California
‘Trump’s not enough. And he knows he’s not enough’: California governor Gavin Newsom on populism, ‘purity tests’ and whether he’ll run for the presidency
When you think of the politician Donald Trump isn’t, when you think of the norm he broke, the archetype he shattered, you might well picture a man who looks a lot like Gavin Newsom. Tall and handsome, hair coiffed just so, with a blond wife and four photogenic kids at his side, Newsom, who has been the governor of California since 2019 and is often described as the frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for the White House in 2028, looks the way professional politicians, and especially presidential candidates, look in the movies.
It’s dogged Newsom for years, that look of his, perennially suggesting that he is, in the words of one California newspaper, “too ambitious, too slickly handsome, and too patrician-seeming”, especially for a populist age that cherishes the authentic and has no truck with anything either phoney or “elite”. The elite tag especially has hung around Newsom’s neck for decades, thanks to the fact that his ascent to the top of California politics has seemed smooth and unbroken, apparently eased by a childhood spent in the orbit of the Getty family, when that name was a byword for astronomical wealth.
Now Newsom is bent on busting those myths, laying out in a new memoir a reality that confounds the public image. Sceptics will of course assume that this is just another classic politician move: the book that precedes a campaign for national office. Even so, few readers of Young Man in a Hurry will come away thinking of its author as the “Prince Gavin” of his rivals’ caricature. Instead they will see a man, now 58, whose story is far more complex, and interesting, than the haircut and smile would have you believe – one whose life might just have equipped him to win the most powerful office in the world.
When we speak, in a conversation that will range from a devastating family history to his knack for a stunt – handing out kneepads at Davos to those politicians and corporate titans he accuses of abasing themselves before Trump – he makes his interest in the US presidency clearer than ever, even if he doesn’t quite say outright that he’s running. If there was so much as a scintilla of doubt about his intentions before we talk, not a trace of it is left afterwards. What’s more, Gavin Newsom leaves some valuable clues pointing not only to how he would seek the presidency of the United States – but why.
Via a videocall from his office in Sacramento – the same office, he points out, where “Governor Reagan, not president yet, Ronald Reagan used to reside” – he tells me that the new book “wasn’t done cynically”, that it “wasn’t done intentionally” as a political ploy; that, in fact, it came out of a rejection. In his telling, he had submitted a more conventional politician’s memoir – detailing his handling of California’s wildfires, the pandemic and “Trump 1.0” – with just one chapter on his own upbringing. The publisher read that chapter and said, “Hold on. I didn’t know anything about this.” What she had read ran so “completely counter” to what she had previously thought – the Newsom born with a presumed silver spoon in his mouth – that she demanded more.
This is what she had learned from those pages. That, yes, Newsom’s father had served as consigliere to Gordon Getty, whom he had known since high school and, in that capacity, became exceptionally close to the family, to the point where he and his two children, Gavin and sister Hilary, would feel at home at the Getty mansion on San Francisco’s Gold Coast, and would frequently accompany the clan on outrageously lavish trips abroad. Newsom describes it all: the teenage trips on “the Jetty”, the Gettys’ private plane; being kitted out by a tailor with the clothes he would need to be a house guest of the king of Spain; that time in Venice when he arrived by gondola at yet another party in a 16th-century palazzo, only to be greeted by the debauched face of Jack Nicholson. “Well, well,” said the actor, “if it isn’t the Getty boys.” The young Newsom didn’t correct him.
But, the governor now tells me, “To work for them doesn’t make you them.” For all his decades in the Gettys’ service, William Newsom “never made much money”. He was paid a salary, but it was not enormous. “It wasn’t a financial relationship … it opened up the door of privilege and opportunity, but not wealth. My father passed with nothing.”
That, though, is not the half of it. After Newsom’s parents divorced when he was three, he was raised by his mother. She worked three jobs at once, one of them as a waitress, and took in lodgers and foster children for extra cash. Gavin and his sister were latchkey kids who shared a bedroom. “We were home alone for too many hours on too many days,” he writes. “We raised ourselves on giant bowls of mac and cheese and thought nothing of it.”
The timber of his family tree is riddled with alcoholism and depression. His mother chugged wine from a jug, while her own father was so badly damaged by his experience as a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese, that he once pulled a gun on his three children, telling them very calmly, “I am going to shoot all of you right now.” He eventually took his own life.
