines into the city by the summer.

Shortly after, Newsom lunged at what at the time seemed a less high-profile provocation: Trump’s demand that Texas redraw its House map to hand him more GOP seats in next year’s election. Yet by countering that gambit with what was an uncertain wager — that California would do the same but for Democratic seats — Newsom prompted a nationwide redistricting arms race and vaulted himself to the early leader of the pack ahead of the sprawling 2028 primary.

Oh, and the governor also green-lit what, remarkably and tellingly, has endeared him to the sprawling anti-Trump coalition, even the Newsom skeptics among them: He began trolling Trump and his enthusiasts online by mimicking the thirsty and capital letter-heavy style of Your Favorite President.

There may not be another 2028 hopeful, or even an operative plotting a presidential campaign, who thinks more about the information ecosystem than Newsom.

He lurks in right-wing media and is as familiar with its avatars as Trump. But this is not a new interest. He managed to host his own (short-lived) television show as lieutenant governor and even did an interview segment with Elon Musk, riding with him in a Tesla. And that book I mentioned, with all the A-List blurbs? It was called Citizenville, but the subtitle was even more revealing: “How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government.”

That was 2013.

“So many of us fell prey to this notion that social media was somehow going to be a uniter, not a divider,” Newsom told me last week, recalling his book and conceding that “all of us” were overly idealistic about the tech transformation.

Yet no politician this side of Trump has benefited more from the phones that dominate our lives — nor has any other state than California profited more economically from the digital era. How Newsom navigates his home state’s economy, its executives in his donor base, and the growing economic and societal impact of California-based tech companies will be one of the great tests of his future candidacy. As Newsom tells it, his eyes were opened to the power of social media after Los Angeles’ twin crises this year.

“The fires in January, and how Donald Trump, Elon, and others weaponized those fires, flooded the zone, dominated the early narrative on those fires, in a way that really brought this issue of communication, narrative home,” he recalled. “And then, of course, what happened in June with the federalization of the National Guard” and Marine deployment.

Those challenges, on top of his 2021 recall, the 2022 re-election and the ballot measure fight the last few months, have created a depth of political scar tissue that few potential 2028 candidates possess.

When I asked him about that, Newsom sounded like he was reading the stage directions, a la Bush 41, saying: “Message, I care.”

“You've got to be on the other side of caution,” he said. “It's just clarity, conviction. Finding your voice, being your authentic self, just letting it rip, and taking the shit along the way.”

What’s telling about Newsom is that the shit along the way, what plainly gnaws at him, is the criticism he caught from his own party for hosting a podcast and inviting on Kirk, Steve Bannon et al.

“Taking the shit for platforming people that I disagree with, and saying, ‘You know what? That's who I am.’ And you don't have to like it. Tune it out. I'm not trying to be someone I'm not,” he said.

He continued: “And so if there was ever a mask on — I've always felt there wasn't — but there was sometimes a caution. That's gone now. I mean, I'm on the other side.”

Newsom’s predecessor as governor, the one and only Jerry Brown, has long believed West Coast politicians are inherently disadvantaged because of their distance and the time difference from the East Coast-based media. But I wondered out loud if that had been mitigated in this flatter technological era.

Newsom was off to the races. While quickly conceding that Jerry’s point still has merit, the governor said “things are radically reorganized in real time” and “at a pace and scale that is so much faster than people fully have absorbed.” It’s why he’s exploring going to TwitchCon and participating in Fortnite Fridays — events that seem custom-made for digital natives.

Even more revealing to Newsom, who likes to turn television news on more than his staff would prefer, is that people are mostly seeing his TV hits on social media.

“They said, ‘Oh, I saw you on TikTok.’ And I said, ‘I said that on Meet the Press.’ But they saw it on TikTok,” the governor recalled.

For all his SF swagger, Newsom presents as humble, peppering his language with references to “grace” and “humility.” Yet one of the few times in our conversation when he strutted a bit was when he said he hoped I had noticed how aggressive his ballot measure effort had been on penetrating the new information order. “We really flooded the zone,” he said, citing his interactions with “influencers in every category.”

That's where, Newsom said, “politics is heading. Mamdani understands it. The Democratic Party at its peril better understand it at the scale it needs to.”

There’s an old saw in politics to capture someone with promise but unfulfilled potential — he who has “been a rising star in three decades.”

It could apply to Newsom, though in fairness, he had to wait his turn, first behind Brown for eight years in Sacramento and then behind Biden and Harris on the national scene.

But the sheer length of time he’s been on the scene, at least in the minds of the political class, has created a perception problem for Newsom with what he likes to call “the Gang of 500” (a reference that, itself, speaks to his longevity).

There’s another political maxim, though, I think of when it comes to Newsom. It’s originally attributed to Gary Hart, but David Axelrod often invokes it, too: It’s that “Washington is always the last to get the news.” Which is to say that what voters are thinking can take a while to register in the capital.

That was the case with Obama, Trump and Bernie Sanders — the electorate was far more open to them than the cognoscenti initially assumed.

Watching how Newsom was received last weekend in Houston, where he took a victory lap in the state that kicked off the redistricting wars, illustrated his strength with those who will decide the Democratic nomination.

“I’m here today because he is a future president of the United States of America,” said Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) at the event, where activists needed no prompting to yell “2028!” at Newsom.

But what sort of president of the United States of America would Newsom be?

For now, Newsom is more comfortable punching back at Trump.

The president may not be on the ballot, Newsom told me, but Trump will ensure 2028 is about him.

Therefore, “the way back for the Democratic Party is about how we work around what appears for some to be this immovable object, Trump and Trumpism,” he said.

Yet, Newsom being Newsom, he hastened to add that any Democratic candidate would also have to present their vision for the future.

“No one's denying that,” he said. “And I think there's sort of a lazy punditry again, back to this notion that you can only be one or the other. Bullshit. You have to do both.”

Both/and — it could be Newsom’s credo. He hates “the tyranny of ‘or,’” as he put it, invoking a favorite business book maxim.

When I asked Newsom whether he’d be welcome in such Midwestern battlegrounds as Michigan and Wisconsin next year, he said he’d go where asked before flashing some self-awareness.

“There is a California derangement syndrome that I'm also deeply mindful of,” he said.

And, in a bit of life imitating art, sounded slightly like his Trump-trolling persona on X: “I think there’s [also] a growing derangement syndrome as it relates to the current governor that I also am not naive about.” (That would be himself, your favorite governor.)

Newsom went further, saying he felt a burden to confront those perceptions about him and his state.

“I recognize my responsibility…but also my opportunity with a book coming out and other things to begin to challenge that narrative,” he said.

There was that book again. It is clearly on his mind. And he wasn’t finished.

Promising to send me a copy as we neared the end of our conversation, Newsom said the book was “about as reflective and honest” as he could make it, including stories he has difficulty discussing in public.

“It’s for my grandkids,” he said.

Yet Newsom conceded he wrote it for another reason.

“I was also trying to understand who I am,” he said.

The book’s title? Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.