The One-Party State

So what happened? A common answer is demographics. Republicans were increasingly seen as hostile to Latinos during the 1990s, culminating in the passage of Proposition 187, a GOP-backed initiative that targeted illegal immigration but was widely perceived as anti-Hispanic. It turned the state’s growing Latino population sharply toward the Democrats. The steady influx of immigrants, not just from Latin America but from Asia as well, only bolstered the Democratic party. So did the national shift of educated whites away from the GOP—a shift accelerated by the rise of Donald Trump, who is exceedingly unpopular in California.

But Dan Walters, a longtime political journalist in Sacramento, will tell you it was the end of the Cold War that really brought about Democratic dominance. He points to the decline of the defense and aerospace industries, major employers in Southern California, which prompted an exodus of Republican voters—middle-class, white, and suburban—to cheaper states. Los Angeles County regularly went for the GOP in elections. It’s simple arithmetic, says Walters. When the GOP lost Los Angeles, it turned California over completely to the Democrats.

Today, the state is a liberal’s dream. It’s multicultural. It’s largely urbanized. It is socially and environmentally progressive. People here frequently boast, without a trace of smugness, that if you want to see America in 10 years, look at California.

What you see, though, is not what you might expect in a true blue state.

California is extremely wealthy—if it were its own country, it’d have the fifth-largest economy in the world—and the center of some of the world’s most important technology, financial, and entertainment industries. But the wealth is concentrated at the top, and the squeezing of the middle class out to Nevada and Utah and Arizona and Texas has left a bifurcated state of the very rich and the relatively poor.

The state has the most liberal environmental laws and regulations in the country, which hamper the development of affordable housing. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation in 2017 showed rising housing costs driving lower-income Californians out of their homes and into the streets. Homelessness has skyrocketed in both the cities and the rural areas of the state. While 12 percent of the U.S. population is in California, 25 percent of the country’s homeless live there. From Sacramento to San Diego, you can’t help but notice the multitudes of people living on the street.

Look at the housing shortage and homelessness, the decline of manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs, and the growth of a tech economy that rewards disruption over predictability, and you see why some are suspicious of the California way. Others just see potential: Without the middle classes to object, progressives think, the wealth can be redistributed to help those who need food, health care, and housing. California can be a place where social progress is achieved and immigrants are welcomed with open arms, no questions asked. It can be the picturesque center of a movement to reverse the effects of climate change and save the entire world.

Gavin Newsom is almost certain to be the next governor of California, and he’ll be the first Democrat to succeed a Democrat in the job in more than 130 years. The current occupant, 80-year-old Jerry Brown, is at the end of a long career that includes two eight-year stints as governor (1975-83 and 2011-19). Newsom, 50, is hungry and ambitious—for California, for the progressive agenda, and for national office. Progressives see in him a chance to finally realize their dreams in the country’s biggest laboratory for democracy.

“I’m not a profligate Democrat,” the lieutenant governor told a small group of reporters during a bus tour this past May. “I have bold ideas, I want to be audacious in terms of the goals, but I’m not reckless.” What Newsom was implying is that some Democrats are reckless and profligate: the starry-eyed progressives in the legislature, the public-sector unions that would like to see more returns on their political investments, the activist base that would be fine busting the state budget to get its wish list fulfilled. That’s not what Newsom is about.

But don’t think for a minute he isn’t bold, that he isn’t audacious. Put another way: Don’t think Newsom is Brown, who was elected governor in 2010 as a budget-conscious liberal pledging to right the state’s sinking fiscal ship. The man who earned the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” for his representation of California’s liberal idealists in the 1970s will leave Sacramento next year with a budget surplus and a reputation for setting the state on course after the disastrous Arnold Schwarzenegger years. “If you ask anyone what is his major accomplishment, what has he spent his time on, it’s all been to ensure that he left the state from a fiscal perspective in a much better place than when he started,” says Gale Kaufman, a veteran Democratic strategist. “And he has been dogged.”

That doggedness has rankled progressives, who grew more frustrated with every stroke of Brown’s veto pen on hundreds of bills passed by the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. He recently nixed a bill that would have funded a state “advisory group” to look into how fake news spreads on social media. In 2012, amid the moral outrage over neighboring Arizona’s anti-illegal-immigration law, Brown issued a late-night veto on a bill that would have limited how much California police who stop illegal immigrants could cooperate with the feds. Another bill, passed by the legislature last year, would have required large businesses to post their median and mean salary data for both men and women on a public website, in the name of transparency on the gender pay gap. Brown vetoed that one, too. There were plenty of bills Brown did approve, but he’s given every interest group on the left something to grumble about. Progressives wonder: What’s the point of having control of the levers of power—and a booming economy to boot—if you don’t make some big changes?