It can be hard to square all this with the Newsom persona California voters have known for so long. He was still in his 20s when appointed to his first citywide role in San Francisco by legendary mayor Willie Brown, whom Newsom succeeded in 2004. That year, Harper’s Bazaar ran a feature on “the new Kennedys”, which included a photo of Newsom in a tuxedo, lying on a rug alongside his then wife, TV host Kimberly Guilfoyle, also in evening wear, in the Getty mansion. The marriage would break up, Guilfoyle would go on to date Donald Trump Jr, and she is now the US ambassador to Greece, while Newsom would marry Jennifer Siebel, an actor and documentary film-maker from a Republican family. But the image lingered.
For some, the disconnect between that and the upbringing Newsom describes in his book is just too much. One former associate described it to the New Yorker as Newsom’s “I was born a poor Black child” story – a reference to the spoof opening monologue of Steve Martin’s 1979 comedy The Jerk. But Newsom is emphatic that “the press’s one‑dimensional portrait of me” is wrong, that he really did live in a “duality”, moving between two worlds: one of scarcity and struggle; the other of fabulous opulence – and that, if his memoir reads like a strange mashup of The Great Gatsby and Hillbilly Elegy, that’s just how it was.
Even those reluctant to concede Newsom his hardscrabble roots have to allow that he did face one obstacle that, on its own, puts the lie to the notion of his career as a smooth ride. He has what he calls a “learning disability”, in the form of severe dyslexia. At school, he says, “I couldn’t read, I couldn’t spell, I couldn’t write.” (He is upfront that his memoir is ghostwritten.) He was sure he was stupid – “a gimpy geek with a bowl cut” – and he was regularly bullied. (They’d call him “New‑scum”, the same word hurled at him by Trump.) To this day, he can only read laboriously, underlining almost every word, then copying out the underlined passages to a notepad, and then copying those out on index cards, which he keeps in a voluminous filing system. He cannot read from an Autocue, at least not in a way most people would recognise as reading.
“We would never be having this conversation if it wasn’t for the gift of dyslexia,” he tells me. It didn’t feel like a gift at the time, but now he can see the effect it’s had. He is a “politician that doesn’t read speeches. You’ve never seen me read a written text in a speech. I don’t look up and down. I’m off script all the time.” In the age of populism, that’s a boast. Given that authenticity is probably the single most prized quality in politics, and that the opposite of authentic is scripted, Newsom is happy to tell you he is literally incapable of being scripted.
It’s had other effects, too. He can’t easily read words, so, “as a consequence, you have to make up for that. You have to read the room. You have to have some emotional intelligence. You feel things.” Besides, having to stand before audiences without the crutch of a text inevitably brings “anxiety and insecurity. And you try to make up for that. And the only way you can make up for that is hard work and grit. And you got to practise. So there’s this notion of reps and resiliency.”
No one disputes Newsom’s work ethic. As he puts it, “You’re just not going to outwork me. I mean, you may think you’re going to outwork me, but you’re not. I’m going to read 10 times more. It may take me 10 times longer to read … [but] I’m going to have to come prepared because, you know, I can’t fake it. I can’t dial it in, and I can’t dial up someone else’s words that are put on a piece of paper, like so many others in my racket, in politics. And so I’m going to spend 10 hours for 10 minutes.”
The tuxedo photoshoot made him look like a playboy – and his dating life as a divorcee mayor in the 2000s kept the San Francisco gossip columnists busily happy – but he is in fact a swot: studying ahead of every meeting, ploughing through papers on his 90-minute commute, underlining and writing out lines. That’s what he means by reps. For him, taking in information is like lifting weights: it requires repetition.
The result is a wonkishness that, again, hardly fits the show pony image. When he appeared as a guest on New York Times journalist Ezra Klein’s podcast, the two went several rounds on modular construction and the role of off-site manufacture in addressing the housing crisis. Newsom is a politician who feeds on a policy-rich diet.
That habit was shaped thanks to a brief but formative part of his career, one that sets him apart from his likely rivals for the 2028 Democratic nomination. Straight out of college, which he had reached only because he had made himself – through hours and hours of practice – a decent baseball player, a left-arm pitcher, Newsom founded a business. A wine store called PlumpJack, in homage to Falstaff, which he set up in San Francisco and where he put his hands-on work ethic to intense use. (In the book, Newsom is at pains to make clear that though Gordon Getty was an early investor, he was one of seven or eight, each giving a modest $15,000.)
