Inside Gavin Newsom's brush with failure

California Gov. Gavin Newsom may have found his footing on the national stage, but he could be on shaky political ground back home, according to a POLITICO analysis of how his signature ballot measure fared in different counties across the state in last month’s primary.

Newsom went all-in on Proposition 1, a costly proposal to combat the state’s homelessness crisis by restructuring its mental health services. Newsom made himself the face of Prop 1, starring in ads and leading a get-out-the-vote tour ahead of California’s March 5 primary. The campaign amounted to a tug-of-war with only one side pulling the rope: the Yes on 1 committee headed by Newsom outspent the disorganized opposition by more than 13,000 to 1.

Prop 1 ultimately passed — but barely, despite polls showing strong initial backing for the proposal. The razor-thin margin for the $6.4 billion bond, less than 30,000 votes in a state of 40 million, shocked California’s political world as a stumble for Newsom, who comfortably defeated a recall effort in 2021 and won a second term the following year before seeing his approval ratings drop to new lows this winter.

“When you’re in a strong blue state and you put a bond on the ballot geared toward solving voters’ number-one issue,” said Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo, “and it barely passes, I think it says more about [his] political strategy and less about the actual issue.”

A POLITICO analysis of county-level returns on Prop 1, officially certified last week by the secretary of state’s office, found that the measure underperformed Newsom’s support levels in the 2021 recall in 49 of California’s 58 counties. Taken together, the figures illustrate that Newsom was unable to reactivate the coalition that handed him a streak of landslide victories in statewide races since 2010 and established him as a formidable future contender for the presidency.

Prop 1 received significantly less support across both Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area than Newsom did in 2021 — two parts of the state that constitute what veteran California pollster Mark DiCamillo calls “the ultimate base of Democratic support” — while overperforming Newsom’s 2021 finish in the state’s rural northeast, a region where Democrats typically struggle.

A number of factors, including a high-profile Senate primary and the lack of a competitive presidential contest, helped shape the electorate that turned out for (and against) Prop 1 in March. Those dynamics produced a smaller, more conservative electorate that is markedly different than the voters who cast a ballot for Newsom against the recall, the only item on the statewide ballot for the September 2021 special election. (A higher share of voters turned out then than did for the midterm elections a little more than a year later.)

In the final years of his tenure as governor, Newsom is looking to build his national profile and cement a legacy on California’s biggest policy issues via the state’s ballot-measure system. Understanding where he has drawn support in past races, and where he struggled to get the necessary backing for Prop 1, gives some indications as to where the California politician’s mobilization and persuasion effort for the measure fell short.

In that sense, the Prop 1 results demonstrate the limits of Newsom’s ability to influence voter behavior when he’s not on the ballot himself — particularly as he faces a growing state budget deficit, and as various Democratic constituencies hope to pass bonds this November on everything from climate to school funding to housing.

Newsom's coalition, then and now

California Democrats typically win statewide races by racking up votes along the Pacific Coast, from rural Humboldt County in the north down through the San Francisco Bay Area all the way to Los Angeles. The sparsely populated northeast and the Central Valley, as well as San Diego and suburban Orange County in Southern California, tend to be tougher terrain for Democratic candidates and causes.

Newsom, who served two terms as lieutenant governor before winning his first gubernatorial term in 2018, faced a recall effort led by those upset by his strict Covid-19 measures and his attendance at a group dinner during a surge of the pandemic. In his campaign to defeat the recall, Newsom framed the 2021 vote as a highly partisan effort by national Republicans to sabotage him and the progress California was making under his leadership.

Their strategy worked: Nearly 8 million voters, or 62 percent, cast their ballots for Newsom that September and helped him defeat the recall effort by nearly 24 percentage points. The following year, Newsom won a second term by a margin almost as large.

In those races, Newsom turned out the traditional Democratic electorate to great effect. More than half of Newsom’s votes came from running up his totals in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, the populous regions home to nearly half the state’s 40 million people. He won by landslide margins in those areas, with support running as high as 86.1 percent in San Francisco County, where he first launched his political career and served as mayor.

Yes on 1’s ad placements indicate the extent to which Newsom’s advisers used those results to guide their strategy this year. The committee spent heavily in the areas where the governor has drawn support in the past, according to data compiled by the tracking service AdImpact, showing viewers in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and along the coast an ad that featured Newsom. More conservative parts of the state, including around Sacramento and the Central Valley, were shown one featuring county sheriffs praising the measure.

Prop 1, by contrast, passed with just 50.2 percent percent of the vote statewide, carrying majorities in Los Angeles County and the nine counties that make up the Bay Area: Support ranged from 51.1 percent in Solano County, in the northern Bay Area, to 73.1 percent in San Francisco County, its strongest showing in the state. (The measure won above 50 percent in just six other counties: Santa Cruz, Monterey, Humboldt, Mendocino, Yolo and Sacramento, all either along the Pacific Coast or adjacent to the Bay Area.)

But in each case, the vote percentages for Prop 1 were significantly lower than those for Newsom in the 2021 recall, illustrating the areas in which differences between the two electorates were sharpest. In San Mateo County, wedged between San Francisco and the heart of Silicon Valley, support for Prop 1 was 20.8 percentage points lower than support for Newsom in 2021; in nearby Alameda County, it was 19.3 points lower; in Santa Clara County, it was 18.5 points lower.

The county with the biggest drop-off in support was Santa Cruz County, a coastal, forested region just south of the Bay Area: There, Prop 1 underperformed Newsom’s 2021 totals by 23.6 percentage points.