Newsom is aware of the simmering impatience, which explains why he cast himself in this summer’s jungle primary as a champion of progressive causes. He outflanked his top Democratic competitor, former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, by embracing the party’s left wing on health care, gun control, and social issues. Newsom cast Villaraigosa as an opponent of the influential teachers’ union (easily done, since the L.A. mayor had fought hard for education reform) and took advantage of the fact that his rival’s bases of support—Southern California and Latinos—are less likely to turn out in a primary than his own multicultural, highly educated Bay Area-based supporters. Villaraigosa only managed third in the June primary, which means Newsom will face Republican John Cox in the November election. There’s little belief anywhere in the state that Cox can pull off an upset.

It will be a generational shift for California Democrats. Besides Brown, there have been only two other Democratic governors in the last 75 years. One was Jerry’s father, Pat, who lost in 1966 to Reagan. The other was Gray Davis, who was recalled in 2003. Even Democrats prefer to forget him. The Democratic party of the two Browns, of Gray Davis, and of Senator Dianne Feinstein is reflective of the national party in the postwar era: split between its less ideological white, working-class base and an emerging coalition of young, liberal, and minority voters. Democrats who won statewide office in California were standard-issue liberals, not radicals. Feinstein has had a reliably progressive record in the Senate but cultivated a reputation for bipartisanship on intelligence and national security. The elder Brown ran for governor in the late 1950s as a “responsible liberal” and spearheaded the big infrastructure projects that created modern California. His son campaigned as both an environmentalist and a budget hawk.

But Newsom’s ascent won’t be a political revolution. For such a large party in such a large state, California Democratic leadership is remarkably incestuous. The Brown and Newsom families have longstanding ties. William Newsom II, Gavin’s grandfather, ran Pat Brown’s local campaigns in San Francisco. Gavin’s father, Bill Newsom, was appointed to the state appellate court during his friend Jerry Brown’s first term as governor. One of Bill Newsom’s sisters, Carole, was an adviser to Brown. Another, Barbara, was once married to Ron Pelosi, the brother-in-law of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Another family important to this story is the Gettys. J. Paul Getty’s vast oil fortune is the unifying thread in the political fortunes of the Newsoms and the Browns. Getty’s son Gordon, a philanthropist and composer, is a friend of Bill Newsom’s going back to prep school (St. Ignatius in San Francisco, which Jerry Brown attended a few years later). Brown was unmarried during his first stint as governor, and Gordon Getty’s wife often performed the first lady’s official duties. Before joining the appellate court Bill Newsom was an attorney for Getty Oil and later left his judicial seat to run the multibillion-dollar Getty family trust, which Gordon Getty controls. The trust provided the seed money for PlumpJack, the winery and restaurant group started by their two sons, William Getty and Gavin Newsom. The success of PlumpJack laid the groundwork for Newsom’s political career in San Francisco, first on the board of supervisors and then as mayor, which he was elected in 2003. Newsom briefly ran for governor in 2010 before being big-footed by old family friend Jerry Brown. Prepared to bide his time, Newsom ran for lieutenant governor.

The top of California’s greasy pole may be full of familiar names, but the state’s dominant political party is a very big tent. There are still moderate Democrats in the legislature, big-city mayors with green eyeshades on, and socially conservative minority voters. Without partisan competition from the GOP, the typical rifts and conflicts of politics are all within the tent—with interesting results.

Dan Walters dubs an unofficial group of centrist Democratic legislators in Sacramento the “Mod Squad.” This coalition curbs the excesses of the Democrats’ supermajority (they hold 55 of the 80 seats) in the assembly, halting everything from stricter and costlier emissions standards to tax increases. “Mod Squad influence is rarely demonstrated in showdown votes on specific bills,” Walters wrote in a 2016 column. “Rather, legislation that fails because of their presence is usually placed on the shelf without votes after legislative leaders count noses and come up short.” Democratic primaries for legislative seats in recent years have turned on issue-based turf wars between labor-backed progressives and business-friendly challengers. In 2016, the unions defeated San Bernardino assemblywoman Cheryl Brown—dubbed “Chevron Cheryl” because of donations the Democrat received from the oil company—with their own Democratic candidate. But in an open assembly seat in the East Bay region that same year, the teachers’ union-supported Mae Torlakson lost to pro-education-reform Democrat Tim Grayson.