PlumpJack proved a great success. It would eventually become an operation with four wineries, two boutique hotels, seven restaurants and bars, two clothes shops and 700 employees – among them, until her death at age 55 via an assisted suicide, which Newsom concedes was then illegal under California law, Newsom’s mother. Its co-presidents are Newsom’s sister Hilary and their cousin.
Newsom says it was building that business that made him a magpie for the ideas of others, agnostic as to their origin, interested solely in what brought success. “Part of being an entrepreneur,” he tells me, “is always casing other people’s joints, constantly figuring out where your competition is going, what they’re about to do, what are the trend lines … I took that and applied it to politics.”
He’s making a point about policy and the search for best practice, but the political application goes wider than that. For one thing, if Newsom is the nominee in 2028, Republicans will struggle to run what has long been one of their favourite lines against Democratic opponents: that they have never run a business, never created a job, that all they’ve known is politics. His business record is one more way in which Newsom might be able to appeal to red state voters as well as blue state ones. Yes, he is the governor of one of the most liberal states in the union, having been mayor of one of the most liberal cities in the country, the mere words “San Francisco” usually enough to whip up a rightwing crowd. But, as the veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told the New Yorker, Newsom can get around that: “Part of his selling will have to be, I can play in the middle of the country – I can play freshwater and I can play saltwater.”
The family he has today will help. Like so much else about him, it’s a duality. At first glance, it could have been designed to delight a Fox audience: the slim, blond wife alongside four kids, aged 10 to 16 – two daughters, Montana and Brooklynn, and two sons, Hunter and Dutch. But the blue state crowd will warm to the fact that Siebel has chosen to be known as the first partner of California, rather than first lady; that her documentaries interrogate themes that include the under-representation of women in positions of power and American notions of masculinity. (Newsom’s book describes the day Siebel told him about her experience at the hands of Harvey Weinstein: in 2022 she testified in court that, 17 years earlier, Weinstein had raped her in a hotel room.)
Newsom’s record is itself a duality. At one point, he tells me, “You’re talking to one of the most progressive politicians in the United States.” As if addressing the Democratic core voters who will choose a 2028 standard bearer in primaries, he rattles off the evidence, starting with the act that first made him a national figure, when just weeks after becoming mayor in 2004, he authorised the first same-sex marriages in US history, prompting thousands of lesbian and gay couples from across the country to head to City Hall in what became known as the “winter of love”. (John Kerry, his party’s presidential nominee that year, was said to have blamed Newsom’s move for his defeat, by galvanising conservatives and evangelical Christians to vote against him.)
But Newsom is just clearing his throat. He ticks off his tally of progressive achievements. “We have universal healthcare in California, regardless of immigration status and regardless of pre-existing conditions or ability to pay. We have the highest minimum wage in the United States of America for healthcare workers: $25. Fast-food workers: $20. $16.90 for everybody else.” He talks about the threat that extreme inequality between rich and poor now poses to the republic; one of his lines is, “We’ve got to democratise our economy to save our democracy.” He says that on so many issues that the New York mayor and progressive pin-up Zohran Mamdani and the left argue for, California has already forged ahead. “We’re being very aggressive calling out Trump and Trumpism, putting a mirror up to this president and punching him back in ways that are very aggressive, not just stylistically.”
He’s referring to Proposition 50, the statewide referendum Newsom pushed last November, urging Californians to agree to a redistricting plan that would give Democrats five more seats in the House of Representatives – to offset the five-seat advantage Republicans had given themselves by redrawing congressional boundaries in Texas. It was a huge gamble. Voters don’t always turn out for what can look like technical, procedural measures, and had Prop 50 lost, Newsom would have been tainted by failure, his electoral pull exposed as weak. Instead, it passed by a walloping 29 points. Overnight, Newsom had established himself as a – if not the – leader of the opposition, a Democrat not looking to split the difference but ready to take the fight to Trump and the Republicans.
And yet, that record sits alongside a résumé as a moderate Democrat, one that goes back just as long. Serving on the equivalent of San Francisco’s city council, in 2002 he antagonised the left with a scheme called Care Not Cash, which slashed payments to homeless people, using the money to fund housing and help with drug addiction and mental illness. He says it worked.
