CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Gavin Newsom didn’t dream of becoming the left’s surrogate-in-chief. But he enjoys his status as enemy No. 1 of the far right.
From presidential debates in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and his own undercard in Alpharetta, Georgia, Newsom ran for the Democratic ticket, and occasionally for himself. Months after the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis debate on Fox News — a primetime broadcast graced by President Joe Biden’s White House — Newsom traveled across the South to support Biden, later leading a tour of the Blue Wall states.
There, on June 27, just after Biden’s gruesome debate, Newsom was present for a series of cable news interviews that were part interrogation, part therapy session. For the latter, he put the host in the chair, instead of the other way around.
“You may remember,” California’s governor told a backyard inquest in Charlotte on Thursday, “that I was the lead surrogate who tried to calm Rachel Maddow down and said, ‘It’s going to be OK.'” The crowd laughed. Enough time had passed to pause the spin. “That was a tough night.”
Newsom said in his next breath that he was proud to have supported Biden to the end, that he continues to argue that there has been no president in his lifetime who has been more transformative, and that Vice President Kamala Harris can lay claim on much of that record. Newsom campaigned for her again this week.
“I couldn’t be more proud of my old friend, Kamala Harris,” Newsom said. “And I don’t say that in politics [sense]. I know you hear politicians say, “my old friend,” and you shove them in the back. Kamala Harris and I knew each other for five or six years before we both entered politics. [we] We used to go on holiday together, eat together and have mutual groups of friends.”
There are, of course, dozens of other Democrats vying to see who is next. But no one else has known each other so well for so long, shares a political network and is chugging uphill on parallel tracks. And certainly no others have a candidate on the cusp of the presidency, which poses a politically existential question for the other: What’s next?
On Friday, Newsom was in nearby Cabarrus County, telling a room full of seniors why he felt far more useful there than in his home state, where the only question was whether Harris would eclipse former President Donald Trump by five or six million votes.
“I know everyone is focused on Wisconsin, on Pennsylvania, Michigan,” he said. ‘If you finish here, it’s over. And when I say here, I mean literally here.”
The exposure during the presidential cycle has undeniably benefited Newsom. But there is still something deeply humiliating about living as a surrogate. At home, he is chairman of the world’s fifth-largest economy. Bringing massive oil companies to heel, he recently vetoed sweeping artificial intelligence regulations that would have been a model not just for California or the United States, but for the entire world. But on Thursday there was Newsom, wandering around the quad at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, mingling with a handful of students and posing for selfies as he exchanged banter about NASCAR and Trump and his “old friend” Kamala Harris.
Didn’t she brief Fox News host Bret Baier in their interview this week, Newsom asked one attendee, tapping their shoulder with a hand? Right?
Trump “didn’t have the courage to appear on ’60 Minutes,’” he said during a stop with Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles and Michael Regan, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “You think [Trump] ever be interviewed by Rachel Maddow? He’s terrified.”
It was hardly a certainty that much of Newsom’s year would be taken up by the presidential race. Before joining Team Biden’s starting five, Newsom provoked eye rolls within the administration. As he took an unmistakable shot at Democratic leaders in Washington for being too slow to recognize the consequences of the Supreme Court striking down abortion rights, a Biden aide compared Newsom’s Paul Revere routine to a baseball fan shouting from the stands. The following year, he significantly improved his standing at the White House, in part by assuring top advisers that he had no interest in challenging the president in 2024.
Newsom’s campaign stops had always raised at least a few questions about his White House ambitions — if not from the news media, then certainly from voters, part of the nod-and-nod trade-off between surrogate and director that everyone seems to understand. Biden’s team occasionally felt like Newsom fell too easily in love with his own script rather than dutifully reading from theirs. He delivered where it mattered most. Newsom repeatedly deferred to Biden, but when voters pressed Newsom harder on why he wasn’t running, claiming that something could happen to Biden given his age, Newsom said Harris was best positioned to take up the mantle to take.
Still, he didn’t expect anything to happen to Biden. Even after the June debate, Newsom continued to insist that the president’s campaign was taking the necessary steps to correct course.
Surrogates – at least the good ones – never abandon their patron. And Newsom, according to various accounts within the campaign, was the standout Biden surrogate: decades younger, telegenic, a natural boxer and a politician who could deliver the White House message like few others.
