Gavin Newsom is pursuing what appears to be an image-building prelude to a 2028 presidential campaign and much of that effort involves appearances on widely popular podcasts.
Those podcasts, such as the one featuring comedian Joe Rogan, are the 2025 equivalents of the radio talk shows and newspaper interviews that ambitious politicians frequented in the past.
Famously, a little-known one-term governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter burrowed his way into the presidency in 1976 by spending months traipsing around the country with aide Jody Powell, sharing rooms in cheap hotels and seeking interviews by radio DJs and local journalists.
I can attest to that personally. During a state Democratic Party convention in Sacramento, Powell tirelessly peddled interviews with Carter, but to little avail. At the time, Carter was a political nobody, eclipsed by better known rivals at the convention such as former astronaut John Glenn.
Media may have changed but ambitious politicians haven’t. They want to build name recognition to claim places on the unofficial lists of potential candidates maintained by political media, pollsters and potential campaign supporters.
As governor of the nation’s most populous state who portrays himself as a cutting-edge political theorist, Newsom has obvious advantages in seeking more name recognition. However, he also has liabilities, starting with the fact that his state has serious problems that have seen little or no improvement during his governorship.
While Newsom is fond of touting California’s immense economic output, for example, he rarely, if ever, mentions it has high rates of unemployment, poverty and homelessness, thanks largely to its extremely high costs of housing, utilities and other necessities of life.
We received another reminder of California’s chronic poverty crisis this week in a report from the Public Policy Institute of California about what happened after the COVID-19 pandemic receded and federal relief programs ended. The PPIC and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality used a way of measuring poverty that takes into account not only income but the cost of living. It’s similar in thrust to the Census Bureau’s alternative way of measuring poverty.
By their California Poverty Index, the PPIC report says, the rate rose from 15.2% in 2022 to 16.9% in 2023, meaning about 6.4 million Californians were living in poverty with Los Angeles County’s 19.9% being the highest of any county.
Even more disturbing is the calculation that when families in near-poverty are counted, 34.8% of Californians were feeling economic distress in 2023, and there’s no reason to believe that the situation has materially improved since then. That number comports with the fact that at least a third of Californians qualify for Medi-Cal, the state health care program for poor people.
The Census Bureau also singles out California in its supplemental calculation of poverty that includes costs of living and other factors left out of the official poverty rate. While California’s official poverty rate of 11.7% over the 2021-23 period is virtually identical to the national rate, its alternative rate, 15.4%, is the highest of any state and markedly higher than those of Texas and Florida, two red states that Newsom often compares to California.
There’s no question that California’s high poverty rate is rooted in its high costs of living because its median household income of $95,921 is the nation’s fifth-highest.
It’s generally accepted that the rising cost of living is one of the major reasons why Donald Trump won last year’s presidential election. While inflation has moderated somewhat in recent months — although it could rise due to Trump’s tariffs — costs of living will probably color the 2028 presidential race as well. That could weigh heavily on Newsom.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.
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