California’s looming public-pension crisis reveals another way Democrats are divided. The generous benefits public-sector unions in California have extracted from state and local governments are prompting cutbacks in school funding and services—or, more typically, tax increases and more bond issuances. A 2017 Stanford University study by former Democratic assemblyman Joe Nation examined 14 governmental agencies in California from the state government itself to cities, counties, and school districts. Nation concluded that “public pension costs are making it harder to provide services that have traditionally been considered part of government’s core mission” and that government contributions to pensions would have to double by 2030. And this is in a booming economy with rock-bottom interest rates.

But billions of dollars in campaign contributions from organized labor, plus the strict collective bargaining and compulsory unionization laws in California, mean it’s difficult for reformers to make headway in Sacramento or elsewhere. “The public-employee unions control the state and control the Democratic party,” says Will Swaim, the president of the conservative California Policy Center.

One Democrat who wasn’t under their control was Chuck Reed, the mayor of San Jose from 2007 to 2014. Reed is a good liberal and a staunch environmentalist, but he couldn’t ignore the budget dilemma. “In about 2010, San Jose was going into the tenth year of cutting services to balance the budget,” Reed tells me. “Our spending was about $800 million a year and our shortfall was around $115 million. We were facing service-delivery insolvency.” With the city council, Reed developed a plan to close that gap, which included significant entitlement reform. The proposal would have replaced San Jose’s defined-benefit health plan with a leaner one and opened up the benefits of current employees to renegotiation.

The plan was put on the ballot in 2012, and 69 percent of San Jose voters approved it. But the unions were infuriated and challenged the measure in court. Reed’s proposal was mostly upheld, but the “California Rule,” an interpretation of state law that protects current benefits from renegotiation, meant that the key provision of the proposal was thrown out. San Jose is appealing. Jerry Brown, recognizing the threat of the unfunded liabilities of the state employee pension program, joined an amicus brief against the California Rule. But there’s little to suggest the rest of the Democratic party is ready to get on board with pension reform any time soon.

Even Donald Trump, who unifies national Democrats in resistance, has opened up splits within the California state party. Dianne Feinstein, for instance, drew the left’s ire after making a relatively innocuous comment about the president at an event last year. “Look, this man is going to be president, most likely for the rest of this term. I just hope he has the ability to learn and to change. And if he does, he can be a good president. And that’s my hope,” the 84-year-old Democrat said. It was boilerplate senator-speak that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in Washington, but it elicited boos from the audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Her chief Democratic challenger in this summer’s Senate primary, the ultra-progressive state senate president Kevin de León, jumped on the remark, calling Feinstein “complicit” in the Trump administration. It was a perfect example of the left’s argument against giving Feinstein a fifth term: She was out of touch with progressives and the #Resistance.

But Feinstein remains a formidable political figure and easily won the crowded Senate primary with 44 percent of the vote. De León finished second, but got just 12 percent, suggesting the November runoff between the two would be more of a snooze than the battle for the heart of the party many were predicting. He has had trouble raising money, and his lack of name recognition even in his hometown of Los Angeles doesn’t help. Still, the activist Democratic base isn’t deterred by Feinstein’s strong position. In July, the state party voted to endorse de León. The endorsement did little to boost de León in the polls but guaranteed him party money and headaches for other Democrats. “It was one of the stupidest things they could have done,” said one experienced party operative. “There’s a lot of candidates who don’t want Kevin on the same materials they’re on.”

Newsom recognizes where the energy is among California Democrats. The lieutenant governor has few official duties, so he took on the role of cheerleading progressive initiatives. He claims partial credit for a number of victories, including the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage, as well as a new law requiring a background check for the purchase of ammunition. During a staged interview at the Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco this August, Newsom hinted that the ammo law is just the beginning for guns in California.

“We have a unique obligation to step up and step in where others have stepped away, and I really feel passionately that when we prove this paradigm and when we begin to apply these rules and when we begin to advance these background checks, that is going to ignite a debate anew across this country and will raise the bar of expectation on gun safety,” he said.

He is skilled in delivering this kind of pabulum. Asked by reporters in May how he would approach the state’s housing shortage and growing homeless population, Newsom promised “to be a lot more intentional on the housing and homeless issue, which is not just about more resources but resourcefulness.”

