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.
California knows it needs more housing. The state is the birthplace of the YIMBY movement—“Yes in My Backyard”—and its legislature has been passing laws designed to make housing easier to build for the better part of a decade. These laws are based on a simple theory: Housing is too expensive in large part because of laws that prevent homes from being built. Loosen those laws, and the houses will come.
And yet, in California, even though the laws have been loosened, the houses have not come. Last year, only about 102,000 new units of housing were permitted in a state with nearly 40 million inhabitants, almost the same number as a decade ago. Residents have begun fleeing for lower-cost-of-living states at such a high rate that California is poised to lose Electoral College votes after the next census.
Some observers look at such facts and conclude that the regulatory theory of housing costs was wrong, or at best badly incomplete, all along. “The movement to lift zoning restrictions is still new, but enough time has elapsed to begin to see how well it’s working, and the answer is … a little,” Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg wrote in Washington Monthly last year. If that’s true, then the YIMBY activists pushing for zoning reforms around the country are making a terrible mistake, dooming themselves to repeating California’s failed experiment.
In reality, the California experience does not disprove the YIMBY theory of the case, but it does provide an important addendum to it. Not all zoning reforms are created equal—as the more successful efforts of other states and cities demonstrate. The problem in California is that the state’s pro-housing laws try to do a whole lot more than just make it easier to build housing: preserve local autonomy, pay high construction wages, guarantee that new units are accessible to low-income renters. In other words, even as they removed some regulatory barriers, they created new ones. In trying to accomplish every objective and accommodate every interest, all at once, California set up its housing agenda to fail.
Senate Bill 9 was supposed to be the big one. Passed in 2021, the legislation, referred to as the “duplex bill,” overrode local laws that prevented landowners from building multiple units on their property. Proponents framed it as a key part of solving the housing shortage in California. Opponents said it would destroy the character of existing neighborhoods. Both sides agreed that the law would be transformative. A conservative analysis estimated that S.B. 9 could lead to about 700,000 additional units in a state that was permitting just 100,000 new housing units each year. A New York Times housing reporter called the law “probably the biggest change in housing in 50 years or more.”
But cities and towns quickly realized that they still had ways to block development, Sonja Trauss, the executive director of YIMBY Law, a pro-housing nonprofit, told me. According to her organization, local governments issued more than 100 “emergency ordinances” designed to limit S.B. 9’s impact in the 18 months after the law passed. These included imposing fees and parking requirements to make projects financially infeasible, restricting the size of the potential units to make them unlivable, and designating certain areas as historic districts or endangered-species habitats to exempt them altogether. Two years after S.B. 9 came into effect, only about 160 projects had been issued permits.
“Frankly, a lot of us were caught off guard by the lengths that local governments went to stop the law from being effective,” State Senator Scott Wiener, one of the bill’s authors, told me. Wiener crafted a “clean up” bill targeting the most egregious efforts to circumvent S.B. 9. But he soon found that his colleagues had little appetite to hold localities accountable; the new bill failed to even make it out of committee. “Everyone says they want to solve the housing shortage,” Wiener said. “But no one wants to face a bunch of angry homeowners at their next town hall.”
For housing advocates, the lesson of S.B. 9 was clear: To get housing built, YIMBYs would have to find a path that did not run through single-family neighborhoods. So, in 2022, they introduced a bill that would allow apartments to be built on land that had been zoned for office and retail space. The bill would create up to 2.4 million units of housing, according to one analysis, while leaving most existing neighborhoods alone. Assembly Bill 2011 passed the legislature with near universal support. Governor Gavin Newsom called it “a big deal.”
But once again, months and years went by and hardly anyone even tried to build new housing—as if the law didn’t exist. Only 22 projects have applied for the relevant permits since A.B. 2011 went into effect, and even fewer have actually received them, according to an analysis by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. And, once again, California’s YIMBYs were blindsided. “It was a shock, really,” Buffy Wicks, the assembly member who spearheaded A.B. 2011, told me. “Obviously, we didn’t think this bill would single-handedly solve the housing crisis. But we were expecting something like half a million or a million new units. And what we got was almost nothing.”
A.B. 2011 had made building multifamily housing technically legal—but economically impossible. In order to qualify for A.B. 2011, a project had to pay its construction workers “prevailing wages,” based on the relatively high level of compensation that the state’s labor unions had negotiated for public-sector projects. Several developers told me that this provision alone raised the potential cost of a given project by 20 to 25 percent. A.B. 2011 also required projects to reserve about 15 percent of units for low-income residents, reducing the revenue that the developers could expect to earn.
