Fading Ripples from Gov. Newsom’s Last State of the State Address

It’s been years since Gov. Gavin Newsom put on a tie and made his way to the Assembly Chambers to grace the legislature with his presence and share some witty lines his whip-smart crisis communications team put together for him. He is, afterall, preparing to storm the country with his not-yet-declared-but-super-obvious campaign for the presidency of the United States and the stump speech has to be worked out in front of a live audience.

Rather, what we got yesterday in his final State of the State address was a 65-minute filibuster, a stemwinder not worth the minutes it took ChatGPT to assemble its wandering parts. What began as a rambling, seemingly off-the-cuff introduction taking a shot at one of his most ardent critics in the legislature, continued with an erratic memorialization of his personal rendezvous with California’s rivers, meandering around his many eroded and unkept political promises.

Newsom remained adrift during his disjointed jeremiad, pontificating upon a metaphorical collection of driftwood he has accumulated during his governorship. The question remains: if Gov. Newsom drops his speech into a river and no one is really listening to it, does it make a splash?

This speech will produce ripples, but the current situation suggests that Newsom’s rhetoric is drowning in reality as he can’t keep people and businesses in his state, even as their chief executive. Data suggests that almost a million and a half people have left the state since 2020. That’s quite a breach of people for someone auditioning to run the country.

With the constitutional requirement that the governor provide his annual budget proposal by January 10th, it was curious that he chose the 8th, the day after the one-year anniversary of the devastating and deadly fires in Los Angeles, to greet the microphone and cameras with vim and gaslighting about the state’s sickly condition. He could have easily saved this talk for a coming public relations drought, while doing his budget kabuki today, right before everyone goes home for the weekend.

Before Newsom could take the stage, and after Assembly leadership began with a land acknowledgement about taking things that weren’t theirs and keeping them (sounds about right for the legislature), the Speaker got right to the point: it’s all President Donald Trump’s fault and every ailment California faces is a result of adverse federal action.

It’s not just that California political leaders are angry about what is coming out of Washington, D.C., it’s that they are incapable of any self reflection about what is coming out of Sacramento. California governance is broken and ignoring that federal elections have consequences will not fix the state.

Newsom declared that the Trump Administration and Congress were waging “an assault on our values unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime.” Millions of Californians feel like Newsom is the perpetrator of that assault, not the victim.

Framing the Trump Administration as the purveyors of fear, he dove straight into the fight he’s having with Washington, D.C., claiming to be a “beacon” to the world, “an operational model, a policy blueprint for others to follow.” He said this all with his patented Cheshire grin. A beacon of what, we’re not sure, because that light burned out years ago. Mass migration out of the state suggests that the Potemkin Village he set up in his speech isn’t powerful enough to keep people around and build out the blueprint.

The budget has been out of whack since the governor effectively declared himself as the supreme leader during his reign of emergency orders during the Covid panic. The most recent analysis from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) projects the state faces an $18 billion deficit for fiscal year 2026-27, with structural deficits potentially growing to $35 billion annually by 2027-28. They note that the budget outlook is weak and identify spending as a problem, especially as the state appropriates billions of dollars on health care for illegal immigrants.

It should be noted that, according to his own Department of Finance, the year he was elected, the general fund expenditures were $124.8 billion, and last year, they landed around $228.9 billion. But the governor ramped up the rhetoric in his speech. Today, he has proposed a $248.3 billion general fund budget. State spending, not including federal or other special funds, has nearly DOUBLED since 2018. It is really hard to blame the Trump Administration or Congress when they refuse to write checks for this drunken spending spree.

To justify the spending, Newsom says he’s going to vastly increase funding for K-12 education, as Transitional Kindergarten is nearly universal across the state. This year, the legislature appropriated $137.1 billion ($83.3 billion general fund and $53.8 billion other funds) for all TK-12 education programs. This means $24,764 per pupil when accounting for all funding sources. We don’t know the formula yet, but Newsom was quick to brag about raising the spending to $27,418 per student. How the governor can justify an ever-increasing bank account for public schools that are hemorrhaging students while still using rolling three-year funding formulas — after he kept kids out of the classroom for 2 years while his kids went to a tony private school — is beyond most people.

Californians want their public schools to succeed, especially after listening to the governor’s compelling opening statement where he detailed his dyslexia and struggles with literacy. Yet, somehow he’s figured out how to read a teleprompter but not the research that shows his fiscal policies and alliance with the teacher unions won’t fix our failing education system. Noticeably absent from his comments were any acknowledgements of the bills he recently signed to screen for dyslexic students and pursue a better reading curriculum.

One would think that the governor would want to highlight the only bill the Speaker introduced, but he probably didn’t want to make his teacher union friends mad, so instead, he proposed growing the governor’s education bureaucracy. It’s similar to a recent plan to get rid of the Superintendent of Public Instruction that didn’t make it out of the legislature, something I’ve written about previously. And he missed a major opportunity to tell the people that he would like to opt into the federal credit scholarship program to bring as much as $3 billion dollars to public and private school children in the state. Other Democratic governors are signaling their support; why not Newsom?

And whenever his marginal successes just aren’t substantial enough to celebrate – a very low bar to pass – Newsom picks fights with his foes outside our borders, incessantly jabbing Texas and Florida, thinking it is going to help his cause. Governors DeSantis and Abbott couldn’t be happier for Newsom’s policies that keep U-hauls leaving California at a rate higher than any other state.

Still, Newsom’s claim that Texas and Florida tax their lower income residents more than California is based on convoluted analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) that picks and chooses which tax policies to critique to arrive at the conclusion that California’s progressive tax policy is better than Texas and Florida. ITEP’s approach has been sharply questioned by the Tax Foundation and the governor should stop using that line. Regardless, taxes are one of the many reasons so many Californians are repatriating to these and other states.

Newsom is quick to brag about the state’s 52 lawsuits (now 53) against the federal government and the paltry amount of money he’s won, but forgets to share how much he’s lost. Case in point, last week the state dropped their lawsuit to reclaim $4 billion in funds for high-speed rail. This is after he said in his first state of the state speech, “And with all due respect, I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump. That fundamentally would have to happen if we just walked away.”

So, it’s surprising that the governor chose to spend as much time as he did about high-speed rail, which only has a fraction of totally required funding, no credible completion date, and hasn’t laid a single rail yet. He’s doing what he often does after his bellicose pronouncements: doubling down on a project that makes no fiscal sense.

One place Newsom has crowed about the most — but can’t seem to move the needle on action — is his failure to remediate his failed policies that allowed Los Angeles to burn last year. The more we find out about obstacles to clean overgrown state land and allow for firefighters to provide comprehensive abatement strategies and overwhelm the fires before they run out of water, the more it will be etched in the pantheon of his governance failures. And for all the loud pronouncements that he’s removed all the regulatory barriers to rebuilding the burned out communities, very little seems to be happening. Newsom is reduced to being a desperate letter writer instead of an action hero.

In the one speech this year where Newsom could have risen above the ashes and shown some amount of decorum, thoughtfulness and comradery, he instead decided to deliver a partisan speech, preferring political talking points to an honest diagnosis of the state’s health. Yesterday’s speech was a trial run for his presidential aspirations and his words ring hollow for most California residents who may not like his politics, but love the state. As such, Newsom’s soppy speech left Californians up a river, without a paddle.