Gavin Newsom hasn’t tweeted about California for over a week
Jack Elbaum
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Since May 22, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has not tweeted a single thing about California from his personal account. Today, of course, is May 31. That means the governor of the largest state in the country hasn’t tweeted about his own state for more than a week — approaching a week and a half now.
This does not mean he hasn’t been active on Twitter, though. He has tweeted more than a few things that have gone viral, regularly racking up more than 30,000 likes. Rather, it just means he has seemingly decided to become hyperfocused on states thousands of miles away rather than what is happening in his backyard.
On May 23, Newsom tweeted about a picture book teaching children about active shooters, along with the caption, “Winnie the Pooh is now teaching Texas kids about active shooters because the elected officials do not have the courage to keep our kids safe and pass common sense gun safety laws.” The same day, he also posted an article asserting that Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Day poem had been “banned” from a school in Florida — a claim that has since been debunked.
On May 24, he tweeted multiple times about Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — one more about supposed “book bannings” and one that reads, “Ron DeSantis just became the first presidential candidate in American history to launch his campaign after suffering a massive defeat to a cartoon mouse.” He also quote-tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), making a reference to “space lasers.”
On May 25, he posted about abortion in South Carolina, and on May 26, he repeated, again, the lie that Gorman’s poem was banned in a Florida school. On May 29, he posted a piece of art that suggests Florida is preventing children from reading books and also suggested a Florida law that has not yet been put into effect is to blame for a shooting.
This is all quite bizarre when one realizes that things aren’t exactly going swimmingly in California. Crime has been increasing for years now, especially in Los Angeles, the tax burden is one of the highest in the country, and the homelessness problem in Los Angeles and San Francisco is out of control. Consequently, the state has been losing more people each year than any other. In 2022, California lost 343,230 people due to out-migration. What makes this particularly ironic is that the states he is attacking — Florida, Texas, and South Carolina — are all among the top four states when it comes to in-migration.
The people of California elected him to govern California — to represent them and focus on their needs. Of course, a governor of a huge state can comment on happenings in other places. This, however, certainly is going too far to the point it can and should be considered disrespectful to his constituents. The likely reason why Newsom is doing this makes it doubly true: He wants to build his national profile so that he can run for president sometime in the future.
But the best way a governor can make himself an appealing candidate for president is by doing good for his state. People like results. Maybe if Newsom spent less time attacking states such as Florida and Texas, he could fix some of the problems in his own.
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Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.