How the coronavirus crisis gave Gavin Newsom his leadership moment

Gavin Newsom this week declared himself the leader of a “nation-state”.

Speaking on MSNBC, the California governor on Tuesday announced his state would be amassing more than 200m medical-grade masks per month for health workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. After weeks of competing with other states for critical medical equipment, in the absence of strategy and coordination from the federal government, Newsom said he had had enough. So he harnessed the bulk purchasing power of “the state of California as a nation-state” to spend nearly $1bn to work with non-profits and manufacturers to deliver masks for his constituents, and possibly other states.

The next morning, as #PresidentNewsom trended on Twitter, Newsom once again presented the state he leads as a global power. “We need to coordinate and organize our nation-state status,” he told reporters at his daily Covid-19 press briefing. California “has been a catalyst to increase supply that will not only avail itself to the state of California but more broadly across this country and potentially in other parts of the globe”, he added.

Related: Why is California still waiting for nearly 60,000 coronavirus test results?

As the leader of the nation’s most populous state – which, Newsom often likes to point out, would have the world’s fifth-largest economy, if it were a sovereign nation – the governor has often cast himself as a foil to Donald Trump. As the president and the governor bickered, critics in California have lamented that the governor often promised more than he could deliver, and was at times counterproductive by trying to appease too many groups at once. But amid the federal government’s faltering response to the coronavirus crisis, Newsom is getting both local and national recognition for stepping into a leadership vacuum.

After identifying its first cases of Covid-19 in late February, California became the first US state to issue a widespread stay-at-home order on 10 March. Since then, the state has seen more than 20,000 coronavirus cases and 570 deaths – but the death toll appears to be rising more slowly than in hard-hit New York and New Jersey. Public health experts have credited the state’s foresight in enforcing social distancing. The Trump administration’s response meanwhile, has lagged behind, with the president denying the crisis and delaying action even as the national death toll climbed.

Newsom moved into the governor’s mansion in 2018, replacing Jerry Brown – a prominent figure who had dominated California politics since the 1970s. At 52, he has already had a long career in politics and weathered a fair share of scandal. More than 15 years ago, as San Francisco mayor, he made headlines after he defied national law to marry same-sex couples in California. He made national headlines again in 2007 after it was revealed he had an affair with a subordinate, who was also the wife of his chief campaign adviser. At the time, Newsom was separated from Kimberly Guilfoyle – now an adviser to the president, and the partner of his son Donald Trump Jr.

Newsom has tried to cast himself as a young, fresh and progressive leader – whose Silicon Valley-chic contrasts with Brown’s suits and ties. He has also presented himself as the governor of “the most un-Trump state in America” – loudly challenging the Trump administration’s policies on the environment, immigration, healthcare and gun rights – often on the president’s favorite platform: Twitter. Trump, meanwhile, has relished taunting Newsom as an “incompetent governor”, and obsessing over narrow policies that disproportionately affect California.

But amid the coronavirus crisis, rather than fighting the president, Newsom has opted to show him up, in some cases delivering on the president’s empty promises. As Trump blithely reassured, “Just stay calm. It will go away,” Newsom earned praise from public health experts around the country for enforcing strict, early distancing orders. While Trump beat back pleas from governors to send more of the ventilators needed to treat coronavirus patients, Newsom shipped 500 ventilators to seven states. And when the federal government sent faulty equipment, Newsom harnessed the state’s outsized tech industry to quickly fix them.

As the federal government stepped back from the crisis, governors including Newsom, Andrew Cuomo in New York and Jay Inslee in Washington found a national audience of Americans looking for steady administration amid chaos.

Governors across the country have stepped up, said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist who has worked for former president Bill Clinton and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“People look for heroes in times of crisis,” he said. “Americans want that figure, that hero that steps out of the mist and into the sun.” And among the governors, Newsom and Cuomo have shined brightest, per Sheinkopf’s assessment. “Newsom is almost in an attention battle with Andrew Cuomo,” he said. “They could be competitors for the presidential nomination in 2024.”

Newsom has brushed away questions about his presidential aspirations. “This is not political,” he told reporters in California, the day after his MSNBC interview. “This is not in any way, shape or form usurping or undermining. This is all in the spirit of all of us stepping into this moment and doing what we can.”

While Cuomo’s open, emotional briefings have captivated national broadcasters, Newsom’s shewed, steady strategy through the crisis could pay off, said Amanda Renteria, who was the national political director for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and a primary challenger to Newsom in 2018. Newsom made “a big statement” when he made California the first US state to order all residents to stay home, Renteria told the Guardian. “There’s going to be an after-review of how those actions made a difference,” she noted.

Already, public health officials are praising Newsom’s early action. Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has repeatedly held up California as a success story to highlight the effectiveness of distancing measures to “flatten the curve”. Even Donald Trump, who has singled out other Democratic governors as targets during his daily coronavirus briefings, has lauded Newsom. “Gavin Newsom has been terrific,” the president said at a 28 March briefing. A few days later, Trump again admitted, “They’ve done a good job, California.”

“You cannot help but be impressed by his response,” said Bill Whalen, a media consultant for California politicians including the ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I’m not by nature a great fan of his agenda.”

Newsom’s political career going forward will hinge on how well he’s able to sustain the momentum, as Californians continue to weather the pandemic. Already, the same criticisms of his lack of focus and boundless ambition are starting to catch up to him.

His dramatic announcement on national television that he had secured hundreds of millions of medical masks, left many state lawmakers confused, without clarity on the total amount being spent, and without having seen the details of the contracts signed by the administration. And some of the groups that Newsom had apparently included in his deal were blindsided by his announcement.

“The governor has apparently done something extraordinary by making arrangements we were not privy to,” Thomas Tighe, CEO of the California-based not-for-profit Direct Relief, told Calmatters. “But we’re delighted.”

And while California has not seen the surge in coronavirus cases that have overwhelmed cities like New York and Detroit in the past weeks, Newsom has admitted that delays and huge backlogs in coronavirus testing have left Californians with an unclear image of how, exactly, the disease is spreading through the state. The governor said he “owns” the issues with testing, and has developed a taskforce to correct course.

“It’s rare that elected leaders get real-time feedback on how well they led,” Renteria noted. “But now people are getting to know their leaders, and paying attention to what they do in that moment of truth.”