Death of a Salesman

This is a reader supported publication. If you would like to subscribe, please sign up at the link below. $5 per month or $50 per year gets you access to all paywalled posts.

When Gavin Newsom ran for governor of California in 2018, the long-running housing crisis in its major cities was already metastasizing. Statewide, the median home sale price in 2012 was $321,748; by 2018, it had risen to $571,058, a 75 percent increase in just six years. But Newsom had a plan: if elected, he would stimulate the construction of 3.5 million new homes — 3.5 million being the magic number that McKinsey said California would need in order to close its housing gap.

By 2020, the median home price at sale had risen to $646,245, and the worst consequences of the housing crisis were becoming even harder to ignore. Homelessness, and in particular visible street homelessness, was soaring to new heights. The previous year, in Los Angeles County alone, 1,267 people had died while homeless. Newsom declared that it was time for bold action: he would dedicate the entirety of his annual State of the State speech to the subject of homelessness. “I don’t think homelessness can be solved,” he would declare in the speech’s peroration. “I know homelessness can be solved. This is our cause. This is our calling.”

And since then? Well, in the years since Newsom’s inauguration, his own Department of Housing and Community Development estimates that California has built slightly fewer than half a million homes. The median home sale price in 2023 was $827,300. And homelessness is worse than it has ever been; between 2018 and 2024, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual point-in-time count, homelessness statewide rose 44 percent.

While the overall picture is bleak, there have been some policy victories along the way, without which things would be even worse. California homeowners have built tens of thousands of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), thanks to an ongoing ADU law reform effort that the legislature initiated in 2016. When the federal government responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by unleashing a flood of emergency aid, California used some of the windfall to launch Homekey, a project that has since created more than 15,000 units of housing for homeless people. And the legislature recently reauthorized SB 35 (2017) — now dubbed SB 423 — a law that has produced more than 18,000 largely below-market-rate homes and promises to facilitate the construction of tens of thousands more over the coming years.

But these small victories, while good and necessary, are deeply insufficient. And it is striking how many of them were achieved more or less in the governor’s absence. Homekey was an administration effort, but the land use reforms coming out of the legislature were very much not. As far as I can tell, Newsom has not spent political capital in support of a single major housing bill, let alone personally twisted arms in the legislature to get it passed. The housing bills that have reached his desk arrive there unsullied by his fingerprints.

Instead of following through on his vow to spur large scale housing production, Newsom drifted off toward other priorities. First, of course, it was COVID-19. Then it was Care Courts, which seemed to represent a change of emphasis when it came to homelessness: instead of focusing on Housing First and home production, Newsom would direct the administration’s energies toward mental health treatment.

That lasted just long enough for the Care Courts bill to make it out of the legislature. Within a couple years, the governor’s attention had wandered to gas prices: he demanded a last-minute special legislative session to address the cost at the pump. This was followed by another special session to “Trump-proof” California. But as Trump’s inauguration neared, Newsom decided to switch up his tactics; instead of acting as a self-appointed general in the anti-Trump resistance, he decided that he should try to do DOGE one better. Now the priority du jour is using artificial intelligence to make government more efficient and dragging state workers back into the office.

Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, was an intensely focused governor: he picked a handful of priorities — cap and trade carbon pricing, school funding reform, high speed rail — and pursued them relentlessly, often to the detriment of other, equally pressing state-level needs. In contrast, Newsom has labeled virtually every issue a high priority, and lavished special consideration on basically none of them. His tenure as governor has been defined by an endless cascade of bold promises, soaring exhortations, impulsive feints in one direction or another, and no follow-through.

Now Newsom’s tenure is almost at an end. He is getting termed out in January 2027, and a crowded field of would-be successors (including, rumor has it, Kamala Harris) are mentally redecorating his office. Always an unusually weak governor in his dealings with the legislature, he is on his way to becoming a lame duck. His early vows to address the housing shortage, the homelessness crisis, and California’s high cost of living have come to very little, and he is running out of time to change that.

And so the governor has turned to podcasting.

Chris Hayes once dinged Sen. Ted Cruz for turning “his powerful elected position into essentially a part-time job” and dedicating most of his energy to hosting a podcast. Newsom is doing Cruz one better: California’s governor is now the host of two podcasts, one of which he co-hosts with Marshawn Lynch, and Doug Hendrickson.

But it is the second of Newsom’s podcasts — the one where he serves as solo host — that has been getting more of the attention lately. This is the one where Newsom has interviewed a succession of far-right creepazoids, including unreconstructed segregationist Charlie Kirk and confessed fraudster Steve Bannon.

The solo podcast has certainly reintroduced Newsom to a national audience, but not to his benefit. Instead, listeners outside of California can now get a taste of his singularly erratic, insubstantial approach to politics. I’ve heard a lot of speculation about why Newsom would want to enter into dialogue with people like Kirk and Bannon — either he is trying to break with Democratic orthodoxy in order to distinguish himself in the party’s crowded 2028 presidential field, or he is trying to prove that he can hold his own against certified MAGA goons, or some combination of the two — but I think the truth is both simpler and dumber than any grand strategy narrative. Newsom doesn’t strategize; he reacts.

Take the infamous moment from Newsom’s conversation with Charlie Kirk where the governor said he agreed with his guest that allowing trans athletes to play women’s sports is “deeply unfair.” It was a grotesque scene: California is a historic safe harbor for queer people, and here was the state’s governor publicly throwing trans people under the bus while chatting up a professional bigot. But let’s set aside the morality of Newsom’s gambit and evaluate his behavior on its own terms: what was he trying to accomplish, and did he accomplish it?

I’ll start with what he was trying to accomplish. Since the 2024 election, there has been a lot of agonizing in Democratic circles over whether the party should, to put it euphemistically, “moderate on trans issues.” Some of this is in response to the widespread perception that Trump’s campaign did serious damage to Kamala Harris with the ad saying she was “for they/them” instead of you, the voter. Newsom’s seemingly off-the-cuff intervention in his conversation with Charlie Kirk was to reassure him that, actually, Newsom’s own support for they/them is qualified at best. Presumably, Newsom was trying to inoculate himself against some of the attacks that apparently worked on Harris — and to demonstrate his viability as a 2028 presidential candidate in the process.

As for whether Newsom achieved his goal: in the couple months since Newsom’s Charlie Kirk interview, we’ve gotten some polling that sheds light on that question. It doesn’t look great for him.

Subscribe to read the rest.