California’s Democrat governor is preparing to unseat Biden. He just hasn’t said it yet

Gavin Newsom ticks all the boxes that the beleaguered president has overlooked or ignored, including securing the youth vote by tackling climate change, writes David Callaway. Is he gearing up to take the White House?

Gavin Newsom offers young voters everything they don’t see in Biden (AP)

While President Biden struggles with a growing Middle East emergency, and an electorate that increasingly sees a tottering old man instead of a clever statesman, California governor Gavin Newsom is focusing like a laser on the one group Biden hasn’t won over – the youth vote. And the one thing they care most about – climate change.

Behind the global headlines of inflation and war that have dogged Biden this past year and overshadowed his own successful infrastructure and job-creating record, Newsom has moved unencumbered to grab the climate spotlight.

He recently signed two first-in-the-nation climate disclosure and risk bills that vault California ahead of national standards at a time when the federal government still hasn’t defined its own rules. He was asked to speak to world leaders at the United Nations during Climate Week in New York last month by secretary general Antonio Guterres (Biden wasn’t).

Next week, he’ll travel to China – via Israel – on a whistle-stop tour of renewable energy plants and companies in places such as Shanghai and Shenzen, signing memorandums of understanding all along the way. By just sticking to climate change and avoiding sensitive topics such as human rights and technology trade issues, Newsom avoids the headlines that have plagued members of Congress on similar China tours this past summer.

The strategy is simple. As long as Biden intends to run for president next year, most Democrats are hanging on the sidelines, not wanting to challenge a sitting president and take away any votes on what is expected to be a tight race against former president Donald Trump.

But with Biden increasingly looking – and acting – the part of the detached leader that so many young voters are worried about, it makes sense to be ready to pounce should Democratic strategists and the Biden campaign suddenly change direction. Newsom will tell anyone who asks that he is just representing California’s interests as governor of the world’s sixth-largest economy – but this is a shadow campaign if ever I’ve seen one.

Newsom offers young voters everything they don’t see in Biden. He’s a good-looking and fit 56-year-old. He talks a great game on climate. He’s a known name on the world stage.

Those of us in California who have lived with his foibles in the last decade as governor and as mayor of San Francisco before that, realise they will be surfaced in any national campaign. These include the homeless and drug problems afflicting San Francisco and other cities, a legalised pot agenda that hasn’t worked as planned, a rigid Covid containment strategy that enraged many parents of school children during the pandemic, and the state’s never-ending fiscal woes.

He’s also seen on a national stage as one of the slick and elite Democratic politicians from the coasts who have difficulty garnering votes from the heartland.

But for young voters who don’t see all that, his focus on climate at a time when fossil fuel interests are running amok distinguishes him from the same old gang in Washington DC. It’s a smart strategy that allows him a national, even global stage without having to carry the baggage of the Biden administration.

Republican strategists have noticed. Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign recently sent him to San Francisco to record a commercial from the blight of the city’s Tenderloin homeless area. Should he raise his head above the presidential parapet, they will be prepared to blast him as an ineffective liberal bent on regulating the nation into obscurity. But that might not mean as much to young voters as the fact that Newsom is rapidly making himself the face of the next generation of climate change leaders, after Al Gore, etc.

In the meantime, Newsom, who survived a recall campaign against him in California just two years ago, is enjoying some prime time in the climate change sun. And plotting presidential politics in its shadows.