Each of these requirements might sound reasonable on its face. Who’s against high wages and cheap apartments? But when taken together, and combined with California’s already high construction costs, they meant that A.B. 2011 projects would never be financially viable. “It’s already hard enough to make a project pencil out in California,” Bruce Fairty, the chief development officer at Cypress Equity Investments, a national housing developer, told me. “These extra requirements make it basically impossible.”
The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has coined the term everything-bagel liberalism to describe Democrats’ tendency to layer bills with so many well-intentioned requirements that they become unworkable. The scholars Christopher Elmendorf and Clayton Nall argue in a 2024 paper that nearly all of the housing bills passed in California over the past decade have been positively covered with what they call “bagel toppings,” including labor and affordability standards. “It’s the same story over and over again,” Elmendorf told me. “A housing bill passes with this fantastic-sounding headline policy. But then you read the fine print and there are so many costly requirements that the actual policy itself is basically guaranteed to fail.”
This raises a question: Why would legislators keep making the same mistake? When it comes to prevailing wages, the answer is interest-group politics. “Every California politician knows that if you want to pass anything on housing, you need to get organized labor on board,” Brian Hanlon, the president of the housing-advocacy group California YIMBY, told me. “It’s that simple.”
The story of affordability requirements is more complicated. Some progressive organizations reliably threaten to oppose housing bills unless they include significant affordability requirements and tenant protections—but, unlike unions, these small nonprofits hardly have the political muscle to overpower legislators. Instead, these requirements may stem from an actual conviction that they’re useful. The view that new housing should be made available to the less fortunate is widely held among voters and progressive politicians. If a developer is going to profit off a project, then why shouldn’t they have to ensure some units are accessible to middle- and low-income households? “A lot of legislators just genuinely believe that the way you make housing more affordable is to force developers to provide affordable units,” Elmendorf said.
Of course, an apartment building that never gets built isn’t going to employ any construction workers at all, let alone at high wages, and it isn’t going to deliver any affordable units. “Look, I get why a 20 or 30 or 50 percent affordability requirement sounds great—I want low-income people to be able to afford housing too,” Wiener told me. “But no one benefits if nothing gets built. Fifty percent of zero is still zero.”
After the coronavirus pandemic, the housing shortage went national. And in the past few years, some states and cities have managed to avoid repeating California’s mistakes. In 2021, Raleigh, North Carolina, responded to a wave of new residents by relaxing its zoning laws for multifamily housing. Over the next three years, the city built 60 percent more housing units annually and experienced half of the rental-cost growth than it had during the previous five years, according to data gathered by Alex Horowitz, a project director for housing policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts. In recent years, similar stories have played out in places as diverse as Austin, Minneapolis, and New Rochelle, New York. What these cities have in common is that their new pro-housing laws came with less restrictive labor and affordability requirements—if any—and, because they were passed at the city level, didn’t encounter resistance from local governments. True YIMBYism has been tried, and it works.
Perhaps the most illuminating example of how not to be California comes, naturally enough, from Florida. In 2023, Florida’s legislature passed the Live Local Act, which changed the state’s zoning laws to allow apartments to be built in commercial, industrial, and mixed-use areas without needing local zoning-board approval. This was almost identical to California’s A.B. 2011, but with a key difference: Florida’s version had no prevailing-wage provision and only a modest affordability requirement that was offset by a large tax break for developers. According to estimates from the Florida Housing Coalition, a YIMBY-aligned nonprofit, the law has led to permits for at least 55,000 units of new housing even as the country has experienced a combination of high interest rates, soaring costs for building materials, and construction-labor shortages. “In a lot of ways, this bill was passed at the worst possible moment for new housing development,” Kody Glazer, the director of the Florida Housing Coalition, told me. “So the fact we’re already seeing such a huge response is really encouraging.”
In fact, California itself has experience with the benefits of the plain-bagel approach to housing. Its one big success story came in 2016, when the state legislature began passing a series of new laws allowing residents to build so-called accessory dwelling units on their property, stripping away legal barriers that had prevented building for decades. Since then, ADU growth has taken off. The number of permitted units jumped from just over 1,000 in 2016 to more than 28,000 in 2023 (the last year for which we have comprehensive data), accounting for nearly 20 percent of the total housing growth in the state. But California will never guesthouse its way out of the shortage.
The 2024 election marked a turning point in California housing politics. The crisis became a symbol of the kind of failed blue-state governance that had broken the Democratic coalition. In response, more lawmakers came around to the idea of bold reform. Last year, the California legislature, under pressure from Newsom, passed two bills that had long been considered the holy grail of housing reform. The first, A.B. 130, exempts most new urban construction from the state’s famously onerous environmental-review process. The second, S.B. 79, relaxes the state’s zoning laws to make building multifamily housing near public transit far easier. Versions of both bills had previously failed to pass; this time, they sailed through the legislature.
