How Gavin Newsom spent just $US105,000 to become Democrats’ presidential frontrunner
California’s governor Gavin Newsom overtook Vice President Kamala Harris in betting after a single TV ad aired in Florida.
It costs just $US105,000 ($153,000) to become a frontrunner to win the Democrat nomination for the US presidency.
California’s governor Gavin Newsom overtook Vice President Kamala Harris in the major US betting markets last week as the most likely Democrat to win the 2024 nomination after he placed a prime-time television advertisement in Florida, urging Floridians to move to California.
“Freedom is under attack,” Mr Newsom warned. “We still believe in freedom: freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate and freedom to love.”
It mattered little Californians have been moving to Florida in droves for years, a trend that accelerated dramatically during the pandemic. It was a brilliant play at national attention, all but guaranteeing Mr Newsom, scion of the San Francisco elite, protege of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will be running for president in 2024.
“For $100,000 you got a million dollars’ worth of attention,” Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio told Politico earlier this week, with “coast to coast tongues wagging”.
Joe Biden, still the most likely winner of the nomination on the Democrat side according to opinion polls, repeatedly says he’s running again, but few believe it.
Already the most unpopular president in decades, he would be 82 at the start of this second term, and based on recent public performances, potentially ill-equipped to deal with the rigours of office.
Newsom, a youthful 54 with movie star looks, the popular governor of America’s biggest state, has catapulted ahead of Democrat stars Ms Harris, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, one of the great hopes of the party.
“With a $US20 million ($29 million) campaign war chest that he doesn’t need to spend to win re-election in California it’s hard to find a downside for Newsom,” said betting agency PredictIt on Saturday (AEST), a national betting house whose bookies still give Biden a 36 per cent chance of clinching the nomination.
Newsom’s chances have surged from 5 per cent to 22 per cent over the month to 8th July, while the vice president’s with, naturally, a much higher national public profile, have sagged from 18 per cent to 15 per cent.
It’s early days of course as the major parties’ primaries kick off in the middle of 2024. But the governor of the biggest US state – almost 40 million people – is in a good position to defeat Biden if Democrats want to put move beyond the political dinosaurs who run the Democrat party.
Name recognition counts for a lot in celebrity-obsessed America, so perhaps it’s little surprise the most famous man in the world Donald Trump, for all the gathering clouds over his behaviour on January 6th, remains the frontrunner to win the Republican nomination.
Trump was rumoured to be declaring his intention to run for president in 2024 over the July 4 weekend, in a supposed bid to reduce the chances of being charged by the Department of Justice over his role in encouraging the January 6th riots, and steamroll the gathering momentum of younger Republican hopefuls.
The former president, who would be 78 at the start of a second term in office, should be concerned. Newsom didn’t pick on Florida and Ron DeSantis for nothing.
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, 43, a former marine, Yale and Harvard educated, is Trump without the baggage, and already the favourite to win not only the Republican nomination but the 2024 presidency outright, according to Empire Stakes bookies in New York.
Trump is still way ahead in the major opinion polls but not according to most betting agencies, where he’s only a whisker ahead in a hypothetical national presidential contest.
A Newsom v DeSantis election in 2024 would be an ideological contest, shorn of the all the ancient hatreds, personality cults, and the rancid ulcer of the 2020 election that a Biden v Trump would inevitably entail.
Both men are accomplished politicians, lay down misères to win a second term as governor in their respective states, the first and fourth most populous in the US.
Their ideologies couldn’t be more different. Under Newsom California has become ever more a progressive paradise within the US, with highly permissive laws and regulations on drugs, crime, abortion.
De Santis supports a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, Newsom, is seeking to enshrine the right to an abortion up to 24 weeks.
Newsom locked his state down, shut schools and businesses during Covid-19 for longer than any US state. DeSantis, dubbed “death Santis” by his opponents, did so briefly in early 2020, then apologised and became the nation’s political pin up for those opposed to lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates.
DeSantis relished hitting back at Newsom’s advertisements this week, noting the influx of California licence plates on Florida streets and the two states’ starkly different attitudes to law and order.
“We would never allow what’s happened in places like San Francisco and LA, where these areas have been destroyed with drugs and crime and the homeless to happen … when people commit crimes, they belong behind bars, not released back onto the street,” the governor said.
Newsom’s advertisement sneer about Florida’s loss of the “freedom to love” was an attack on the Sunshine state’s new law – dubbed Don’t Say Gay by its opponents – banning teachers from discussing LGBTQI+ sexuality with primary schools kids under 8. The law has enraged Democrats nationally, even more than Florida’s hands-off approach to Covid-19.
The two men offer a very different visions of American in the 21st century. Their presidential contest would in effect ask Americans: do you want the US to be more like Florida, or California? If internal migration statistics are anything to go by, the answer will be Florida.
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