Will Newsom pay more attention to his day job?

Governor Gavin Newsom has devoted much of his second term to building a national political profile and has been more or less successful in doing so.

Why he did it is less clear. He says he was helping his Democratic Party become more aggressive. The national media assumed he was laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign. Or maybe it was just an ego trip.

Newsom has 28 months left as governor, and the question is whether he will now focus more on his day-to-day operations or, for whatever reason, continue his quest for relevance on the national stage.

The truth is: If Newsom's term were to end now, his track record would be poor, especially compared to that of his immediate predecessor, Jerry Brown.

Brown stabilized the state's shaky finances, reformed school funding, addressed prison overcrowding, and convinced lawmakers to reform the workers' compensation program and public employee pensions.

When Newsom ran for office six years ago, he promised a lot, claiming he was a student of government and could bring about profound changes, like a national health care system and millions of new homes, to solve one of the state's most vexed problems.

“I'm tired of politicians saying they support a single-payer system, but it's too soon, too expensive, or someone else's problem,” Newsom said during the 2018 election campaign, winning support from advocates. After the election, however, Newsom backtracked, citing the difficulties of merging multiple systems and calling his promise “ambitious.”

Newsom has expanded Medi-Cal, California's health insurance program for the poor, to millions more Californians, including illegal immigrants, making it eligible for more or less universal health insurance. But the cost of doing so is enormous, the state budget is in the red, and poor Californians still struggle to find health care.

“As governor, I will lead the effort to create the 3.5 million new housing units we need by 2025, because our solutions must be as bold as the problem is big,” then-Lieutenant Governor Newsom wrote in 2017. In his inaugural address in 2019, he went even further, announcing a “Marshall Plan for Affordable Housing.”

While Newsom signed several laws to remove barriers to development and cracked down on communities that impede development, construction activity has not increased noticeably and the housing shortage continues to grow.

Housing is not the only social basic that California lacks. Other deficiencies include a reliable water supply, adequate electricity supply—not just to meet current needs but also the immense amounts that a carbon-free economy would require—and a truly embarrassing deficit in reading and other academic skills compared to other states.

Newsom has pushed for improvements in preschool education, but there is still uncertainty about its effectiveness. There is the same uncertainty about the outcome of another of Newsom's initiatives, improving mental health services, and of course the homelessness crisis has worsened even more during his time in office.

Newsom's biggest mistake, which will haunt the state indefinitely, was his 2022 declaration that the budget surplus would be $97.5 billion. “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus this large,” Newsom boasted, setting off a spending spree.

The surplus was an illusion. Newsom and his budget team assumed that a one-time revenue boost would last indefinitely, which, as it later turned out, led to a $165 billion error over four years.

The phantom surplus turned into a multibillion-dollar deficit, forcing Newsom to cut spending, dip into emergency reserves and borrow money to cover the gap. The underlying gap between revenue and spending will still exist in 2027 – when Newsom hands the keys to his successor.