California Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed on Sunday that he was specifically considering a bid for president in 2028, but added that he was focused on helping his party win seats in Congress in the upcoming midterms first.
Newsom spoke with Robert Costa on CBS’s Sunday Morning and discussed his bid to bring his brand to a national stage, including to red and purple states. The two spoke in California but Newsom was as recently as July in South Carolina — a red state, and also a pivotal early primary state on the Democratic Party election calendar.
The governor explained that his focus was on the midterms, for now, but told Costa he’d be “lying” if he said he wasn’t going to consider running for president after the 2026 elections.
“The idea that you’d even throw that [possibility] out is in and of itself extraordinary. Who the hell knows. I’m looking forward to who presents themselves in 2028, and who meets that moment,” Newsom told Costa of running for president in 2028, before being pressed on whether he’d consider it after next year.
“Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise. I’d just be lying. And I can’t do that.”
The governor went on to say that “fate will determine” if he finds what he calls a “compelling ‘why’”, or a message central to a political effort on the national stage that would help him find success in a tough presidential election year.
Any Democrat who runs in 2028 is likely to face Donald Trump’s chosen scion, be it Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or another conservative Trump-aligned candidate. They’ll also face the near-certain prospect of a crowded Democratic primary field in a year as the party’s base fumes over their leaders’ botched handling of the 2024 election campaign.
The governor himself has also warned that the president will try to run for a third term, a warning echoed by a gleeful Steve Bannon in an interview this past week.
Newsom is one of a short list of Democratic leaders at the state level who’ve emerged as possible contenders for the top spot on the 2028 ticket, with others including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — though Moore seemingly ruled out running for president in September, choosing instead to focus on a second term. Former Vice President Kamala Harris confirmed to the BBC in an interview last week that she was also considering a 2028 bid.
In Congress, several young party members are also emerging as stalwarts, holding out against the supercharged right-wing agenda of the second Trump administration, thereby allowing them to build their own national prominence. In the Senate, Democrats like Chris Murphy, Ruben Gallego, and Jon Ossoff have been floated as potential party leaders.
California has allowed Newsom an oversized stage to grow his own brand on the left; however, as Donald Trump and his allies across the administration have made challenging the leaders of blue states like his a priority.
Earlier this year, the president battled with Newsom in court over the deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles to protect ICE agents performing immigration raids and facilities housing detainees and personnel. He’s now teeing up another fight over sending in soldiers to San Francisco. However, the Republican president backed off from those threats this past week after a conversation with the city’s Democratic mayor.
Absent another direct fight with the White House over the militarized occupation of American cities, the governor is picking a different battle with the broader GOP as he fired the opening shot of the Democratic response to Republican mid-decade redistricting efforts, a bid by Trump-aligned state leaders to engineer more House seats for a slim Republican majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
With Texas’s legislature voting for new maps aiming to shift as many as five seats into GOP hands, the California governor returned with his own bid to scrub out an equal number of GOP-held seats in his state. Officials in both parties in states around the country are now scrambling to find their own responses to the escalating gerrymandering conflict, under respective pressures from the Republican president and a furious Democratic Party voter base.
“Wake up America,” Newsom warned in August at an event announcing his redistricting moves. “This is serious moment. Wake up to what's going on. Wake up to the fear, the anxiety. Wake up to what's happening.”
A dancing Trump arrives in Malaysia to kick off Asia tour
Trump’s final words on Jan 6 to Mike Pence revealed
Trump showcases trademark dance moves as he lands in Malaysia
Ukraine war latest: Trump ‘mulling further sanctions’ on Putin’s war machine
Which countries buy Russian oil – and what impact will sanctions have?
ICE removes MGMT’s ‘Little Dark Age’ from ‘propaganda’ post after band hits back
