Gavin Newsom

Gavin Christopher Newsom (born October 10, 1967) is an American politician and businessman serving since 2019 as the 40th governor of California. A member of the Democratic Party, he served from 2011 to 2019 as the 49th lieutenant governor of California and from 2004 to 2011 as the 42nd mayor of San Francisco.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Newsom graduated from Santa Clara University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science in political science. Afterward, he founded the boutique winery PlumpJack Group in Oakville, California, with billionaire heir and family friend Gordon Getty as an investor. The company grew to manage 23 businesses, including wineries, restaurants, and hotels. Newsom began his political career in 1996, when San Francisco mayor Willie Brown appointed him to the city's Parking and Traffic Commission. Brown then appointed Newsom to fill a vacancy on the Board of Supervisors the next year and Newsom was first elected to the board in 1998.

Newsom was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2003 and reelected in 2007. He was elected lieutenant governor of California in 2010 and reelected in 2014. As lieutenant governor, Newsom hosted The Gavin Newsom Show from 2012 to 2013 and in 2013 wrote the book Citizenville, which focuses on using digital tools for democratic change.

Newsom was elected governor in 2018 and reelected in 2022. He faced criticism for his personal behavior and leadership style during the COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed to an unsuccessful recall effort in 2021. As governor, Newsom has focused on infrastructure, housing, climate, gun control and LGBTQ rights. In 2025, he began hosting the podcast This Is Gavin Newsom, which has featured guests from across the political spectrum. He oversaw the passage of California Proposition 50, a gerrymandering proposal developed in response to 2025 Texas redistricting. Newsom is a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

Gavin Christopher Newsom was born on October 10, 1967, in San Francisco, California, to Tessa Thomas (née Menzies) and William Alfred Newsom III, a state appeals court judge and attorney for Getty Oil. He is a descendant of the Newsom family of architects active in early 20th century California, who originally came from Canada. William Newsom was a close friend of billionaire heir Gordon Getty, who repeatedly supported Gavin's career. William Newsom would also for a time help manage the Getty Trust. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Newsom comes from a prominent family. His maternal great-grandfather Thomas Addis was a nephrologist and professor of medicine at Stanford University noted for his research on kidney disease. Newsom is a second cousin twice removed of musician Joanna Newsom, and his aunt Barbara Newsom was married to Ron Pelosi, the brother-in-law of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Newsom's parents divorced in 1971 when he was three years old, leaving his mother, Tessa, to raise him and his younger sister, Hilary Newsom Callan, largely on her own. Tessa worked three jobs—often as a waitress, bookkeeper, and secretary—to support the family, and Newsom has cited her as shaping his work ethic. Newsom has called his childhood challenging, shaped in part by financial instability and his struggle with "pretty severe" dyslexia, a condition he still has.

Newsom's education began at École Notre Dame des Victoires, a French-American bilingual Catholic school in San Francisco that he attended for kindergarten and first grade. But his severe dyslexia—which affected his ability to read, write, spell, and perform numerical tasks—prompted a transfer. He continued at Notre Dame des Victoires from third through fifth grades, where he was enrolled in remedial reading classes to cope with his learning difficulties. Throughout his years in school, Newsom relied heavily on audiobooks, summaries, and verbal instruction. Newsom has written that as an adult, he still prefers audio interpretations of documents and reports. In a 2023 interview, he said his dyslexia "forced me to find workarounds and think differently."

At Redwood High School in Larkspur, California, Newsom excelled athletically despite his academic struggles, graduating in 1985. He played basketball as a shooting guard and baseball as an outfielder. Tessa opened their home to foster children. Newsom's sister Hilary recalled lean Christmases when their mother warned them not to expect gifts, underscoring the family's financial strain. Newsom wrote in a later memoir that the family would receive luxurious gifts from the Gettys, which he and his sister pretended not to like so their mother could return them for store credit. Nevertheless, the children also accompanied the Gettys on expensive trips, such as a hot-air balloon safari and a meeting with King Juan Carlos I of Spain. Newsom's father's habit of donating much of his income further tightened the family's finances, leading Newsom to take jobs such as washing cars and working at a local deli during high school.