Crucially, S.B. 79 includes far less strict labor and affordability standards than previous bills, and A.B. 130 doesn’t include any such requirements for most projects. For this reason, some housing advocates believe that a new era has begun. “We think these bills will come to be seen as some of the most important pieces of legislation in modern California history,” Nolan Gray, the senior director of legislation and research at California YIMBY, told me.
We have, of course, heard that before. The success of these laws will hinge on whether California has actually learned the lessons of its past failures. With months to go before S.B. 79 takes effect, several localities are lobbying for carve-outs and exemptions, threatening lawsuits, and pushing to delay implementation until the 2030s. In January, the transportation agency of Los Angeles, the most populous county in America, claimed that it should be exempt from the law altogether. Already, the legislators behind S.B. 79, including Wiener, are being forced to draft a “clean-up bill” to prevent localities from exploiting ambiguities in the law’s wording. That effort might not have the political support needed to pass, let alone the two-thirds majority required for it to take effect this calendar year.
California’s leaders have, at long last, passed legislation free of the requirements that rendered previous bills unworkable. As a result, they are under intense pressure to add requirements back in or to let localities do the same. After a decade of failing to solve the housing crisis by saying yes to everyone and everything, the question now is: Will they finally be willing to say no?
Two Jewish men were beaten, and later briefly hospitalized, after they were heard speaking Hebrew in front of a restaurant in San Jose’s Santana Row in California, local media reported on Tuesday.
Footage of the incident, shot by local witnesses, shows the pair of victims attacked by three other individuals outside the Augustine restaurant, NBC Bay Area reported.
“I just turned around, and they literally started punching,” one of the victims, who wished not to be identified, told the outlet. “We got swarmed very badly. I’m in a lot of pain. I still cannot chew. My jaw hurts, my back is hurting.”
According to NBC, the victims said they did not recognize their assailants, and police are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.
According to ABC7 News, both Jewish men were waiting to be seated at the restaurant when the incident occurred.
“One of the witnesses said that they heard them saying, ‘don’t mess with Iran’, which we don’t know why,” one of the victims told the outlet. “We don’t have any problem with them. But, I heard at the beginning of the fight, something with, ‘F the Jews’.”
ABC7 added that one of the victims had been knocked out and needed stitches after the assault.
In a statement, the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council identified the pair of victims as Israeli Americans.
Sam Liccardo, the Democratic representative of California’s 16th Congressional District and former San Jose mayor, condemned the assault in a subsequent statement on X/Twitter.
“Violence targeting any members of our community—including our Jewish and Israeli community members—amounts to an attack on all of us,” he wrote.
Current San Jose Mayor also weighed in on X, stating that “Antisemitism and all acts of hatred have no place in San Jose. Being able to talk about our differences and celebrate them is what makes us the safest big city in America.”
“I have been in touch with our police department and leaders in the local Jewish community regarding this deeply disturbing incident and will continue to monitor the situation closely as the investigation continues,” he added.
Sources: California Voter ID Initiative text (proposed); H.R. 7296, Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, 119th Congress, 2d Session (introduced January 30, 2026); Congressional Research Service Bill Summary; California Secretary of State; National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
Background: How California Currently Handles Voter Identification
Under current California law, U.S. citizenship is required to vote, but the state relies on voters to simply attest to their citizenship when registering. California does not generally require voters to show identification at the polls. The limited exceptions apply only to first-time federal election voters who registered by mail or online without providing a California ID or Social Security number, and even then, the state allows a broad range of documents, including utility bills, bank statements, paychecks, or official government mail.
In 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation explicitly banning local jurisdictions from requiring voter ID, following Huntington Beach voters’ approval of a local measure to do so. California currently has among the most permissive voter identification rules in the nation.
The California Initiative: A Targeted, Inclusive Reform
A proposed California ballot initiative would amend the state constitution to add a new Section 3.1 to Article II. The initiative states three purposes: to “promote public confidence and trust in the electoral process,” to “deter and detect voter fraud by maintaining accurate voter registration records and confirming eligibility to vote,” and to “minimize the risk of voter impersonation by requiring proof of identity to vote.”
The measure is notable for what it does and, just as importantly, for what it does not do.
For in-person voting, the initiative requires that “each time a voter casts a ballot in person in any election in the State, the voter shall present government-issued identification.” The initiative defines government-issued identification as “documentation that allows conclusive verification of the voter’s identity.”
