President Donald Trump portrays Gavin Newsom’s California as a dystopian hellscape of garbage, homelessness and wildfires, where people are voting with their feet by leaving.
But the Democrats running to succeed Newsom have also painted a portrait of a state in decline. Though they don’t often mention Newsom by name, their campaigns have centered on the state’s struggles with affordability and accountability — implicitly pointing to Newsom’s failure to make good on some of the audacious promises he made when he first ran.
It’s the first draft of the playbook Democratic rivals will use against Newsom if — as widely expected — he makes a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. Newsom’s 7 ½ years as governor have been defined by his ambition and the lofty goals he set to solve the state’s problems with housing, homelessness and health care. But his hopes have often collided with the complexity of solving California’s most entrenched problems, even as he has governed in a state with a Democratic supermajority.
The slate of Democratic candidates for governor seized on the disconnect.
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Casting his ballot last week during early voting, billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer argued that he would need to make deep structural changes “so that Californians can afford to live in California,” flicking at the tens of thousands of people moving out of the state due to costs.
When Xavier Becerra was asked during a recent forum why California spent $24 billion on homelessness between 2018 and 2023 only to see the unsheltered population grow, he replied that the state “didn’t focus on outcomes” and that “accountability wasn’t there.”
And San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s stinging descriptions of California’s challenges could well end up in a future attack ad. In his closing argument the weekend before the primary, he described California as having one of the highest effective poverty rates, one of the highest unemployment rates and among the highest energy costs “despite nearly doubling the size of government in less than a decade.”
As a darling of Democrats nationally, Newsom is armed with his own very loud megaphone in his relentless campaign to take on the president. Now, he is aggressively pushing back against the beleaguered image of his state, as he satirically adopts some of Trump’s own language by calling the criticism “California Derangement Syndrome.”
In recent speeches and forums, he has played up California’s economic “dominance” as the fourth-largest economy in the world, noting that it has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, two-thirds of the nation’s venture capital investment and the most Nobel laureates.
Newsom frequently rattles off a rapid-fire list of policies he has implemented to help lower- and middle-income families reduce their costs. He points to recent wage increases, free diapers for newborns, his successful push for universal transitional kindergarten and the creation of nearly a half-million subsidized child care slots for low- or moderate-income families. Though he abandoned his campaign pledge to implement a single-payer health care system in California, he has argued that California has come close to achieving universal health care coverage, with an uninsured rate that dropped to about 6% in 2025.
“No state is helping families at the scale California is,” his office wrote recently on X.
When Newsom ran for governor in 2018, he set goals on housing and homelessness that even he called “audacious.” While his allies point out that the roots of those problems go back decades in California, Steven Maviglio, a California Democratic strategist, argued that “there was an issue of overpromising and underdelivering.”
Chief among Newsom’s promises was his now-abandoned pledge to drive the construction of 3.5 million housing units by 2025 to deal with California’s housing shortage. It would have required at least quadrupling the pace of building, a goal that many housing experts considered unachievable.
Instead, state data shows new housing permits are still hovering around 100,000 a year — about the same level as when Newsom took office in 2019. The California Department of Housing and Community Development acknowledges that ongoing production “continues to fall far below the projected need,” which it estimates is about 180,000 homes annually. And the most recent statewide housing plan created a much longer runway for progress, calling for permitting 2.5 million new housing units by 2030 (when Newsom will be long gone).
The Democratic gubernatorial candidates also drew attention to a 2025 RAND study that found that the cost of building multifamily housing is 2.3 times higher in California than in Texas. The same study found that the time to bring a project to completion is 22 months longer in California than in Texas.
On the campaign trail, former Rep. Katie Porter advocated for requiring new housing permits to be issued within 30 days and for the state to do more to limit fees on new projects. She argued that developers face an impossible level of uncertainty and a mountain of fees from local jurisdictions. “Pretty soon the project is unaffordable,” she said during a housing forum with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein.
But some lawmakers who have worked closely with Newsom in Sacramento argue that the figures cited by the candidates mask the extensive work Newsom and his allies have done to help pare back the thicket of state regulations and permitting hurdles that have slowed home construction in California.
“Decades and decades of laws designed to slow construction have achieved their purpose,” Buffy Wicks, a Democratic state assembly member, said in an interview. Wicks has driven many of the recent pro-housing reforms in the state legislature. “We have spent the last six to eight years trying to dismantle a lot of that.”
The governor has “used his political capital in ways that have been profound,” Wicks added.
Last year, Newsom and Wicks worked with other pro-housing legislators like state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, to push through reforms exempting certain urban housing projects from the complex regulations in the California Environmental Quality Act as well as a controversial proposal aimed at expediting the construction of high-density housing near transit hubs.