What progressives care most about, though, is a single-payer health-care system, and they expect Newsom to be more than just “intentional” with getting it passed into law. The powerful California Nurses Association is the lobbying force, and the state senate passed a version of it last year. Despite the big Democratic majority in the assembly, speaker Anthony Rendon declined to hold a vote on the bill, which had no funding mechanism and read more like a wish list than a serious reform. Rendon took the brunt of the criticism from the left for scuttling progressive dreams, but Jerry Brown has long expressed skepticism that single-payer is feasible for California. “Where do you get the extra money? This is the whole question,” he told reporters in 2017. Even if the assembly had passed the senate bill, Brown would almost certainly have vetoed it.

Newsom has said countless times he supports single-payer. While he was mayor of San Francisco, the city implemented a subsidized medical-care program (paid for by taxing companies and so raising the cost of doing business in the city). All are eligible, no matter their citizenship, immigration status, employment, or preexisting condition. San Francisco has had near-universal insurance coverage for more than a decade.

“We can do this all across the state and all across this country,” Newsom promised at Outside Lands. “I am committed to it, and we can make it happen, and we have an obligation to do that,” he told the approving crowd, adding that he has “long believed in a single-payer financing system” and “Medicare for all.” Then Newsom asked essentially the same question Brown did, but with a more positive tone: “Can a state do it?”

His answer sounded like yes, but it wasn’t quite: “In my humble opinion, there is no other state better positioned to do it than a state that already spends $367.5 billion a year on health insurance, a state that has one of the most robust health-care delivery systems of anywhere in the world, and with all our remarkable ingenuity, capacity, and human capital,” he said. So is that a commitment to pass a single-payer bill? “I am committed to advancing that principle, advancing that paradigm, and seeing how far we can take it,” Newsom said. “The job of the next governor is to get in the ‘how’ business.”

What astute political observers, including supporters of Newsom, wonder is just how quickly the “how” question for single-payer and other big progressive agenda items will be shunted aside. As governor, Newsom’s first task will be negotiating a budget with the legislature. Those close to the candidate say he’s absorbed Brown’s public and private warnings about a recession wiping out the surplus so carefully built up. On August 6, Brown told reporters a recession is “going to happen” and predicted “we maybe have two years if we are lucky.”

Perhaps Newsom would be lucky to get a recession. The realities of an economic downturn would make initiatives like single-payer health care tough to justify and remove the impossible political challenge of wrangling the progressive wing and the Mod Squad into agreement. A downturn would allow him to do what his Democratic predecessors have done and what many Democrats in California suspect Newsom would really like to do: tack to the center on fiscal issues while focusing on things like guns, criminal justice, and, yes, resisting Trump. If there’s one thing progressives can count on from Newsom, it’s that he’ll be loud on the national stage where Brown has been relatively quiet.

At Outside Lands, Newsom positioned himself as the anti-Trump—not just an angry resister but a counterargument to the Trumpian vision for the country. “Here we are in San Francisco, one of the most diverse cities in one of the most diverse regions in the most diverse state in the world’s most diverse democracy,” he said. “Those are values worth protecting. Those are values worth standing tall for, and those are the values under assault by not just the Trump administration, but by the Laura Ingrahams of the world, by the Tucker Carlsons of the world. By Trumpism more broadly.”

All of this suggests White House ambitions. Comparisons between the handsome Californian and JFK have swirled for 15 years. In 2001, Newsom married Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former model turned assistant district attorney in San Francisco. (Her father, Tony Guilfoyle, was one of Newsom’s top political advisers until his death in 2008.) A 2004 profile of the San Francisco power couple in Harper’s Bazaar was titled “The New Kennedys” and featured a photograph of the two splayed out on an oriental rug, hands clasped together, staring broodingly at the camera. Out of the window behind them you can see an ornate balustrade on a balcony overlooking the San Francisco Bay. The photo was taken in a mansion owned by Gordon Getty.

Newsom and Guilfoyle divorced in 2006. The next year, it was reported that he had been having an affair with the wife of one of his top aides, and soon after, the young mayor announced he would get treatment for alcohol abuse. He went on to win reelection in 2007 and, the following year, married actress Jennifer Siebel. They have four kids, and by all accounts, the former party boy has cleaned up his act. (Guilfoyle, for her part, went on to a career as a Fox News star and is now dating Donald Trump Jr.)

Could Newsom challenge Trump for the presidency? A run in 2020 isn’t likely given that he would have to start running for president almost immediately after being sworn in as governor of California in January. But he’s likely to give it a run in 2024 or even 2028, when he’ll only be 61 years old. By then, the country will be more secular and socially progressive. It will be more ethnically diverse. It will have a more automated and tech-driven economy. It will be looking down the barrel of the entitlement crisis. It could be on the cusp of adopting a single-payer health-care system. In other words, 10 years from now, America really could look like California does today.