He compiled a staggering number of statistics on jobs and manufacturing and held up the Biden administration’s social spending plan, Build Back Better, along with infrastructure and microchips and even the long-elusive deal on weapons.
He blasted Trump as the leader of a Republican rights regression that was already demanding abortion and endangering other rights such as gay and interracial marriage and even contraception.
Newsom delivered the delegates to ceremoniously put Harris over the top for the Democratic nomination. But he was criticized by California experts for his low-profile presence in Chicago. It didn’t help that he joked about Harris winning the nomination in a “very open process.”
The transition from full-throated Biden stan to Harris surrogate has been slow. He appeared at, and later organized, fundraisers for Harris’ ticket alongside Tim Walz and Nancy Pelosi.
Meanwhile, in Sacramento, Newsom gathered his staff, eager to fend off even the idea of creeping lame-duck status by filling their notebooks with ideas and new initiatives. On Monday, he signed legislation aimed at curbing rising gas prices after calling lawmakers into a special session. Newsom is governor for two more years.
Then he headed back to Harris, with this week’s trip to North Carolina and a quick hop aboard a bus with other Michigan governors that served as a bookend to his year-opener in South Carolina.
He said it’s strange knowing both Harris and Trump so well, and nodded to the sibling rivalry (he hates that term, by the way). Newsom officially became mayor of San Francisco just minutes before she was sworn in as district attorney. “That was pretty much the last time I did anything before Kamala Harris,” he said.
And he talked about how a victory for him or Trump would affect him and his state.
“You have a long-time friend and ally in the White House with whom you have a next-level relationship — not just with her — but with many of the people around her and probably with the vast majority of the people she brings into the administration, Newsom said of Harris. “I still have a lot I want to finish” as governor before he is impeached in 2026.
Newsom is convinced that a victorious Trump will embark on a “revenge tour” as soon as his transition. He spoke at length about Trump’s current and past promises to withhold federal disaster relief funds and his threats to California on the climate for immigration policy.
“He goes to the Economic Club and brings up ‘Newscum,’” he said, referring to Trump’s nickname for him. “For me there is an omnipresence, because there is one degree of separation. I’m not just talking about [ex-wife] Kimberly [Guilfoyle]but even in his right-wing universe, when I talk to Bret Baier, talk to Sean Hannity all the time, talk to these guys, I’m in their heads. … Even when I’m not making news, I’m in their news cycles. I am part of their conversations. I’m in his head in that respect, because that is his ecosystem. That’s the sludge he’s kind of working through. And so I am very aware of the world changing radically in both ways.”
At a brewpub near Davidson College, the alma mater of NBA great Stephen Curry, and throughout the trip, Newsom called it an existential moment in American history. “And you have the ability to determine fate and the future,” he said.
On Wednesday, he made his first visit to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, and attended Ethel Kennedy’s memorial in Washington, where he sat behind Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, describing how moved he was by it all.
“Her life was about racial justice, economic justice and social justice. She was a fierce warrior of service and contribution,” said Newsom, who has long revered the Kennedy family. “They talked about words you don’t hear much these days: empathy, care, compassion, collaboration, the spirit of [Martin Luther] King Jr. was still alive and talked about this idea [that] we are all connected by this web of reciprocity.”
Newsom sat next to former Secretary of State John Kerry, who himself came within whispering distance of the White House. Kerry spoke about the narrow margin in Ohio, “about the importance of every vote… about what could have happened,” Newsom said.
The commitment in November for his own career is now also different. A Harris victory could prevent him from running for the White House for eight years — if he ever makes one. But a Trump victory would immediately propel him to the presidency, not of the United States, but certainly of blue America.
The surrogate – now in his second year and on his way to becoming his second candidate – refused to look beyond the coming weeks.
“I don’t even want to think about that,” Newsom said. “This country needs a break after the next election. It’s exhausting.”
Before embarking on one of his final days on the road in 2024, he lamented the billions of dollars spent on the permanent campaign.
“It is also not the case that we do not play in that game, the Democratic faction. But this is a joke,” Newsom said. “This is gross. This is not sustainable.”
