Gavin Newsom must be the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. I’m a big fan.

Every time I see Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, I get excited about him running for president in 2028 as the Democratic nominee. There’s no other potential Democratic candidate who makes me feel that way.

Kamala Harris? Been there and done that.
Gretchen Whitmer? She’s vanished in the Michigan wilderness.
Josh Shapiro? Too calculating and unnatural.
Cory Booker? Holier than thou attitude that turns me off.
Mark Kelly? Nice guy who lacks charisma.

By contrast, Gavin Newsom is appealingly real. He comes across as genuine, a rare quality in a politician of his stature. I just watched a recording of Friday’s Real Time With Bill Maher show. Newsom was the featured pre-panelist guest. Here’s a clip from that interview. Newsom comes across as my dream candidate for president: aggressive against Trump, personable, well-spoken, energetic, knowledgeable.

If you want to really get a feel for who Gavin Newsom is, I highly recommend an in-depth profile of him by Nathan Heller in the February 9, 2026 issue of The New Yorker titled The Long Game: Gavin Newsom has spent a lifetime striving to be the Democrats’ future. Has his moment arrived? Here’s a PDF file of the online version with a slightly different title.
Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Long Game | The New Yorker

Some excerpts:

For years, Newsom has cultivated the air of an accidental politician. He notes that, in his twenties, he was a wine entrepreneur: with support from the dynastic businessman and composer Gordon Getty, he launched a wine shop, then a café, and then a vineyard and other projects, called PlumpJack (a Falstaff epithet, in “Henry IV, Part 1”).

Today, he owns, partly in a blind trust designed to avoid conflicts of interest, stakes in offshoot enterprises with names like the Falstaff Management Group, Inc. He tells people that, if his political career ended tomorrow, he would return to life in business, and what a mercy that would be. But the feint convinces almost no one, because Newsom is perhaps the least Falstaffian man in wine.

He starts texting at seven in the morning. He dresses each day as if for the meeting that will change his life. His holdings earn him, passively, more than a million dollars a year, enough to live on and more, and yet there he is, week after week, taking notes in policy binders, standing in the sun along the border—a guy so all in for the public grind, it seems, that he has turned even the simple pleasures in life, like poking fun at the President’s unhinged posts, into a statehouse chore.

In 1996, when Newsom first entered public office, at the age of twenty-eight, there was a feeling that he would flourish without ascending to the top—too slick, too swank, too smug, too hard for regular people to connect with. (As one of his opponents at the time put it to me, “He was misguided and élite.”) Three decades later, that criticism is unchanged, but his prospects have transformed.

Newsom, now fifty-eight, has never lost an election. He has spent more than twenty consecutive years in executive office, and is finishing his second term as the leader of the most populous and powerful state in the Union. His approval ratings drift like summer clouds above fifty per cent, and his congressional-redistricting campaign is central to the Democrats’ play for power this fall. During what was expected to be his lame-duck year, the Governor is accelerating, leaving observers with a newly urgent version of a lasting question: What, exactly, is Gavin Newsom in it for?

…Given that Newsom has openly taken on Trump; that he is ambitious, relentless, and connected; that he is not yet sixty, with four children and a wife who increasingly makes speeches alongside him; that he has written a bootstraps memoir; and that he has not had a month out of office in thirty years, many people are certain that he plans to run for President in 2028. Newsom has not refuted the possibility. “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he said last summer—a rumination that some found comically understated.

“He had that I-want-to-be-a-President vibe twenty-five years ago,” Peskin, who recalled entering Newsom’s supervisor office for the first time and coming face to face with a bust of J.F.K., told me. In 2004, Nancy Pelosi told this magazine that she thought about a Newsom Presidency. (Recently, she told me that she had no memory of saying so, then added, “I do know, from the standpoint of leadership, vision, and values, knowledge of the issues, strategic thinking about how to get things done . . . he’s masterful.”) Others are less circumspect. Wiener told me, “He’d probably kill me for saying this, but I think he’s going to run.” Willie Brown said, matter-of-factly, “I think he’s had that in mind from Day One.”

Newsom, who dutifully records every explanation he hears for the Democrats’ losses in 2024 on a list that now runs to twenty-seven pages, is routinely described as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination—an odd claim about a race in which nobody is yet running.

…No one who meets with Newsom walks away without a list of policy programs that must be handled more effectively. Late last year, he assembled a team to pore over the policy platforms of candidates running for California governor this fall and to see whether there were ideas that he could take up and put into practice before the end of the year. All his political life, he said, people have been telling him to focus; all his political life, he has refused. “We don’t have the luxury of that,” he told me in his office. “Foster care matters, as much as child care matters, as much as prenatal care matters, as much as preschool matters, as much as preventable-disease and chronic-disease management matter, as much as—” He paused for breath. His arms were in the air, and he was almost dancing.

“Geez!” he exclaimed, as if suddenly overcome by an idea. “I wish I was running for governor again!”

I’m glad you’re not, Gavin, because you’re term-limited and need to start focusing on your campaign to become the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. I’ll miss your tweets as Governor that do a great job of satirizing Trump’s megalomania. This is a recent example, a take-off of Trump putting his photo on American passports.