More recently, Newsom has angered the left again. Last year he launched a podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom. He knows it’s a cliche: “You roll your eyes. God, a politician, an American politician, with a podcast and a book.” But that’s not what riled many on his own side. It was his choice of guests. He has featured Steve Bannon and Maga-before-Maga talkshow host Michael Savage, whose longtime mantra was “borders, language, culture”. On his debut show, Newsom interviewed Charlie Kirk.
Naturally, Newsom was denounced for platforming – he puts the word in quotes – hate figures from the right. What’s more, on that first episode, Newsom mused that transgender athletes’ participation in professional women’s sports was “deeply unfair”. The backlash was immediate. Many detected a political calculation, Newsom signalling that he understood the much‑discussed vibe shift revealed by the defeat of Kamala Harris a few months earlier and pointedly breaking from the activist left of his party.
The governor insists it was nothing of the sort. His view was shaped, he says, by practical experience. Two years earlier, “we had some statewide championships in track and field, where there was a trans athlete that was successful in [defeating] another athlete. And there was tremendous controversy. We tried to accommodate for that and address the issue of fairness and some advantages that I think, by any objective standards, existed and persisted. And the difficulty was we couldn’t figure it out.” A year later, the issue recurred and, again, Newsom could not see a fair solution. “And so Charlie Kirk asked me a direct question, and I answered it.”
He says he’s sorry that he hurt the feelings of some on his own side, but he thinks the response he got teaches its own lesson. “Frankly, we were becoming a little too judgmental as a party … this idea that somehow you’re countenancing a point of view or perspective by engaging in conversations, that somehow you’re complicit … There was a purity test” – according to which nothing less than total orthodoxy on key issues is good enough. “I have a difference of opinion with my party on sports for transgender athletes. And there was tremendous judgment and condemnation for that point of view, somehow saying I’ve abandoned the LGBTQ community. I’ve walked away. I’m throwing them under the bus. I think it’s that kind of tonality that pulls people away.”
Newsom says he’s interested in finding those areas where Democrats and Republicans might come together. Just as likely, he wants to see where Democrats might win over former Republicans and gain their votes. He’s back to casing the competing joints, looking for the clues that Republican success in 2024 left behind. He consumes rightwing media, watching more Fox News than he ever watched MSNBC, now rebranded as MS NOW, and is particularly keen to work out how the right cuts through among young men. That’s a trick Democrats need to match.
Still, it’s a duality: Newsom simultaneously the most pugnacious Democrat on the playing field – trolling the president with Trump-style social media posts, complete with capital letters and multiple exclamation marks – and the advocate of building bridges that might connect blue and red America. That connection has to happen, he says, because “divorce is not an option”.
Can you be both at once: attack dog and unifier? Newsom thinks so. When I offer a range of apparently competing strategies for opposing Trump, some on the offensive, some aimed at accommodation, asking which he prefers, he answers, “All of them.” He sees no reason to choose.
“I mean, you can stand your ground, be firm, but also have an open hand, not a closed fist in terms of dealing with our common humanity. This notion that it’s got to be one or the other, that’s the tyranny of ‘or’ versus the genius of ‘and’ … I think there’s nuances in life. It’s not black and white. It’s not binary. I think that’s the way we need to approach life.”
He extends that – sort of – even to Trump himself. In the book, he describes an encounter during Trump’s first term, where the governor and the president rode on Air Force One together. The Trump that Newsom saw seemed eager, in private, to win him over, to josh with him, to be liked by him. He looked needy. Is Newsom saying he almost felt sorry for Donald Trump?
“He wants to be loved. He needs to be loved. Yes, he’s a narcissist. He’s desperate for it. He doesn’t care if he’s the heel or the hero, as long as he’s the star … He’s broken in many ways. That’s why he tried to break this country on January 6 … and why he will do more to destroy this republic, today, tomorrow and into the future. It’s a tragic story, but it’s a very human story.
“You know, I think it’s why he desperately needed to become president of the United States again. It’s why he’s trying to rename everything in his image. It’s never enough, because he’s not enough and he knows he’s not enough. And I think the remarkable thing is how easy it is to play on that. How easily our foreign adversaries are able to manipulate him.”
It’s one thing to play him, Newsom says, “but you also have to stand up to him. You’ve got to fight him, you’ve got to fight the bully. I felt like the [Mark] Carney [at Davos] speech represented that … [Emmanuel] Macron began to sort of lean into that. There’s a new tone and tenor.” He wants to see the post-1945 transatlantic alliance survive, he says, and that requires strength in the face of Trump. At Davos, he urged European leaders to realise that “grovelling to Trump’s needs” makes them “look pathetic on the world stage”.