For mail voting, the requirement is far more limited. The voter needs only to provide “the last four digits of a unique identifying number from government-issued identification that matches the one designated solely by the voter for their voter registration.” Importantly, the type of ID designated by each voter “must be indicated in their voter registration record, noted on the mail ballot envelope provided to them, and available to them on request by phone or electronically,” so voters are never caught off guard.
On the question of cost, the initiative is explicit: “Upon request by an eligible voter, the state shall provide, at no charge, a voter ID card for use in casting a ballot.” This is perhaps the most important provision in the measure. One of the most common and legitimate criticisms of voter ID laws is that they can function as a de facto poll tax. This initiative addresses that concern directly by guaranteeing that the means of compliance are freely available to every eligible voter.
On citizenship verification, the initiative directs the Secretary of State and county elections officials to “use best efforts to verify citizenship attestations using government data” and to “annually report what percentage of each county’s voter rolls have been citizenship-verified.” This is a transparency measure, not a documentation barrier.
On accountability, the initiative requires that “during every odd-numbered year, the State Auditor shall audit the State’s and each county’s compliance with this section and report its findings and recommendations for improving the integrity of elections to the public.” Citizens may also “seek judicial review and remedy of the State’s or any county’s compliance with this section.”
What the initiative does not do is equally important. It does not require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. It does not require voters to submit citizenship documents with mail ballots beyond the last four digits of an ID number. It does not impose criminal penalties on election officials. It does not create unfunded mandates. It does not establish a private right of action against election workers.
In short, the California initiative is a narrowly drawn measure. It asks voters to confirm who they are while ensuring that the tools to do so are freely available to all.
The Federal SAVE Act (H.R. 7296): A Sweeping and Problematic Mandate
Introduced in the House on January 30, 2026, by Rep. Chip Roy and referred to the Committee on House Administration, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Unlike the California initiative, which works within existing systems, the SAVE Act would fundamentally restructure how Americans register to vote and cast ballots in federal elections, with requirements that, in many cases, are practically impossible for millions of eligible citizens to meet.
Here is what the bill actually requires, provision by provision, and why each raises serious concerns.
1. Documentary Proof of Citizenship Required to Register
The bill is unambiguous on this point. It states that “a State may not register an individual to vote in elections for Federal office held in the State unless, at the time the individual applies to register to vote, the individual provides documentary proof of United States citizenship.”
The bill defines acceptable proof narrowly. It includes a REAL ID-compliant document “that indicates the applicant is a citizen of the United States,” a valid U.S. passport, or a military ID combined with “a United States military record of service showing that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.” For voters who cannot provide those documents, the bill allows a government photo ID paired with a certified birth certificate, but that birth certificate must meet an exacting list of requirements: it must include “the full name, date of birth, and place of birth of the applicant,” must list “the full names of one or both of the parents of the applicant,” must carry “the signature of an individual who is authorized to sign birth certificates,” must include “the date that the certificate was filed with the office responsible for keeping vital records in the State,” and must bear “the seal of the State, unit of local government, or Tribal government that issued the birth certificate.”
This is an extraordinarily demanding standard. Birth certificates are lost, damaged, or were never properly recorded, particularly for older Americans, rural residents, and low-income citizens.
The bill does include a fallback process for applicants who cannot produce these documents. They may “sign an attestation under penalty of perjury that the applicant is a citizen of the United States” and “submit such other evidence to the appropriate State or local official demonstrating that the applicant is a citizen.” The official then makes a personal judgment and must sign a sworn affidavit “swearing or affirming the applicant sufficiently established United States citizenship.” This places an unusual and significant legal burden on individual election workers who are simply trying to help voters register.
2. A Photo ID Requirement That Specifies Citizenship on the Face of the Document
The bill requires that every voter in a federal election present an “eligible photo identification document.” The bill defines that document as one containing “a photograph of the individual identified on the document,” “an indication on the front of the document that the individual identified on the document is a United States citizen,” and either an ID number or “the last four digits of the social security number of the individual identified on the document.”
The citizenship indicator requirement is the critical problem. Currently, only a handful of states denote citizenship status directly on driver’s licenses. Even REAL ID-compliant cards display the same gold star insignia for citizens and lawfully present non-citizens alike. The bill does include a limited workaround: a voter may present a non-compliant ID “together with another identification document that indicates the individual is a United States citizen.” But requiring two documents at the polls is itself a significant additional burden, and it would disqualify the standard ID held by the vast majority of Americans unless paired with a second document.
