SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Governor Gavin Newsom coasted to reelection Tuesday evening. The results were called within a minute of the polls closing.
The majority of his brief acceptance speech focused on the national mood, and how he will continue to fight back against the narrative in red states.
How does the governor balance the real issues that are going on here in his state and his continued battle on the national level? They go hand in hand.
As political analysts put it, if the governor has any shot at running for national office, or even just fighting against the Republican narrative, everything he does over these next four years will be a part of his record that he will have to campaign on.
Election day morning, this is what the governor said his focus was moving forward.
“It's homelessness and housing, housing affordability," Newsom said.
Election night, once the polls closed, his focus was on the national narrative.
“We have governors that won their reelection tonight in other states that are banning books, that are banning speech, that are banning abortion," Newsom said, "and here we are in California moving in a completely different direction. That's a deep point of pride, and it's with that passion that I bring to this second term, a resolve to do more to advance that cause of freedom and fairness.
UC San Diego Political Science Dean Thad Kousser said it’s about which cameras are rolling.
“What you see is that tension that any governor who has presidential aspirations faces," Kousser said. "Nationally, he needs to be talking not about problems of California that he's going to solve, but about what's right about California, and why it should be a model for the nation going forward. So you saw when he was using his time on the nation's camera last night, he was he was trying to project an image of California strength."
Both he and Analyst Steve Swatt said what happens in California over the next four years will need to be top of mind.
"Anything he does politically after this, you'll have to run on his record here in Sacramento," Swatt said, "And that means tackling some of the thorniest issues that have bedeviled governors in years past, one, of course, is housing, affordable housing."
And the lack of a red wave on election night, they said, means the governor may need to be patient.
“It looks like there won't be that mounting pressure on Joe Biden to step aside," Kousser said. "His popularity is low, but that didn't reverberate across the party ranks, and it might give him the chance to have a second act in his presidency to regain some of the popularity that he had really in his first six to nine months in office. All of that changes the narrative of the trajectory of the Biden administration, and if that trajectory is upward, Gavin Newsom is going to have to be patient for for his own national moment.”
Newsom’s Care Court proposal to address the homeless and mentally health crisis will be in place statewide during this next term. Next month, the governor called for a special session to address high gas prices. Kousser believes many of the governor’s plans will start to pay off- and will help his aspirations.
Newsom pledged to fulfill his four year term right, but Swatt said Barack Obama made that same promise in 2006, and Bill Clinton in 1990. Two years after those promises, they both ran.
WATCH RELATED: Reaction to Newsom withholding homeless funds (Nov. 2022).