We’ve talked for a while and the subject can be avoided no longer: is Gavin Newsom going to run for president? I remind him that he once said that it’s “better to be candid than be coy”. He laughs, adding, “I shouldn’t have said that” – and so I urge him to be candid now. An easy question first. He doesn’t have to tell me what he’s decided, but has he made up his mind about running?
“Absolutely, I have not.” He says he cannot know now what the moment will require in 2028. But he’s clear that, if he runs, he won’t be doing it to fill a psychic hole, like Trump. It won’t be to make up for a lack of parental love. For all her challenges, his mother “did give me a lot of hugs. And I was loved by my dad, despite the fact he could never say it.” If he does it, it will be because he thinks he can be “a solution to a problem”. He says that for a guy like him, who got a low SAT score of 960 – he urges me to look that up, to see how bad it is – even to be asked such a question is humbling. “And so I’m not going to say no, because I’d be lying by saying that, but I absolutely cannot say yes.”
I push him a bit more. What if the threat to democracy is as sharp in 2028 as he believes it is now?
He says “something shifted in me” at two points in 2025. One was in January, just ahead of Trump’s second term, when, as Newsom saw it, Trump tried to “weaponise” the California wildfires, seeking to extract political advantage from an opponent and a hostile blue state in distress. The second came in the summer, when Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles, along with 700 active duty marines. They “were not sent overseas but were sent to the second largest city in the United States”.
That January, “I was experiencing something I was not prepared for. A president-elect trying to take down an American city, trying to take down an American politician in a way that I, frankly, was not prepared for. Six months later, with the National Guard, I just started to shift tonally, my temperament, my approach.”
He says that he’s on “the other side” of that shift. “There’s a freedom now that I feel. And I’m running around Davos with kneepads, taking shots at folks that I used to admire and respect that I feel have sold their souls. And this is an existential moment that goes to your question. If someone else doesn’t have that fire, that sense of purpose and mission, then, yeah, I could see myself stepping into that void.”
It’s not an announcement, but it’s not far off it. It comes from a man who has never lost an election and who always comes prepared. And he’s preparing right now.
City lights of bustling San Francisco shown dimly along the shore, while the headlights of cars making their morning commute streaked quickly along one of the towering bridges of the Bay. We floated below the cement city, rocking gently with the waves of the sea and sitting silently as the world woke up around us. As the sun rose with the people from its sleeping slumber, our group of hunters waited for our boat Captain, Melynda Dodds, to say the magic words: “Scoters on the horizon, get ready.”
San Fran Scoters
When hunters think of sea duck hunting, images of the snowy, blistering winter conditions of remote Alaska or coastal Maine come to mind. And while it’s true these destinations see their fair share of sea ducks migrating through, so do warmer climates.
California is more than just movie stars and Los Angeles. It’s a state that is steeped in hunting heritage but often overlooked because of its Hollywood fame. The Pacific Flyway stretches some 4,000 miles north to south and encompasses The Golden State and the Pacific Ocean. The state is a waterfowl hunting destination as it sees thousands of birds migrate through including not only divers like goldeneyes and blue bills, but puddle ducks and sea ducks.
Instead of ice and snow, hunters are given a unique hunt in warm climates as surf scoters make their way south along the Pacific coast from their far north breeding grounds in Alaska and Canada.
The surf scoter is a unique species of sea duck. The drakes are often referred to as “Old skunkhead” because of the unique black and white patches that line its head, while a bright orange and white bill is florescent against its black plumage.
Although they may sometimes fly inland to lakes during migration, their primary range is wide open seas. Like all sea ducks, scoters do not respond well to calling. They are, however, excellent decoy and flagging birds. They fly fast and low along the water, making hunting and connecting on this fowl a test in skill as you battle shooting on rolling ocean seas.
Unlike most hunting, where you find yourself far off the beaten path, a healthy population of surf scoters passes through the San Francisco Bay area, making for a unique urban hunt. Sprawling cities with tall tech buildings and refineries line the skyline and sit as your backdrop, while cargo ships sail by your small, in comparison, hunting vessel. While you swing on fast flying scoters, city life is thriving just a few miles away on the shore.
