Gavin Newson Is Running For President As a CONSERVATIVE Democrat

You have to hand it to Gavin Newsom. He understands that being a brazen hypocrite is an asset in politics. 

For 20 years, he has been a left-wing crusader, serving as Mayor of San Francisco, Lieutenant Governor of California, and now Governor. Every step along the way, he has been the slick and generally attractive, in more ways than one, face of the radical left. He has cultivated deep ties to the tech community and the Chamber of Commerce types, but his policies have steadily moved a state once governed by Ronald Reagan so far left that it has almost fallen into the Pacific Ocean. 

It has been a formula that has worked well for him, although he did face a campaign in 2020 and 2021 that flopped badly. 

Newsom pushes California cities to ban homeless encampments https://t.co/KM0AS95HM5

— POLITICO (@politico) May 12, 2025

Newsom is so obviously interested in becoming president that he inserted himself into the 2024 presidential campaign early, hoping that Joe Biden would bow out or flop so badly that he would be seen as a natural alternative to the president. He debated Ron DeSantis for no obvious reason and traveled the country to raise his profile at a time when you would expect the sitting president and presumed candidate would be doing so. 

Newsom’s dream of replacing Biden on the ticket ended when he was outmaneuvered by Kamala Harris, who scored the (bizarrely) coveted Biden endorsement. Trump’s victory in the general election sent a clear message to Newsom–one that most people in his party have not heeded: voters are tired of lefty dysfunction. 

That explains Newsom’s lurch to the right. The first few episodes of his new podcast featured friendly interviews with right-leaning guests, including Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, and Michael Savage. He has dropped tidbits that suggest he isn’t the radical lefty who has been sitting in California’s top political offices for two decades. For instance, he suddenly discovered that girls and boys may be different and not belong in sports together. 

This is from the governor who made California a trans sanctuary state, in which the government fights against court orders from neighboring states to ensure that children can be sterilized and mutilated at the will of non-custodial parents. 

Newsom has been executing a “10-Year Plan” to eradicate homelessness that has seen tens of billions of dollars spent to increase the homeless population, resulting in a dramatic increase in homelessness, the sprouting of homeless encampments on the streets and in the parks, and most tastefully “poop maps” warning pedestrians where not to step. 

Even California residents, who have tolerated almost every lefty insanity, are fed up enough to spark an exodus, and Newsom knows that his record will be a liability anywhere outside the deepest Blue areas of the country. He could duplicate Harris’s performance in the 2028 election, but that is just another way of saying he would be a loser. 

So Newsom is now a conservative with a heart of gold. Compassionate, yes. But with TOUGH love. 

“The time for inaction is over,” Newsom said in a statement. “There are no more excuses.”

Newsom’s release of a model ordinance prohibiting encampments builds on years of efforts to make cities and counties move people off the streets and into shelter. He’s also taking advantage of a political and legal landscape that increasingly favors clearing the tents that have proliferated in parks and on sidewalks across the state.

He embraced the Supreme Court’s 2024 reversal of a lower-court ruling that barred clearing encampments in the absence of sufficient shelter alternatives. His proposal comes amid rising voter support for tougher tactics, reflected by a recent proposal from San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to arrest people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter.

The proposed order attempts a balanced approach, with a memo from Newsom emphasizing the need to connect people to services and denouncing “inhumane” policies that “prohibit individuals from sleeping outside anywhere in the jurisdiction without offering adequate indoor shelter, effectively banishing homeless individuals from the jurisdiction’s borders.”

The Pravda Media is cooperating with Newsom’s rebrand, implying that he has always been in favor of clearing California’s streets of homeless and poop. 

Yeah. Right. So in favor of it that under his watch, San Francisco’s and then California’s streets have been flooded with tents, human excrement, and the drug-addled. His policies didn’t just allow this to happen; he has flooded the homeless-industrial complex with tens of billions of dollars to subsidize the destruction of California’s cities. 

Now it would be wrong to assume that every media outlet over the next three years will give Newsom a complete pass on his record; media figures don’t fully coalesce around one candidate, but rather herd them into ideological “lanes” and help candidates from each lane fight it out to see who wins the battle. 

But you can expect that Newsom’s rightward (rhetorical) shift will be aided by compliant media figures who will help him massage his image and clear that “conservative Democrat” lane for him. The more progressive outlets will trash him, of course, but the establishment liberal media will go with the “Newsom lost patience” line to help him out. 

You would think a mere rhetorical shift would not be enough to wipe the stain of his actual policy failures driven by radical left policies, but you would likely be wrong. The media elite have near infinite faith in their ability to distort reality, and that faith is justified because their audience–self-professed “rational” liberals will buy whatever the media sells them. 

So expect a lot of talk about Newsom’s centrism and his rejection of the progressive orthodoxy on some issues. He will have his “Sister Soulja” moments, and remarkably, a lot of liberals will believe him. 

It’s hard to say whether there is much of a lane anymore for centrist Democrats. During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden was sold to America as a “normal,” centrist Democrat, but his base demanded and he provided the most progressive administration in modern history. 

The conventional wisdom among Democratic consultants is that the Party must abandon the progressives and move back to the center, but the shrinking base of the Democratic Party begs to differ. It will take a Hillary Clinton-level of party manipulation to keep the progressives in line, and I’m not sure the party elite have the political juice to do that. 

As for whether Middle America would buy Newsom’s newfound centrism? It’s easy to doubt, but three years is a lifetime in politics, and Newsom is slick as his hair grease.