Still, even if the overall vote in favor was significantly below what Newsom won in his recall vote, the margin for Prop 1 in a handful of populous Bay Area counties — including San Francisco and Alameda, where Prop 1 got 61.9 percent of the vote — arguably helped give measure the votes needed to put it over the top.

"Even despite a rough statewide electorate, L.A. and Bay Area counties carried Prop 1 to victory," said longtime Newsom adviser Nathan Click. "And these were the markets where the governor was the primary messenger."

The only area where Prop 1 performed better than Newsom in the 2021 recall was the rural northeast, where support for Democrats is typically low. In Lassen County, for example, along California’s northern border with Nevada, Prop 1 overperformed Newsom by 8 points; in Shasta County, just west of Lassen, Prop 1 overperformed by 6.1 points.

This is the part of the state, though, where Newsom received his lowest support in 2021 — it did not take much to outdo the 2021 result. In Lassen County that year, just 15.8 percent of the electorate cast a ballot for Newsom; in this March’s primary, 23.8 percent voted for Prop 1.

It is also where the Yes on 1 campaign did not air any ads at all.

Why Prop 1 fell short

After helping usher his mental health package through the Legislature last summer, Newsom faced a choice about when to put it before voters. (Their approval was necessary because the law both amended a policy established by an earlier ballot measure and included a bond issue.)

If the measure went up for a vote in March, it would face a primary electorate that is always smaller and more conservative than turnout for general elections. If Newsom’s campaign had waited until November, it was likely to share the statewide ballot with several other bond measures. That juxtaposition might have turned off voters wary of authorizing too much government spending at once, and the competition for voter attention would have likely made the race more costly.

“Was it a risk going in March? Yes. But there was a strong bipartisan coalition behind Prop 1,” Anthony York, one of Newsom’s closest advisers on the Prop 1 campaign, said at a POLITICO event in late March. “If we wanted to do it the easy way we would have spent more money. We would have done it in November.”

Elections are won or lost on a combination of mobilization and persuasion: After taking political ownership of the measure, Newsom’s task was to both convince voters the $6.4 billion bond was good policy and also that it was important enough to drive them to the polls.

Early public polling showed overwhelming support for the measure, as high as 68 percent support in late 2023. But below those impressive top-line numbers hid reasons for concern. In February, the Public Policy Institute of California asked voters whether they thought March was the right time for a spending measure like Prop 1. Nearly half of them, or 48 percent, said it wasn’t.

Newsom’s advisers have said the measure was never as popular as public surveys showed. But they largely attributed Prop 1’s narrower-than-expected victory to unexpectedly low turnout in the March primary. Just 35 percent of eligible voters showed up to the polls in March — significantly below the 2021 recall vote, which reached 58 percent.

Turnout in this year’s primary was also 3.4 percentage points lower than in 2020’s, when there was a competitive Democratic presidential contest on the ballot. A similar measure, a school funding bond backed by Newsom, struggled that March even with slightly higher turnout: The measure failed, winning just 47 percent of the vote.

The results of both the 2020 school bond and this year’s Prop 1 indicate how difficult it is for a state-level politician like Newsom to shape the electorate in a significant way when he himself isn’t on the ballot, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., a commercial provider of voter data to campaigns and others.

“When you’re on the ballot, you can drive turnout because people are upset or excited” about your candidacy, Mitchell said. “But on a ballot measure, to try to drive turnout would be really hard.”

The March electorate was likely shaped more by the partisan primaries with which it shared a ballot. Republicans faced an active presidential nominating contest between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, while on the Democratic side President Joe Biden did little to mobilize voters in his noncompetitive race. (In fact, fewer people voted overall in the Democratic presidential primary than voted for Prop 1). In the Senate primary, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff ran ads effectively elevating Republican Steve Garvey as his main opponent, a gambit which, too, may have helped drive Republicans to the polls.

Persuasion surely played a role in Prop 1’s performance, as well. While Newsom’s team prioritized elite outreach, enlisting a broad coalition of both labor and business interests and trumpeting endorsements from Republican legislators, the results suggest it failed to successfully sell the technically complex proposal to voters.

Newsom’s own stature among the electorate may have also had an impact on the vote. Since late last year, his approval ratings in the state have dropped to new lows. The February PPIC poll found Newsom’s approval rating at 47 percent among California adults, the lowest support for him the pollster had found since 2019. With a disapproval rating of 50 percent, it represents the first time Newsom has had more voters viewing his handling of the job negatively than positively.

That drop has coincided with Newsom’s efforts to raise his profile nationally, casting himself as a direct antagonist of red-state governors by launching a PAC, running ads and even debating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Late last year, a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll found voters split over Newsom “taking a more prominent role in national Democratic politics”: 45 percent were in favor, while 43 percent opposed his moves on the national level.

“The voters didn’t like that — they wanted him back in California,” said DiCamillo, who leads the Berkeley IGS poll. “That’s part of the reason his numbers had started to become negative.”

Newsom's advisers shrug off the fact that Prop 1 prevailed with the barest majority. "It was a close election, but the policy implications are huge," said Click, calling it a "legacy win — not just for Newsom, but for the state of California."

But the measure's slim margin could trigger other concerns. With increased focus on California’s budget deficit, California Democrats may conclude that Newsom is not the best salesperson for the spending priorities they plan to bring to the ballot this fall.

“It will be interesting to see how [Newsom] handles himself this year with this looming budget deficit,” DiCamillo added. “He’s got some hard work ahead of him … as we’ve polled on past governors, whenever you have a big deficit situation looming, it’s not a happy situation for the governor.”