Hunting Scoters with California Guide Service
It was 5 a.m. and in the middle of December as my friends and I pulled into the boat ramp in the San Francisco Bay. We expected to see a line to launch duck boats during prime hunting season. Instead, it was empty except for a lone Toyota Tundra hauling a 25-foot Bankes Titan boat and two women moving with purpose around the vessel.
With skilled precision from many mornings of this same routine, Melynda Dodds, owner of California Guide Service, and her deckhand Maddie Day, prepared the open water boat for launch as we stepped out to greet them.
One wouldn’t know Melynda was an adult-onset hunter. Her depth of knowledge regarding how to shoot California sea ducks and skills as a boat Captain gave off the conviction that she had been hunting these open waters since an early age. Instead, Melynda began her love for the outdoors as a young woman growing up in Texas, a far cry from the busy San Francisco area.
“I grew up in a hunting family, but I was never invited to hunt, they didn’t think I would be interested,” explained Melynda. “It wasn’t until I was 30 that I would shoot my first deer and hog. I was told I couldn’t do it…you don’t tell a Texas girl that.”
After taking her first big game animals, Melynda was hooked on hunting and would make it her career soon after. Relocating with her family to the Bay area, she experienced the thrill of hunting ducks along the Pacific Flyway and never looked back.
“I was at a crossroads after my kids were both in school,” said Melynda. “I could either go back to the corporate world or dive into guiding for fishing and hunting, two things that I was actually passionate about. So, I dove right in.”
Starting from the bottom, Melynda began by working as a deckhand on charter fishing boats to gain experience before applying for her Captain’s license. Once licensed, she set out to learn how to drive as many boats as possible, skippering seven different boats—from 50-foot Deltas, to Six-Pack boats, to 56-foot Westports. While mastering her Captain’s license, Melynda’s knowledge for hunting ducks in the Bay went from novice to expert, and California Guide Service was born.
Sea Duck Hunting in California
With the boat ready for launch thanks to our skilled guides, I watched as Melynda backed the 25-foot duck boat down the ramp with ease, her years of hard work and experience showing itself.
We were ready for our California sea duck adventure. With gear loaded, and Melynda’s black Lab, Nova, in her place next to deckhand Maddie, Captain Melynda Dodds steered us through the harbor, the city lights twinkling in the distance.
Having embarked on blistering boat rides for sea ducks in years past, it was satisfying not to have to hunker down for warmth on the short ride before Melynda slowed the throttle. Working as a proficient team, our Captain maneuvered the boat while Maddie prepared and launched multiple strings of scoter decoys.
Soon after legal shooting light, flocks of scoters began flying. Unlike puddle ducks or divers that provide high in the sky shooting, sea ducks fly low and fast along the water, making it very difficult to connect on birds. If we were lucky, we could spot flocks of sea ducks off in the distance so we could prepare ourselves for shooting if we saw the birds turn towards our decoys. Other times, the ducks would zip into the decoys without notice, their black bodies blending in with the dark of the water.
Your positioning in the boat tested your skills as a shotgunner. At times, you were lucky, and the scoters would cup their wings for landing straight on in your shooting lane, while other times, you were dealing with hard crossing shots. Because they fly low on the water, it’s easy to determine whether your shots are behind or ahead thanks to your shot string making a visual splash.
My friends and I marveled at the scoters who humbled us for a time before we had our lead times tuned in. Soon, we were enjoying the cool California morning, picking our shots carefully on drakes while Captain Melynda and Maddie laughed with us at our epic hits and misses.
Nova sat patiently, waiting on us to get our sea legs so she could work. The drakes were easy to pick out of the flocks, the white paint on their heads serving as a makeshift target that was easily distinguishable from the all brown plumage of the scoter hens. Soon, Melynda gave Nova what she wanted, releasing her to dive into the dark seas to retrieve our quarry.
An All Women Guiding service
Melynda and Maddie worked as a smooth operating team during our two days hunting the San Francisco Bay. In fact, Melynda prides herself on being a Women Owned Small Business with a crew of only females for both her fishing charters and hunts.
“It’s important for me to provide opportunities to women and young girls,” said Melynda. “In this industry, ladies are generally guided by men—few are full female outfits. I want to show women that they really can hunt all on their own. I feel having a team comprised of all women helps to build confidence and expand possibilities for other ladies.”