To reduce housing construction costs, Newsom and his allies are now turning their focus to pressuring cities and counties to stop charging development “impact fees” that they levy on state-funded affordable-housing projects. As part of his new budget proposal, Newsom also warned that the state’s largest cities and counties will need to start contributing a local match in order to draw down flexible housing and homelessness money from the state to show they have “skin in the game.”
Earlier this year, Newsom threatened to sue 15 cities and counties that were not moving ahead with plans to create more affordable housing in their communities. Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta also successfully sued the conservative city of Huntington Beach for failing to comply with state housing laws, which Newsom chalked up to “pathetic NIMBY behavior.” Under a new state law signed by the governor, the court has ordered the city to pay $160,000 in fines and an additional $50,000 each month for failing to comply with state housing laws.
“The governor has really prioritized enforcement and accountability, and it’s sent a real clear signal to cities that if you blow off these laws, there are going to be consequences,” said Wiener, who authored the law to impose penalties on cities that were falling behind. “We have been step-by-step been restructuring the system.”
“It was a 50-year problem,” Wiener said in an interview. “It’s not going to take us 50 years to solve it, but it’s not going to take a few years either.”
Along with housing costs, California voters expressed frustration throughout the gubernatorial campaign with what they view as a lack of visible progress in reducing the state’s homeless population despite the tens of billions of dollars Newsom has directed toward the problem. While California accounts for about 12% of the nation’s population, it continues to have about 43% of the country’s unsheltered population.
New data released last week by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development may help the governor make his case. It showed a modest 2.8% drop in homelessness in California between 2024 and 2025, and a 6.8% dip in unsheltered homelessness. Declines in the overall homeless population were more significant in New York, Illinois, Florida and Hawaii, but homelessness increased in 28 states during that period.
In his state of the state address earlier this year, Newsom pointed to more dramatic drops in homelessness in specific areas like Los Angeles (a 10.3% reduction) and Contra Costa County (a 34.8% decline) based on the state’s internal data.
“Our investments are paying off,” Newsom said in the address.
The governor declined an interview request about his legacy. His spokesperson Tara Gallegos argued that candidates will advance “a scrutiny narrative now, only so they can later take credit for what this administration had already set in motion.”
“The writing is already on the wall, Newsom strategies are turning this crisis around,” she said.
Still, several of the gubernatorial candidates — including Becerra, Mahan and Republican Steve Hilton — argued that there was not enough accountability measuring outcomes from Newsom’s historic early investments in homelessness.
One frequent topic on the campaign trail was a 2024 state audit that found the state lacked “current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs” after spending more than $24 billion during the five-year period between 2018 and 2023.
That led the Newsom administration to build a new data-integration system to give them a clear lens on what local governments were spending their homeless funding on to help steer future dollars. The Newsom administration also created an accountability website where Californians can sort by county and track how much progress they’re making in reducing unsheltered homelessness and how many affordable housing units are being built in each jurisdiction.
The visibility into those numbers is intended to hold those cities and counties to account for the dollars they are spending and “who is actually producing results,” Newsom said during a recent budget presentation.
Allies of the governor say he ultimately may be judged less on individual investments than the structural policy changes he has presided over — from a statewide policy aimed at resolving homeless encampments to major changes in the state’s antiquated mental health system and its conservatorship laws that Newsom hopes will end up moving many more unhoused people into treatment.
Jason Elliott, who was the governor’s top advisor on homelessness, noted that a 2024 ballot proposition that Newsom championed devotes $4 billion to building and rehabilitating both residential and outpatient mental-health-treatment beds. Another $2 billion from that bond will be directed toward permanent supportive housing. Starting in July, counties must also begin spending a third of the money they draw down from the state to house people with mental illness.
“One of the challenging things about working in homeless policy is that the right thing to do is not necessarily the thing that yields the fastest visible results,” Elliott said. He noted that the administration has tried to both address the immediate problems like dangerous encampments while also making long-term structural changes to address the mental health challenges so many homeless people experience.
“If you Rip Van Winkle and wake up 10 years from now, I think you’re going to observe a very different, much more effective mental health and homeless system,” Elliott said. “Ten years is way too long for anybody to wait, so there’s all this interim work that’s happening: clearing encampments, building interim housing, deploying tiny homes to make sure that we’re not just waiting five or ten years for a solution.”
Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican strategist, said Newsom’s rivals, both Democrats and Republicans, will have plenty of vulnerabilities to target if he runs for the White House in 2028.
“He’s going to leave California without achieving what he wanted, not even close on housing, and he’s going to leave energy prices potentially in crisis,” Stutzman said, noting the average price of gas in California has soared to $6 a gallon, in part because of Trump’s war with Iran. Because of the rising cost of living, he said, “People are choosing not to live here.”
“That’s Newsom’s problem,” Stutzman said. “All these specific issues add up. And I think it’s just the stone that you can’t roll up to the top of the mountain.”
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