Gov. Gavin Newsom has a lot riding on the success of his plan to rid the state of homeless encampments. With little tangible progress from his efforts to tackle chronic homelessness in his six years as governor, time is running out to solve the enduring crisis.
And if he runs for president in 2028, as many assume he will, the intractable issue that has bedeviled California politicians for decades and aggravated everyday Californians will surely become one of his greatest political vulnerabilities.
“I can tell you, the very first thing his opponents will show you in an attack ad is homeless encampments in California and say, ‘What Gavin Newsom did for California, he’ll do for America,'” said Claremont McKenna College political science professor Jack Pitney.
Since Newsom took office in 2019, some $27 billion in state funding has been funneled to local programs to solve the homeless crisis across the state, including turning hotel rooms into homeless shelters. Nonetheless, the number of unhoused people ballooned 24% during that time to 187,000 statewide, according to a statewide audit.
Whether Newsom’s latest get-tough plan announced Monday urging local governments to adopt ordinances to clear out homeless encampments will work — and whether doing so can help propel him to the White House — remains to be seen.
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It’s an issue that has been fraught as homeless advocates demand adequate funding for mental health services, proper housing and dignity for the unhoused, while frustrated Californians demand solutions.
Newsom took a particularly strident tone Monday in announcing the plan to cities, saying that with access over the years to billions in state funding, “the time for inaction is over. There are no more excuses.”
But to his critics, Newsom’s announcement was little more than political theater.
“After decades of failure on homelessness as supervisor and mayor of San Francisco, lieutenant governor, and now governor, Gavin Newsom is trying to clean up his record ahead of a likely White House run,” Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said in a statement Monday. “Instead of taking responsibility, he’s trying to shift the blame to local communities.”
Newsom has been laying the groundwork for months if not years to increase his national profile and show he’s more moderate on hot-button issues than the stereotype of a San Francisco liberal that President Trump and Fox News-loving Republicans might suggest.
On Newsom’s podcast (referred to as “MAGA-curious” by CalMatters in a recent story) the governor called transgender athletes playing on women’s sports teams “deeply unfair.”
Last year, he egged on a televised debate with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Fox News and last weekend, he featured himself in a 30-second ad on Fox and Friends highlighting California as the planet’s fourth-largest economy and how Trump’s tariffs are tanking the nation’s economic future.
“These tariffs punish families and risk ending America’s run as the world’s greatest economy,” Newsom says in the ad, filmed in front of the Port of Oakland. “Take it from California: We’re the ones leading it.”
His critics pounced on social media, deriding Newsom’s leadership of the Golden State as “disgraceful,” — a place that “can’t pave halfway decent roads or provide a basic education.”
Nonetheless, if Newsom plans to run on the idea that Trump and the Republican administration has “messed everything up,” Pitney said, then he needs to come across as a “practical problem solver.”
A strategy to appeal to more moderate voters could backfire, however, said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at UC Berkeley and USC.
“He’d have to win a Democratic nomination before a general election,” Schnur said, and more conservative positions on crime, homelessness and transgender sports “might create obstacles for him in a primary, even if they would help him in the November campaign against a Republican opponent.”
Newsom will have to employ a delicate balancing act, he said, to appeal to progressives and moderates without alienating the other group.
Steve Hilton, an Atherton Republican who has filed to run for the California governor’s office said he has his own political peg for Newsom.
“I think the right label for Gavin Newsom is not left or right or moderate, but ineffective,” Hilton said. “We are the worst performing state on nearly everything that matters, the highest poverty rate most of the last year, the highest unemployment rate, the highest taxes, the highest cost for housing, gas, electricity, water — everything that matters.”
It’s too soon to know how politics will play out, how the national economy will fare by 2028, and whether California finally gets a grip on it’s homelessness crisis.
“Well, as Trump likes to say, ‘we’ll see what happens,'” Pitney said. “It’s been a really tough problem in California, and there’s only so much the governor in Sacramento can do. It depends on the implementation at the local level, right?”
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