Gavin Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor who has spent the past eight years waiting in the wings of Sacramento as lieutenant governor, took a role on the national stage Tuesday when the Democrat cruised to election as California’s next governor.
Having defeated Republican businessman John Cox, Newsom will take over a state that would have the world’s fifth-largest economy if it were a country. And increasingly, in President Trump’s America, California has been behaving as if it were a country, challenging the administration’s authority on everything from immigration policy to greenhouse gas regulation and control of public lands.
Newsom, 51, will now have four years to show whether he can solve problems that have cast California in an unflattering light nationally — a growing poverty rate even amid widespread wealth, homelessness that seems intractably rooted in cities and has spread to rural areas, and housing costs that threaten to turn a generation of young people into lifelong renters or drive them from the state entirely.
This was Newsom’s second campaign for governor, after he aborted the first one in 2009 when Jerry Brown decided to enter the race. That was another dip in a career that has careened from groundbreaking moves — approving same-sex marriages six weeks after becoming mayor in 2004 and offering universal health care to San Francisco residents — to public embarrassments like his consensual 2005 affair with a City Hall employee who was married to his campaign manager.
Newsom has never shied away from championing leading-edge, often controversial ideas, whether it was the Care Not Cash program in San Francisco that replaced most direct welfare payments for the homeless with housing and services, or the statewide legalization of recreational cannabis. Yet two questions have always shadowed Newsom: whether he can transform his ideas into policy and how much he is driven by his future political ambitions.
“He will try to get some victories early, because being governor of California is not the last item on his bucket list,” said Melissa Michelson, a professor of political science at Menlo College in Atherton.
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Having defeated Republican businessman John Cox, Newsom will take over a state that would have the world’s fifth-largest economy if it were a country. And increasingly, in President Trump’s America, California has been behaving as if it were a country, challenging the administration’s authority on everything from immigration policy to greenhouse gas regulation and control of public lands.
Newsom, 51, will now have four years to show whether he can solve problems that have cast California in an unflattering light nationally — a growing poverty rate even amid widespread wealth, homelessness that seems intractably rooted in cities and has spread to rural areas, and housing costs that threaten to turn a generation of young people into lifelong renters or drive them from the state entirely.
This was Newsom’s second campaign for governor, after he aborted the first one in 2009 when Jerry Brown decided to enter the race. That was another dip in a career that has careened from groundbreaking moves — approving same-sex marriages six weeks after becoming mayor in 2004 and offering universal health care to San Francisco residents — to public embarrassments like his consensual 2005 affair with a City Hall employee who was married to his campaign manager.
Newsom has never shied away from championing leading-edge, often controversial ideas, whether it was the Care Not Cash program in San Francisco that replaced most direct welfare payments for the homeless with housing and services, or the statewide legalization of recreational cannabis. Yet two questions have always shadowed Newsom: whether he can transform his ideas into policy and how much he is driven by his future political ambitions.
“He will try to get some victories early, because being governor of California is not the last item on his bucket list,” said Melissa Michelson, a professor of political science at Menlo College in Atherton.