Newsom is acting like he is running for president sooner rather than later

You can call it a backup campaign or wishful thinking, but Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) actions make it clear that he wants to run for president sooner rather than later.

Newsom recently vetoed two radical bills that came through California’s Democratic-dominated legislature. The first was a bill that specified that judges must consider separating parents from their children in custody battles if the parents oppose permanently disfiguring their children in the name of transgenderism. The second was a bill that would prohibit the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from informing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when an illegal immigrant was convicted of a crime so he or she could be deported.

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That Newsom would veto either bill is a welcome development, but even his veto messages make it clear where his support lies. He praised the “passion and values that led” to legislatures trying to separate parents from their children based on transgender ideology and boasted that CDCR already limits its cooperation with ICE. But Newsom has his eyes on the presidency, which is why he has continued to carve out a more “centrist” posture after years of dutifully serving as a cog in the progressive California machine.

Consider some of Newsom’s other recent actions. He condemned the courts (and, by extension, Democratic-appointed judges) for not letting San Francisco clear homeless encampments. He has led California’s backpedal from its renewable energy pipe dream by expanding “dirty” energy to avoid more bad headlines about blackouts. He has tried to whitewash his pandemic record and plans to travel to China to try and get the Chinese Communist Party to care about climate change.

On top of it all, Newsom will be debating Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), a top presidential contender, at the end of November as the primary cycle heats up. That move specifically was reported to have rankled the teams of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

It isn’t hard to see why Newsom is getting his ducks in a row. Biden is old and increasingly unpopular, with almost no redeeming qualities to voters besides the fact that he isn’t former President Donald Trump. Even then, the strength of that one point is fading as Biden’s polls continue to tank. And Harris happens to be one of the few Democrats who is more unpopular than Biden. Newsom can see the blood in the water because everyone can see it, so he wants to clean up his radical-progressive record ahead of a potential campaign launch.

Newsom is running out of time to actually jump into the race, but whether he is seriously considering it or just preparing a Democratic National Committee-approved backup campaign, it is clear that he wants to be president. It’s also clear, thanks to his recent attempts to buck the California Democratic Party, that his eyes are on 2024, not 2028, whether he wants to admit it or not.

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