Newsom enrolled at Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science in political science. His application to the university was supported by letters of recommendation from former California governor Jerry Brown and a member of the school's Board of Regents. He tried out for the baseball team during his first two years but underwent elbow surgery in late 1985—later revealed as a procedure to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament—ending his varsity aspirations. He has credited the university's Jesuit education for influencing his worldview. During his junior year, Newsom spent a semester studying abroad in Rome, Italy, an experience he called "eye-opening" in a 2019 speech.

Newsom and a group of investors created the company PlumpJack Associates L.P. on May 14, 1991. The group started the PlumpJack Winery in 1992 with the financial help of his family friend Gordon Getty. PlumpJack was the name of an opera written by Getty, who invested in 10 of Newsom's 11 businesses. Getty told the San Francisco Chronicle that he treated Newsom like a son and invested in his first business venture because of that relationship. According to Getty, later business investments were because of "the success of the first".

One of Newsom's early interactions with government occurred when Newsom resisted the San Francisco Department of Public Health's requirement to install a sink at his PlumpJack wine store. The Health Department argued that wine was a food and required the store to install a $2,700 sink in the carpeted wine shop on the grounds that the shop needed the sink for a mop. When Newsom was later appointed supervisor, he told the San Francisco Examiner: "That's the kind of bureaucratic malaise I'm going to be working through."

The business grew to an enterprise with more than 700 employees. The PlumpJack Cafe Partners L.P. opened the PlumpJack Café, also on Fillmore Street, in 1993. Between 1993 and 2000, Newsom and his investors opened several other businesses that included the PlumpJack Squaw Valley Inn with a PlumpJack Café (1994), a winery in Napa Valley (1995), the Balboa Café Bar and Grill (1995), the PlumpJack Development Fund L.P. (1996), the MatrixFillmore Bar (1998), PlumpJack Wines shop Noe Valley branch (1999), PlumpJackSport retail clothing (2000), and a second Balboa Café at Squaw Valley (2000). Newsom's investments included five restaurants and two retail clothing stores. Newsom's annual income was greater than $429,000 from 1996 to 2001. In 2002, his business holdings were valued at more than $6.9 million. Newsom gave a monthly $50 gift certificate to PlumpJack employees whose business ideas failed, because in his view, "There can be no success without failure."

Newsom sold his share of his San Francisco businesses when he became mayor in 2004. He maintained his ownership in the PlumpJack companies outside San Francisco, including the PlumpJack Winery in Oakville, California, new PlumpJack-owned Cade Winery in Angwin, California, and the PlumpJack Squaw Valley Inn. He is the president in absentia of Airelle Wines Inc., which is connected to the PlumpJack Winery in Napa County. Newsom earned between $141,000 and $251,000 in 2007 from his business interests. In February 2006, he paid $2,350,000 for his residence in the Russian Hill neighborhood, which he put on the market in April 2009 for $3,000,000. At the time of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March 2023, it was acknowledged that at least three of Newsom's wine companies—PlumpJack, Cade, and Odette—were Silicon Valley Bank clients.

Newsom's first political experience came when he volunteered for Willie Brown's successful campaign for mayor in 1995. Newsom hosted a private fundraiser at his PlumpJack Café. Brown appointed Newsom to a vacant seat on the Parking and Traffic Commission in 1996, and he was later elected president of the commission. Brown appointed him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors seat vacated by Kevin Shelley in 1997. At the time, he was the youngest member of San Francisco's board of supervisors.

Newsom was sworn in by his father and pledged to bring his business experience to the board. Brown called Newsom "part of the future generation of leaders of this great city". Newsom described himself as a "social liberal and a fiscal watchdog". He was elected to a full four-year term to the board in 1998. San Francisco voters chose to abandon at-large elections to the board for the previous district system in 1999. Newsom was reelected in 2000 and 2002 to represent the second district, which includes Pacific Heights, the Marina, Cow Hollow, Sea Cliff, and Laurel Heights, which had San Francisco's highest income level and highest Republican registration. Newsom paid $500 to the San Francisco Republican Party to appear on the party's endorsement slate in 2000 while running for Supervisor. He was reelected.

As a San Francisco Supervisor, Newsom gained public attention for his role in advocating reform of the city's municipal railway (Muni). He was one of two supervisors endorsed by Rescue Muni, a transit riders group, in his 1998 reelection. He sponsored Proposition B to require Muni and other city departments to develop detailed customer service plans. The measure passed with 56.6% of the vote. Newsom sponsored a ballot measure from Rescue Muni; a version of the measure was approved by voters in November 1999. Newsom also supported allowing restaurants to serve alcohol at their outdoor tables, banning tobacco advertisements visible from the streets, stiffer penalties for landlords who run afoul of rent-control laws, and a resolution, which was defeated, to commend Colin Powell for raising money for youth programs. Newsom's support for business interests at times strained his relationship with labor leaders.

