- State & Local
- California
For reasons maybe only extended therapy may one day unearth, I spent part of my post-election detox binge-watching the Netflix romantic comedy Nobody Wants This.
Why the fascination? It might because the Los Angeles-based saga of an unlucky-in-love gentile podcaster who finds her soulmate in the form of a hunky West Side rabbi is a romanticized version of California’s largest city—a fictional LA in which Judaism is cherished (in 2024, anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for 80 percent of all reported religious hate crimes in Los Angeles County), the roads are always clear (in fact, LA is home to the nation’s second-worst traffic), and a coterie of friends not exactly dripping in money somehow have the resources to frequent trendy eateries when not hosting mixers in their cool homes (it takes an income ranging from $280,000 to $430,000 annually to buy a house in Los Angeles).
As it turns out, there’s another California city that likewise seems fictional these days —well, not so much fictional as stranger than fiction. And that would be a post-election Sacramento in which an outgoing governor won’t cede his spotlight to his successor—an incoming governor-elect who doesn’t seem ready for the attention.
(If you’re curious about how to interpret California’s election results, here’s a podcast with my Hoover colleague Lee Ohanian).
Let’s begin with soon-to-be-former-governor Gavin Newsom, who caused a major stir late last week by announcing that he’s commuting the sentence of the 548 inmates awaiting execution. Newsom’s rationale: “State-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us. I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.”
As in most things with a governor assumed to seek the presidency once he leaves office in January (though some would argue that Newsom’s been angling for the Democratic nomination for over two years now), Newsom’s action invites cynicism.
First, Newsom waited until the tenth month of his seventh year in office to deliver a death blow to the death penalty—conveniently, after Election Day and thus sparing talk of the mass commutation from becoming a campaign issue. Keep in mind: this is the same governor, the author of a memoir titled Young Man in a Hurry, who placed an executive moratorium on the death penalty only two months into his first term, then converted San Quentin Prison, home of California’s Death Row, into a “rehabilitation center” in early 2023, soon after breezing to re-election.
Second, Newsom’s seemingly bold action actually passes the buck to the judicial branch. Under Article V, Section 8 of the California Constitution, reducing a death sentence to life without parole, as Newsom wants, requires the California Supreme Court’s approval in cases of twice-convicted felons. This applies to roughly 70 percent of California’s death row population.
Third, while Newsom’s actions play to a progressive primary electorate across America that delights in the idea of a governor stopping the killing in the Golden State, it’s not as if Newsom governs a killing field: next January marks twenty-one years since the Golden State’s last execution. My old boss, former governor Pete Wilson, liked to say about the delay in capital punishment: “The leading cause of death on death row shouldn’t be old age.” California inmate David Carpenter, aka the “Trailside Killer,” might agree. He turned ninety-six this year and has been awaiting execution since 1984.
Oddly enough, one person who might want to thank Newsom for his action is California’s next governor, Xavier Becerra, whose rocky press conference in Sacramento mercifully was drowned out by Newsom’s post-election, attention-seeking behavior.
And this is why Sacramento seems stranger than fiction—and out of political character these days.
Ordinarily, in a post-election California with a new administration on the way, it’s the outgoing governor who stays out of the limelight other than for the annual Capitol tree-lighting ceremony, holiday parties, and a legacy tour up and down the Golden State to sell the public on the notion of eight years of accomplishment.
Instead, in present-day transitional Sacramento, it’s Newsom still on the stage—and perhaps staying there until his final hours in office.
Which may not be a bad thing for Becerra, as it’s still not clear how he plans to deal with California’s many challenges (“contemplative” being a charitable adjective offered by the Los Angeles Times).
What comes to mind: the final scene in The Candidate, a 1972 film about a fictional Senate race in California (that the lead character is an underdog Democrat in an uphill struggle versus a Republican incumbent tells you just how old the movie is) and this closing line: “What do we do now?”
If Becerra’s first post-election press availability in the state’s capital (all of nineteen minutes) is any indication, it seems that what to “do now” is something to be decided . . . sometime later.
Asked by reporters what he and legislators intend to address next year, including the remote possibility of a tax cut, the governor-elect replied: “I think everything should be on the table. By the way, you’re probably going to be hearing me say that a lot, whether it’s on energy, whether it’s on revenue and tax policy, whether it’s on health care; why should we take anything off the table?”
Asked if he’d undo Medi-Cal cuts for undocumented immigrants before they kick in next summer, Becerra replied: “Don’t play this game about asking me to commit; I didn’t get elected doing that.”
And asked for his thoughts on Newsom’s mass commutation, Becerra stayed mum (while running for governor, Becerra said he opposed the death penalty for reasons having to do with race and arbitrary application).
For now, California’s governor-elect has the luxury of time (albeit not much of it) to make sense of matters in the weeks ahead—in addition to appointing a cabinet and top aides, he’ll be spending some painful hours with the state’s Department of Finance over how to proceed with the Golden’s State structural deficit and a budget proposal due in early January (part of Newsom’s legacy: under his watch, California took in $1.4 trillion in general fund revenue while spending $1.7 trillion).
There’s also the matter of what to do with California’s beleaguered high-speed rail project, which could run out of money as soon as December of next year (earlier this year, Becerra promised that if elected the rail project would be finished “on budget and on time”).
And, assuming Becerra and Democratic lawmakers will spend their 2027 searching for added revenue now that the Proposition 40 billionaire wealth tax has failed (though its backers say they’ll attempt a do-over in 2028), what form will the new revenue take? A new bracket for millionaires? A mileage tax for California drivers?
It’s worth remembering that the election of 1974—arguably the worst-ever midterm drubbing before last week’s anti-Trump referendum—produced a new government-elect in California with a familiar surname: Jerry Brown. Not that it was a mandate: despite voters across America being in a mood to punish the party of California native son Richard Nixon, Brown prevailed by less than 3 percent.
After his win, Brown encountered a Sacramento unsure of the new governor because of his age (at thirty-six, California’s youngest elected governor) and a perceived lack of preparedness. Another word to describe the new governor: flaky (asked to describe his political goals, Brown responded: “Reduce the sum of human misery, I guess. Help people expand their lives a little bit, give them an awareness of their own potential.”
A half-century later, Xavier Becerra prepares to take office as California’s second-oldest elected governor (Becerra turns sixty-nine in January; Brown was seventy-two when he returned to office in 2011).
But will he be prepared for what awaits him?
