September 15 2026 - 6:00pm
It was like a scene from The Office. Half-submerged in Montana’s Bitterroot River, fiddling with bait on his fishing rod, Gavin Newsom made a confession to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I wouldn’t run if [Kamala Harris] ran,” he declared. “Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to her… I won’t waste everyone’s time.” Tapper stared at Newsom with bovine incomprehension, before the California Governor continued. “I know her base of supporters, I know her friends, the [Venn] diagram on that is just pure crossover,” he said. “Every other Democrat is praying for that, and every other Republican is gonna pray for that. And that’s just not gonna happen.”
Newsom’s coyness about a presidential run has been a long-running theme of his shadow campaign. After surging ahead in the polls last year, it seemed as though an announcement would be a formality. Despite fretting in September 2025 that there might not even be an election in 2028, Newsom teased just a month later that he was, in fact, considering a run. But then he pulled back again this year, saying that any talk about the presidency was “wildly premature”. He added that his children have a veto — and two of them are firmly opposed.
Newsom obviously wants to run. He has jumped through all the requisite hoops for a presidential campaign: the heartfelt memoir, gladhanding in swing states, trout fishing with journalists. What’s more, the ongoing DoJ probe into his administration could give Newsom a Trump-style boost, allowing him to cast the federal investigation into his finances and travel as unjust lawfare. As the case of Mark Kelly shows, becoming public enemy no 1 of the Trump administration pays dividends.
But does he have a point about Harris? The RealClearPolitics poll of polls currently shows the former vice president leading Newsom nationally by roughly 10 points. She remains extremely popular with the party, and would have a significant chunk of the black vote — a key Democratic demographic — in her corner. If the Democratic primary begins in the heavily black state of South Carolina, Newsom would be in trouble.
The bigger problem for Newsom, however, isn’t Harris. It’s Gavin Newsom. Amid the rise of the DSA and a bubbling anti-establishment fury coursing through the Democratic base, there is little appetite for a man who has spent most of his life inside the Californian political machine. His repeated flip-flopping on several key issues, not least Israel, has angered moderates and progressives. His anti-Trump trolling on X, once so relentless, now looks puerile compared with the recent speeches by Jon Ossoff, a swing-state senator who has proven far more adept at articulating the grievances of Democratic voters. In trying to be all things to all men, Newsom has effectively ceded the ground to his rivals.
During his fly-fishing expedition with Tapper, the California Governor explained why he didn’t run in 2024. “I wasn’t ready,” he said. “I would have gotten crushed because I didn’t have a why. You don’t have big enough why, then you don’t belong there.” Tellingly, Newsom never offered up his own why. Perhaps, deep down, he knows there isn’t one.
