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Gavin Newsom stood before the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference this week and gave us a glimpse of what the Democratic Party’s 2028 primary might look like. It was not pretty. In a rambling address that veered between defensive apologia for the Biden administration and barely coherent attacks on the Trump White House, California’s governor managed to insult the Vice President, misread the American electorate, and demonstrate exactly why his party keeps losing ground with working-class voters.
The headline moment came when Newsom took aim at JD Vance. “With all due respect, JD, you don’t have it,” he declared, suggesting that Vice President Vance lacks whatever intangible quality allows Trump to command the movement he built. Newsom described Trump as an “invasive species” and Trumpism as a “cult of personality” that cannot survive its founder. It is the kind of analysis you’d expect from a political science freshman, not a man who supposedly represents the future of one of America’s two major parties.
What is striking about Newsom’s critique is not just its nastiness, though there is plenty of that. It is the fundamental misunderstanding it reveals about why Trump resonates with millions of Americans. The MAGA movement is not a personality cult. It is a response to decades of bipartisan failure, to an establishment that shipped jobs overseas while lecturing displaced workers about learning to code, to a political class that treated Middle America with contempt while catering to every whim of coastal elites. Trump did not create that frustration. He gave it voice. And pretending it will evaporate when he leaves the stage is the same kind of delusional thinking that led Democrats to underestimate him in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
But the real spectacle came in Newsom’s attempt to defend the economic record of the administration he spent four years boosting. According to the governor, the Biden years featured a “booming” economy with low inflation, record job creation, and unemployment numbers not seen since the 1960s. One wonders which country Newsom was describing, because it certainly was not the United States where families watched their grocery bills double, their gas prices spike, and their savings evaporate under the weight of 40-year-high inflation.
The word salad only got thicker from there. Newsom insisted that Democrats need to move beyond “tinkering” with tax credits and retraining programs, sounding for a moment like he might actually embrace the populist economic message his party desperately needs. But then he caught himself, laughing off any comparison to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or AOC. Cannot go too far left, after all. Cannot actually challenge the corporate interests that fund the Center for American Progress and the rest of the Democratic establishment. So instead we get this incoherent middle ground: not quite populist, not quite establishment, not quite anything at all.
Newsom’s speech comes at an interesting moment for his party. The DNC’s 2024 election autopsy was just released, and it offers a damning assessment of the identity politics that defined Kamala Harris’s failed campaign. The report suggests, in polite bureaucratic language, that focusing on racial and gender categories while ignoring kitchen-table economics was a losing strategy. One might think a savvy politician would read that document and adjust accordingly. Newsom appears to have read it and decided to double down on the same failed approach, wrapping it in slightly different rhetorical packaging.
The governor also accused Trump of wanting to bring America back to a “pre-1960s world” by destroying LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and voting rights. This is standard Democratic hyperbole, of course, the kind of alarmism that gets applause at DC conferences but falls flat with voters who are more concerned about affording their rent than parsing the latest culture war skirmish. It is also revealing. For all his talk about moving beyond old frameworks, Newsom cannot resist the temptation to frame every political disagreement as an existential threat to civil rights. It is tired. It is predictable. And it is a big part of why voters have tuned out.
What Newsom’s performance ultimately demonstrates is the Democratic Party’s continuing inability to grapple with its own failures. Rather than acknowledging that Trump won because he addressed concerns they’d ignored, they prefer to pathologize his supporters and dismiss his movement as a temporary aberration. Rather than offering a compelling alternative vision, they serve up warmed-over Bidenism with a side of personal attacks on the Vice President. And rather than speaking plainly to Americans struggling with the cost of living, they retreat into jargon-filled conferences where consultants and donors applaud while the rest of the country moves on.
The 2028 primary is a long way off, but if this speech is any indication, Gavin Newsom has a lot of work to do before he is ready for the national stage. The word salad might play in Sacramento. It will not win the White House.
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