The News
LAURENS, S.C. — Gavin Newsom came here to talk about rebuilding the Democratic Party and winning the 2026 elections, not whether he’d run for president.
That was the plan, at least.
“As we go around, welcoming these candidates who are running for president…” Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said as he introduced the California governor during the fourth of his seven meet-and-greets with local Democrats. When the laughter stopped, Newsom got back on message.
“I worry about this country going off the rails if we’re not successful in the midterms,” Newsom told reporters. “The Republican Party has been more focused, disciplined.”
Newsom, whose last South Carolina trip was a barnstorm for Joe Biden, spent two days traveling with the state party. In crowded churches and rec centers, more than a thousand potential primary voters met a man they’d seen mostly on TV, battling Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, saying “no” to the presidential question.
He had come with advice: Constant organizing, constant offense, defending the liberal pluralism they all believed in. Democrats needed to tell their neighbors that Republicans had put rural hospitals at risk in order to finance tax cuts for wealthy people who “don’t need them, and in many cases, weren’t asking for them.” They couldn’t be dragged into every Trump-selected news cycle.
That, too, was easier said than done. Newsom left California right after armed, masked ICE agents swept MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. He would return right after the Justice Department sued the state, alleging “reckless endangerment by male participation on female high-school sports teams.”
Citizens who didn’t like that would have to mobilize, and he would help.
“The more you use your formal authority, the less you have of it,” Newsom said at a Baptist church at the end of the tour. “Power. Dominance. Aggression. But all of us have what Dr. King had, what Cesar Chavez had, what Mandela, what Gandhi had. And that’s the most important power, and the most important authority. Moral authority.”
Know More
At each stop, Newsom denounced President Donald Trump’s megabill and dramatically described the ICE sweeps in Los Angeles. When he wrapped, instead of taking questions, he stood for a photo line, where attendees could speak to him.
The audiences skewed older; in the majority-white counties on the tour, they skewed white. Democrats came in their resistance raiment, including buttons from June’s “No Kings” rallies and campaign gear from when they hoped to be electing “Madam President.”
Republicans showed up, too, rallying outside the events in the most conservative counties on the tour. In Seneca, they lined an entrance to a community center with Trump flags and very specific anti-Newsom signs; one read “Hey ‘Newsom,’ you’re the REASON we left California.”
Inside the center, Democrats drew blinds to blot the protesters out, as Newsom defended his state from the “propaganda networks” that he said were making it so difficult for Democrats to be heard outside their bubble.
“I grew up in the most diverse state in the world’s most diverse democracy,” Newsom said of California. “More scientists, researchers, more Nobel laureates, engineers; more patents emanating out of the state [university] system.”
Newsom didn’t get specific about what his state had done to fix the problems that have slowed its growth. South Carolina did not get a lesson on environmental permitting or housing, though he riffed on an old George Carlin line that California was “coming attractions” for the rest of the US.
Instead, he urged fellow Democrats to recover lost support by convincing people that Trump was wrecking the country — even as he acknowledged no one had figured out how yet.
The View From Local Democrats
Plenty of attendees at Newsom’s stops thought they were meeting a presidential candidate, if not a president. They had already known him for years, identifying him as the Democrat who could take on any Republican in a debate.
“It’s easy to come into rooms like this and speak,” said Ken Campbell, 51, who arrived at the Seneca event in a shirt with an altered MAGA logo: Mexicans Ain’t Going Anywhere. “What I’ve noticed about Governor Newsom is that he can go on Fox News, he can be questioned by people that are hostile to his political point of view, and he doesn’t get tripped up.”
The only other Democrat whom Campbell identified with that “ninja” debate ability was former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Other Democrats came out of the events praising Newsom and recounting his high-profile fights with Trump; he got loud applause for mentioning how many times he’d sued the administration.
But no voter was making their 2028 decisions yet, and some South Carolina Democrats were acutely aware that Newsom epitomizes the liberalism that southern Republicans use as a foil.
In Pickens County, Newsom met council member C. Claiborne Linvill, the only elected Democrat in the area, who took a photo with him – but was not running her own campaigns like he was.
“As far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t here running for anything, and I wasn’t here endorsing anything,” said Linvill. “To me, he represents that the national Democratic Party cares about the rural South.”
Room for Disagreement
Republicans, confident that Newsom’s politics don’t play in South Carolina, mocked him for coming and derided Democrats for inviting him. They didn’t buy the language of liberal protest from anybody, least of all a governor who faced (and beat) a recall after violating his own COVID restrictions to dine at the French Laundry.
“If you’ve ever wondered how many liberals there are in Seneca, South Carolina,” Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote on X, “we now know they can all fit in one room with Governor Gavin Newsom!”
Potential gubernatorial candidate Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., repeatedly challenged Newsom to a “debate” about their politics; Newsom told reporters he had “sub-zero” interest in that. State attorney general Alan Wilson, who is already running for governor, contrasted his own record with the Californian’s.
“While Newsom was shutting down churches and restaurants, I was fighting in court to protect South Carolinians from Biden’s unconstitutional vaccine and mask mandates,” he wrote.
David’s view
If you start listing the Democratic Party’s problems right now, two of them lead straight to Newsom.
One: No matter where they run, Democrats get linked to the most left-wing members of their party, as well as the crises of Democratic-led states and cities.
“California,” in Republican campaigns, is a metonym for homelessness, high taxes, and unaffordable housing; for a while it was synonymous with endless mask mandates and closed churches, which inevitably recalls Newsom’s indoor dinner at the height of the pandemic.
Two: The party keeps identifying the ground it wants to fight on, only to get yanked off of it by the Trump administration. Nearly every Democrat believes that they are better off talking about saving Medicaid from cuts than they are talking about ICE raids.
But if networks have a choice between a press conference outside of a rural hospital and Gavin Newsom in a command center denouncing the “disgrace” at MacArthur Park, they will show his more dramatic display.
“It’s not distracting, because it’s consequential,” Newsom told Semafor. “We’ve got to address it when you have 5,000 military on the streets of an American city, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers money, for pure theater and to create a sense of fear and anxiety.”
Newsom, one of the most openly self-reflective politicians in the party, is at least aware of the problems his presence brings. And that matters more than it might seem right now.
“That’s why I said, in the Central Valley on the tariffs, don’t get distracted by certain things,” Newsom told me in Laurens, recalling how he tried to keep an event on topic when reporters wanted to talk about deportations. (He got scorched by left-wing commentators.)
Newsom now hosts a podcast, but a decade ago he hosted a talk show. He has worried for many years that Democrats can’t explain their policies or their vision when only liberals consume traditional media.
Beyond diagnosing his own liabilities, Newsom is also pointing out how hard it will be for any 2028 hopeful to start breaking through. For the first time in decades, Democrats are running to win back power in a midterm after a presidency most voters considered a failure. (They did not think that after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama left office.)
There is no immediate nostalgia to run on. Few Democrats, Newsom included, point to their deep-blue states and cities to directly say: This is how we’ll govern.
Notable
- In the Post-Courier, Seth Taylor captures the local reaction to the Newsom tour: Democratic love-bombing (“my heart just stopped”) and GOP outrage.
- In the Washington Post, Maeve Reston finds Democrats already fretting the idea of another nominee from California. (Kamala Harris was their first.) “It almost seems like a candidate with no history is better,” said one Democrat who came to see Newsom.