The story didn't appear in such periodicals as Breitbart or the Blaze or National Review. Instead, quite shockingly, it appeared on Thursday in Atlantic magazine where assistant editor Marc Novicoff and Jonathan Chait went full smackdown on Newsom. The authors are both liberals but they fear that Newsom, with his disastrous record in the Golden State, is sure to cause a horrible electoral loss for the Democrats in 2028 should he become that party's presidential nominee.
So fasten your seatbelts as Novicoff and Chait sound remarkably like 2028 GOP attack ads in "Gavin Newsom’s Record Is a Problem."
...Newsom has a problem: He has been a California politician for decades, and has held the state’s governorship since 2019. During his tenure, the state has been a laboratory for some of the Democratic Party’s most politically fraught policies and instincts, which has left it less affordable and more culturally radical than it used to be. His record not only raises pressing questions about how effectively he could govern as president; it also provides opponents an endless buffet of vulnerabilities across social and economic issues.
OUCH! But wait! In the very next paragraph it gets even worse!
Indeed, many of Newsom’s positions read as if they were reverse-engineered from Republican attack ads. California has spent billions of dollars offering Medicaid to undocumented immigrants, and millions more on providing transgender surgeries for prisoners, some of them on death row. But because these policies either command majority support among Democratic voters or matter enormously to progressive interest groups, Newsom could very well make it through a primary despite a record that would repulse swing voters come November 2028. Just about everything people don’t like about the Democratic Party has come true in Newsom’s California.
And as you gasp in amazement that this is being published in the Atlantic magazine, take a deep breath to prepare for another cascade of body blows against Newsom's poor leadership which has helped to bring about the horrendous decline of California.
The state’s long-standing aversion to new construction has made housing notoriously expensive. Its median home price is nearly $1 million, and building multifamily housing costs more than twice as much in California as it does in Texas, and 50 percent more than it does in Colorado. This is one reason that California is among only seven states to have lost residents since 2020.
The state’s high home prices have also driven a surge in homelessness, which has risen by more than 20 percent since Newsom took office. In the absence of shelters and other arrangements, California has allowed public spaces to host homeless encampments. The ubiquity of the state’s homelessness has become one of its most distinctive traits—a haunting tableau of its unaffordability and social disorder. If Newsom wins the nomination, Republican attack ads will inevitably roll the tape of children walking home from school past unsheltered people using drugs in public.
The authors Novicoff and Chait continue in this manner, slamming Newsom as well for his disastrous illegal immigration and health care policies. It's almost too much to grasp but perhaps just one more grand slam for the road:
During Newsom’s tenure, the state has flirted with various misguided education reforms in the spirit of increasing equity. The governor-appointed University of California Board of Regents committed in 2021 to ending the use of test scores in evaluating applications, in a bid to diversify the student body—despite research suggesting that test scores are perhaps the least biased part of a college application, compared with grades and personal essays. Predictably, the UC San Diego campus—one of the system’s most exclusive—has seen a 30-fold increase in students requiring remedial math instruction since 2020. About 70 percent of those students do not meet even middle-school math standards. If only there were a way of measuring their math abilities before accepting them into what was once one of America’s finest public universities.
Perhaps those math-challenged students of Newsom's California can improve their skills with the proper tutoring at the "Quality Learing Center."
