To no one's surprise — except for maybe the conservative zealots who were also sure Gavin Newsom would be ousted in the pointless, failed recall election of September 2021 — the Democratic governor of the nation's largest state handily won reelection on Tuesday over state Sen. Brian Dahle, R-Bieber. At 8:01 p.m., yes, only one minute after California polls closed, CNN declared the former lieutenant governor and San Francisco mayor the winner. With Democrats — incumbents as well as new faces — on track to win all other statewide offices, it's clear that the Golden State remains the deepest blue.
Nonetheless, there are warning signs that Newsom's victory vibes may be ephemeral. When Newsom's predecessor Jerry Brown left the governor's office in January 2019, he did so after two terms in which his emphasis on increasing housing — both to bring down the cost of shelter for all Californians and to relieve the homelessness crisis seen up and down the state — produced some legislative victories but no substantial progress. And there is little reason to think Newsom will fare better than Brown in addressing these and other huge issues. Despite Sacramento paying more attention to housing than ever of late, new laws to emerge have yet to provide relief to those who desperately need it. The cost of shelter remains staggering for middle income and poor residents alike, cementing California's status as the nation's epicenter of poverty. Newsom's recent stunt of putting a hold on state aid to local homelessness programs seems more like an attempt to shift blame than to create change. Apart from his CARE Court push to make more mentally ill and addicted homeless people accept treatment, he has offered local leaders little to rally around.
Between poverty, homelessness, rising crime, soaring energy costs and chronic water shortages, California's quality of life has taken a dramatic hit. Dahle may have been an uninspiring candidate, but when he said life for state residents who aren't wealthy hasn't improved in an era of Democratic dominance, he has a case. The state's population is going down for the first time as a result.
If Newsom wants to rewrite this script — both to help his constituents and, sure, to burnish his presidential credentials — he must be unusually bold. On housing, he must consider drastic steps to incentivize construction and open up millions of acres of government-controlled land to development. On homelessness, he must embrace the manufactured home revolution seen in Japan and Britain to end the folly of spartan units being built by conventional means for $600,000 or more. On crime, as a start, he must fix problems with poorly written Propositions 47 and 57 that have caused safety fears to spike. And it's not just fears that are up. Crime itself is, too.
But it is on an issue in which Newsom deserves great credit — his urgent attempts to reduce the emissions driving the global climate emergency — where the governor faces rough times ahead with implications not just for the nation but for democracies across the world. The Golden State has led the planet with its smart, ambitious environmental policies for a half-century. Yet Newsom and other progressives, who seek to build on this record in responding to global heat waves and droughts, do so in ways that hammer taxpayers — moving to require the purchases of expensive electric cars and trucks; to mandate retrofits of existing structures; to add to already-heavy construction regulations, and more.
Powerful arguments can be made for these steps and others. But will residents of the most impoverished state accept far higher costs? Or will there be a populist backlash against such environmental edicts? California must draw up a practical blueprint for dealing with the climate emergency that limits the economic pain that results for its residents. Newsom may or may not be eyeing a run for the presidency. He certainly won't admit it. But what he needs to focus on right now is running the state. The stakes for Californians are too high to have him focus only partly on governing. And the stakes for the globe are evident with each deadly wildfire, wrenching heat wave or punishing drought.
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