The bill also specifies that for in-person voting, the eligible photo identification document “shall be a tangible (not digital) document,” closing off the possibility of using a digital ID on a smartphone, a technology that several states have begun adopting.
3. Double Documentation Required for Absentee Voting
For voters casting absentee ballots, the bill requires that a copy of the eligible photo identification document be submitted both “with the request for an absentee ballot” and again “with the submission of the absentee ballot.” This double documentation requirement, which most states do not currently impose at any stage, would add substantial friction to the process that millions of Americans, including elderly, disabled, and overseas military voters, rely upon as their primary means of voting.
4. Immediate Effective Date, No Funding, No Phase-In
The bill states plainly that its provisions “shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this section.” There is no phase-in period. There is no federal funding provided to help states implement new documentation systems, train election workers, update voter registration forms and databases, or communicate requirements to the public. The Election Assistance Commission is given just 10 days after enactment to “adopt and transmit to the chief State election official of each State guidance with respect to the implementation of the requirements.” States are given 30 days to “establish a program” for identifying non-citizens on voter rolls. These are the conditions under which states would be expected to overhaul their entire voter registration and election administration infrastructure.
5. The Risk of Bifurcated Elections
States that cannot comply with the law’s requirements could be forced to maintain two separate voter rolls: one for voters who have provided documentary proof of citizenship and are eligible to vote in federal elections, and one for voters who have not. Arizona has operated under just such a bifurcated system since 2004, resulting in nearly two decades of continuous litigation. The SAVE Act would risk spreading that legal and administrative chaos to all 50 states simultaneously, with no funding and no preparation time.
6. Mandatory Federal Database Cross-Checks and Data Sharing
The bill requires states to establish programs to identify non-citizens on voter rolls using information from the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system, the Social Security Administration, and state driver’s license agencies. Federal agencies must respond to state requests within 24 hours and are directed to “share information with each other with respect to an individual who is the subject of a request.”
The bill goes further: it directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to “conduct an investigation to determine whether to initiate removal proceedings” against any non-citizen found to be registered to vote. This means voter registration data would become a direct input into federal immigration enforcement. The scope of personal voter information flowing between state election systems and federal agencies raises significant privacy concerns that the bill does not address.
7. Criminal Penalties for Election Officials
The bill amends the existing criminal penalties section of the National Voter Registration Act to make it a federal crime for an election official to register “an applicant to vote in an election for Federal office who fails to present documentary proof of United States citizenship.” The bill also criminalizes “providing material assistance to a noncitizen in attempting to register to vote or vote in an election for Federal office” for executive branch officers and employees.
Critically, the bill does not limit criminal liability to knowing or willful violations. An election official who makes an honest administrative mistake could face federal criminal prosecution. This provision could have a severe chilling effect on election administration, discouraging qualified people from serving as election officials and causing those who do serve to deny registration to borderline applicants out of fear of personal legal consequences.
8. A Private Right of Action Against Election Officials
The bill expands private right of action provisions under the National Voter Registration Act to include “the act of an election official who registers an applicant to vote in an election for Federal office who fails to present documentary proof of United States citizenship.” This means private individuals may sue election officials directly for compliance failures, compounding the chilling effect of the criminal penalties and creating a hostile legal environment around the routine work of election administration.
Side-by-Side Comparison
The Bottom Line
Both proposals share a stated goal: ensuring that only eligible U.S. citizens cast ballots in American elections. But they represent fundamentally different visions of how to pursue that goal, and the differences matter enormously for millions of American voters.
The California initiative works within existing systems. It asks voters to confirm who they are, provides free IDs to those who need them, and builds in transparency and accountability through annual audits and public reporting. Its requirements are clearly defined, its burdens are modest, and its protections for voters are explicit.
The SAVE Act, as written in H.R. 7296, would impose requirements that tens of millions of eligible American citizens cannot currently meet, without providing a dollar in funding, a meaningful period of preparation, or protection for the election officials expected to carry it out. It takes effect the day it is signed. It gives states 30 days to overhaul their voter rolls. It exposes election workers to both criminal prosecution and private lawsuits for honest mistakes. It routes voter registration data into federal immigration enforcement. And it threatens to force all 50 states into the kind of bifurcated election chaos that Arizona has lived with for two decades.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether voter ID requirements are necessary or wise as a matter of policy. But the contrast between these two proposals is instructive. One is a carefully drawn, incremental reform that takes eligible voters’ concerns seriously. The other is a sweeping federal mandate that, as written, would make voting harder for millions of lawful American citizens while creating new legal and administrative burdens that states are given neither the time nor the resources to meet.
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