It was supposedly big news that Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, wearing a very unflattering top for his saggy chest, recently told CNN content creator Jake Tapper that he won’t run for president if former Vice President Kamala Harris decides to run as well. That is, in a single word, bull.
Barring some personal crisis involving his family, Newsom is going to run for president, regardless of whether Kamala does. The reasons for that are obvious.
One, Newsom, like many Democrats before him, buys into the heady version of himself that the dying national media have tried selling to voters across the country. He’s a good-looking and masculine guy (relative to the rest of his party, which isn’t saying a ton), and he leads the state with the biggest population.
Yes, for our dying media, that is really all it takes to be considered a viable presidential candidate, so long as you’re a Democrat. Just like Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and, eventually, Jon Ossoff, Newsom believes that his fan girls in the media reflect his popularity nationwide, even though they don’t.
Two, Newsom might be a sociopathic narcissist with a numeric “666” tattoo underneath his helmet of hair, but he’s not dumb. Nobody wants Kamala Harris to run for president again. Nobody wanted her to run in 2024, but because she forced herself on the party, they had no choice. And so the sprawling Democrat apparatus, with great assistance from the media, hoisted her on its shoulders, squandered more than $1 billion attempting to convince voters she was capable of being president (“Kamala IS brat“!), only for her to lose every single swing state and the so-called “popular vote.”
Kamala likes being famous but she has no interest in governing. She has no vision and no opinion, which is why in 2024 she was able to take the exact opposite of every position that she previously held on every major issue right up until she became the nominee. Newsom knows all of this about her, and so declaring publicly that he would defer to her is his way of pushing other party leaders to make it clear where they stand on rolling the dice with Kamala as their nominee again. They can do it privately or publicly, but either way Newsom knows they will either advise her not to run or they will tell her she should not assume their support if she does. He wins either way.
Three, as of now, there’s realistically no one else. There are a lot of Democrats who want to run for president, but none of them outside of Newsom have demonstrated why they should. At least Newsom got creative and effectively zeroed out President Trump’s redistricting plan in Texas. No other Democrat leader has singularly matched Trump in a political fight on that same level.
It’s anyone’s guess as to how a Newsom presidential campaign would turn out. I suspect not well, given that Newsom is actually a lot like Kamala. But it’s not going to be up to Kamala whether he runs one.
