Gavin Newsom keeps weathering crisis and winning big. Does he deserve to do it again?

The political evidence of Gavin Newsom’s success is — pardon our Newsomese — iterative.

In 2018, Newsom was vying to succeed Jerry Brown from the modest perch of lieutenant governor, hardly a launching pad to the political stars. Every aspirant in the state had a fair shot at the former San Francisco mayor, including a prominent Democrat and the best California Republicans could muster, which didn’t turn out to be saying much. Newsom won in a landslide over John Cox, a perennial candidate with a pronounced Chicago accent, claiming 62% of the vote.

Three years later, thanks to the quirks of California democracy, an even more ecumenical field of challengers got another chance at the first-term governor to just as little avail. Almost as if Newsom’s popularity were a replicable experiment, he once again walked away with 62% of the ballots.

A year later, Newsom’s last remaining obstacle to a second four-year term is Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle. And Dahle, the recent recipient of an unexpectedly controversial slaughtered goat, is by all indications his party’s latest sacrificial lamb. Newsom is so assured of victory that he has spent much of the season conducting a proto-presidential campaign.

So doesn’t all this decisive political success suggest Newsom is doing something right? While Dahle allowed only that the governor is “good at getting elected,” correctly noting his failure to make a dent in homelessness and more, Newsom’s political success isn’t a complete accident. His tenure has been replete with achievement as well as turmoil.

The defining crisis of Newsom’s term was, as defining crises often are, a wholly unexpected one: the pandemic. Indeed, his handling of COVID became the post hoc rationale of his most avid opponents in the recall attempt.

It was an unconvincing cause. Newsom had led the nation in dialing back economic activity and requiring other precautions, difficult decisions that likely saved thousands of lives. In the context of a disastrous national response, California weathered the pandemic with fewer deaths per capita than any of the dozen most populous states. Ninety-five thousand Californians have died of COVID, but we would have lost an additional 30,000 at the national rate, 35,000 at Florida’s and 42,000 at Arizona’s.

Newsom’s pandemic management was, like much of his governorship, certainly messy, marred by frenetic policy shifts, dodgy contracting and of course his infamous adventure in bare-faced fine dining. But his administration’s success in protecting Californians is convincing.

The same cannot be said of the crisis Newsom and everyone else expected to define his term: housing and homelessness. Despite his subsequently qualified, modified and all but denied pledge to bring about a dramatic revival of housing production, he has done no such thing. California continues to build at an anemic pace, with consequentially soaring prices, poverty and homelessness.

The state’s homeless population appears only to have grown, with alarming increases in the Bay Area early in Newsom’s term having given way to similarly disturbing numbers in the capital region more recently. That’s despite the dedication of some $14 billion in spending to alleviating homelessness over the past two years and a massive pandemic-era effort to provide shelter to about 60,000 homeless Californians in hotels and motels. The administration’s latest response to the problem, a new court focused on severely mentally ill and often homeless people, seems unlikely to significantly reduce the state’s unsheltered masses, who make up a majority of those sleeping outdoors nationwide.

And yet after watching a series of consequential housing bills die over the last four years, Newsom signed the most important housing measures of his governorship this week, one to streamline residential redevelopment of disused commercial properties and another to undo anti-housing parking requirements. Coupled with last year’s bill to unravel the most restrictive residential zoning and an increase in state housing requirements, the bills could begin to mitigate decades of obstruction and ease prices and homelessness. So could the administration’s recent moves to challenge ostensibly progressive cities such as San Francisco for maintaining reactionary anti-development policies.

“I have got to drive accountability much more aggressively,” Newsom told McClatchy’s California editorial boards when asked about housing and homelessness. “I mean business on this. ... No excuses anymore.”

Newsom has compiled a record of similarly qualified but undeniable progress in other arenas. Despite a backward push to reward car ownership with gas rebates and extend the life of the unnecessarily risky Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, he set important clean energy and transportation goals and took the overdue step of requiring buffer zones between oil wells and homes. Although he has been caught exaggerating the state’s forestry achievements and helped keep the state’s most pyromaniacal utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., in business, he has invested substantially in effective wildfire prevention and is presiding over a relatively muted fire season.

Newsom also fell short of a promise to usher in single-payer care but extended health coverage to undocumented immigrants, making it universal. And while his failure to prevent the far-reaching harms of California’s excessive school closures is a dark mark on his education record, he did sign legislation extending access to crucial early childhood education and expanding parental leave to care for newborns.

The governor’s opponent argues that “the problem with Gavin Newsom is there is no plan. There’s a lot of money being thrown around and a lot of talk.” Dahle expects the state to face a bleak future and a gathering exodus thanks to the lingering housing and homelessness problem, overbearing regulation and taxation, an expected economic downturn and rising crime.

A veteran state legislator and farmer from remote Lassen County, Dahle is longer on diagnoses than prescriptions. He decries runaway housing costs even as he fiercely defends the local control that suppresses needed development. His first answer to homelessness is increased drug enforcement, a strategy this country has thoroughly tested and discredited for half a century.

That said, Dahle is among the better Republican statewide candidates on this and a few preceding ballots. He is experienced, knowledgeable and moderate in temperament and politics. His underfunded, underexposed, underdog status is less his fault than that of his party, which seems increasingly incapable of recognizing and backing a decent candidate when it has one. That dearth of viable opposition is another key ingredient of Newsom’s success.

For his part, the governor has enough work to do here in California to knock off his carping at Republicans in Florida and Democrats in Washington. But he has accomplished more than enough not just to win but to deserve another term.

This story was originally published October 2, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Gavin Newsom keeps weathering crisis and winning big. Does he deserve to do it again?."