Melynda and her crew had our respect long before the hunt began, but after days on the water together, that respect only grew. Her passion for hunting California burned bright, making this urban sea duck hunt one for the record books.
Gear For Hunting Surf Scoters
Sea ducks are tough fowl. Their plumage is made to withstand the harshest ocean conditions, making it hard for shot to penetrate. Additionally, close ranging shots on these fast flyers are rare—most of the time they’re zipping past the end of your decoy lines, typically 30 to 40 yards at the minimum.
Benelli Ethos A.I.
Scoters proved a fantastic opportunity to put an Ethos with the new Benelli Advanced Impact (A.I.) barrel technology to the test.
The new A.I. barrel is packed with enhanced features, making it one of the most advanced shotgun barrels of all time. The interior contours as it makes its way down the barrel, making an hourglass shape that is extremely long and tapered. This creates pressure in the barrel that not only increases velocity and energy at impact, but keeps shot strings compact and uniform. At 30 yards, velocity is 21 percent higher than a standard barrel, giving the Ethos 50 percent more penetration on target.
benelliusa.com
B&P Dual Steel
To bring down tough ocean scoters, a reliable steel shot load was needed. The B&P Dual Steel Magnum shot is made with two layers of pellets: steel and plated steel. This combination helps maintain consistent shot patterns, even at distance. The loads are also made with B&P’s Green Core wad, which is not only completely bio-degradable, but also made to withstand varying inclement weather and temperatures like those found when hunting sea ducks.
baschieri-pellagriusa.com
California
3 people killed, several others injured after driver crashes into crowd in Oakland, California
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Three people were killed and several others were injured after a driver crashed into multiple cars and pedestrians late Saturday night in Oakland, California, authorities said.
The crash happened shortly after 11 p.m., according to officials.
Three people were pronounced dead at the scene and five others were injured, the Oakland Fire Department said. Two of those injured were in critical condition. The driver involved in the crash was also injured, though officials described those injuries as minor.
Authorities did not immediately release additional details about what led to the crash, and the driver’s identity was not made public.
The crash remains under investigation, officials said.
California
Governor’s Race: Katie Porter speaks 1-on-1 on strengths, criticisms and priorities for California
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — On June 2, Californians will choose their top two picks to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom.
ABC7 Eyewitness News Political Reporter Monica Madden is catching up with candidates in these final weeks and spoke one-on-one with former Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter.
Katie Porter: “I also think it’s important to give voters some choice here.”
In this crowded race for governor, former Orange County Congresswoman Katie Porter believes voters are still looking for detailed policy plans from top candidates.
WATCH: Full interview with California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter
ABC7 Eyewitness News Political Reporter Monica Madden sits down with California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter.
Monica Madden: “You have several proposals for how to make the cost of living better for Californians, one of them being free childcare, free college tuition at state universities, and then eliminating the state income tax for families that are making under $100,000. What’s your plan for how to pay for those?”
Porter: “I would pay for it by doing for corporations in California what we ask families to do, what we ask workers to do, which is in our higher earning years: when we earn a little bit more, we pay a little bit higher tax rate. And I think that’s a fair thing to ask corporations to do, too.”
The Democrat made the case that she has the most thought-out proposals.
Porter: “Nobody’s said that my idea to pay for it is a bad idea. These are actual things that give California families more money in their pocket. So, when we hear candidates say things like,’When I’m governor, you’ll have health care,’ like, how? And at what price point? So, I’m really focused on very concrete policies.”
Porter also pushed back on criticism about her temperament after a video of her berating a staffer resurfaced earlier in the campaign.
Katie Porter addresses leaked video of her yelling at staffer
California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter is addressing the leaked video of her caught berating a campaign employee.
Monica: “Do you think that there’s a double standard here?”
Porter: “Temperament is a word that you mostly hear used for show dogs, racehorses, and women candidates. Most importantly, when it happened years ago with that staffer, that’s who I owed the apology to — when I made it five years ago to that staffer. And that’s what really matters to me. That’s the mark of my character. And I think that’s what we ought to be talking about, is what is the character of each of these candidates?”
On the future of California, Porter says she believes AI can be an opportunity if leaders handle it correctly.
Porter: “AI also has the potential to fuel tremendous investment in California. I have done battles with large and powerful interests before with some of the, you know, the most wealthy and well-connected in the world — and come out as a winner. And I think that’s what it’s going to take to steer California in a way that makes things, like, AI positive.”
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