I can’t tell you whether events in California this week will end up making the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, the national spokesman for a revitalized Democratic resistance or a symbol of runaway immigration and social unrest. Like most things political these days, it could tip either way.
Trump is doing Democrats a favor by elevating Newsom
The Democrats will be stronger if their opposition to Trump comes from outside Washington.
June 12, 2025
For most of the past half-century, the most powerful and successful contrasts to any president have come from statehouses, not Congress. The most damning Democratic indictment of Ronald Reagan emerged not from his frenemy in the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., or from his reelection opponent, former vice president Walter F. Mondale. It came from New York’s towering and eloquent governor, Mario Cuomo, whose 1984 convention speech still stands among the century’s best: “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.”
Cuomo never ran for president, but the tantalizing possibility that he might lent an air of intrigue and dynamism to the presidential cycles of 1988 and 1992, when Democrats badly needed a glamorous and cerebral counterweight to Republican presidents. His retreat opened the door for another, lesser-known governor: Bill Clinton, who had for years been making his own compelling case for a new Democratic agenda.
During the Clinton years, when the avatars of Washington Republicans were the heedless Newt Gingrich and the grumbling Robert J. Dole, it was the new wave of more temperate Republican governors — Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, New Jersey’s Christine Todd Whitman, Bill Weld of Massachusetts — who recast the party and cleared the way for one of their own, George W. Bush, to emerge.
In the decades that followed, particularly in the Democratic Party, it became harder for governors to elbow their way into the Washington-based spotlight. In fact, as I noted after the election last year, it has now been nearly 30 years since Democrats have nominated any presidential candidate who did not first serve in the Senate.
That probably had a lot to do with the rise of cable news and then social media, which instantly amplified the voices of celebrity insiders and provocateurs and made it harder for most governors to get an introduction. It’s also because Democrats seemed to misread the meaning of Barack Obama’s success; they thought he had made the Senate cool again, when in fact most Americans saw Obama more as a cultural icon than a legislator.
Whatever the reasons, statehouses lost their luster, while Democrats cycled through leaders (John F. Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris) who underscored the party’s central problem — more than messaging or money or all the other things you might hear about at monotonous dinner parties these days. The bottom line is that Democrats keep trotting out their Washington insiders when the last thing most voters are looking for is more of the same.
But now here comes the blustering Trump, offering a lifeline. Trump and his party are far from popular by any standard, but up to now they’ve been doing just fine compared with an opposition that’s old, familiar and mostly ineffectual. You’d think Trump would want to keep his culture-baiting focus on national Democrats, who have an approval rating somewhere south of the Baltimore Orioles’ front office.
But no. By sending troops into California and challenging the sovereignty of states, Trump seems poised to do for Democrats what they can’t do for themselves, which is to provide a national hearing for a pretty deep bench of governors — a group that includes (but isn’t limited to) Newsom, Colorado’s Jared Polis, Illinois’ JB Pritzker, Maryland’s Wes Moore, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear.
Maybe Newsom emerges from this standoff in Los Angeles as a kind of Mario Cuomo for this moment. (Washington Democrats like to dismiss Newsom as a slippery shape-shifter, but with his colossal state and political hubris to match, I take him seriously.) What would be even better, it seems to me, is if he and other governors could actually put their egos aside and band together for once, the way their predecessors sometimes did, to present a united alternative to both Trumpism and their own party’s tired establishment.
Could Newsom and other Democrats in the states provide a better alternative to Trump than the party’s better-known leaders? It would be nice to find out. And we know one thing for sure: They couldn’t do much worse.