During Newsom's time as supervisor, he supported housing projects through public-private partnerships to increase homeownership and affordable housing in San Francisco. He supported HOPE, a failed local-ballot measure that would have allowed an increased condo-conversion rate if a certain percentage of tenants within a building were buying their units. As a candidate for mayor, he supported building 10,000 new housing units to create 15,000 new construction jobs. Newsom's signature achievement as a supervisor was a voter initiative called Care Not Cash (Measure N), which offered care, supportive housing, drug treatment, and help from behavioral health specialists for the homeless in lieu of direct cash aid from the state's general assistance program. Many homeless rights advocates protested against the initiative. Newsom said: "Progressives and Democrats, nuns and priests, homeless advocates and homeless people were furious." The successfully passed ballot measure raised his political profile and provided the volunteers, donors, and campaign staff that helped make him a leading contender for mayor in 2003. In a 2008 city audit, the program was evaluated as largely successful for lowering average cash payments per person from over $300 to $78 and the number of people receiving cash payments from over 2,500 to about 640.

Newsom placed first in the November 4, 2003, general election in a nine-person field. He received 41.9% of the vote to Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez's 19.6% in the first round of balloting, but faced a closer race in the December 9 runoff, when many of the city's progressive groups supported Gonzalez. The race was partisan, with attacks against Gonzalez for his support of Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election, and attacks against Newsom for contributing $500 to a Republican slate mailer in 2000 that endorsed issues Newsom supported. Democratic leaders felt that San Francisco needed to be reinforced as a Democratic stronghold after losing the 2000 presidential election and the 2003 gubernatorial recall election to Arnold Schwarzenegger. National Democratic Party figures, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jesse Jackson, campaigned for Newsom. Five supervisors endorsed Gonzalez, while Willie Brown endorsed Newsom.

Newsom won the runoff with 53% of the vote to Gonzalez's 47%, a margin of 11,000 votes. He ran as a business-friendly centrist Democrat and a moderate in San Francisco politics. Some of his opponents called him conservative. Newsom said he was a centrist in the Dianne Feinstein mold. He ran on the slogan "great cities, great ideas", and presented over 21 policy papers. He pledged to continue working on San Francisco's homelessness issue. Newsom was sworn in as mayor on January 8, 2004. He called for unity among the city's political factions, and promised to address the issues of public schools, potholes, and affordable housing. Newsom said he was "a different kind of leader" who "isn't afraid to solve even the toughest problems".

San Francisco's progressive community tried to field a candidate to run against Newsom. Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly considered running, but both declined. Gonzalez also decided not to challenge Newsom again. When the August 10, 2007, filing deadline passed, San Francisco's discussion shifted to talk about Newsom's second term. He was challenged in the election by 13 candidates, including George Davis, a nudist activist, and Michael Powers, owner of the Power Exchange sex club. Conservative former supervisor Tony Hall withdrew by early September due to lack of support. In August 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Newsom faced no "serious threat to his re-election bid", having raised $1.6 million for his campaign by early August. He was reelected on November 6 with over 72% of the vote. Upon taking office for a second term, Newsom promised to focus on the environment, homelessness, health care, education, housing, and rebuilding San Francisco General Hospital.

As mayor, Newsom focused on development projects in Hunters Point and Treasure Island. He gained national attention in 2004 when he directed the San Francisco city–county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, violating a state law passed in 2000. Implementation of Care Not Cash, the initiative he had sponsored as a supervisor, began on July 1, 2004. As part of the initiative, 5,000 more homeless people were given permanent shelter in the city. About 2,000 people had been placed into permanent housing with support by 2007. Other programs Newsom initiated to end chronic homelessness included the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (SF HOT) and Project Homeless Connect (PHC), which placed 2,000 homeless people into permanent housing and provided 5,000 additional affordable rental units in the city.

During a strike by hotel workers against a dozen San Francisco hotels, Newsom joined UNITE HERE union members on a picket line in front of the Westin St. Francis Hotel on October 27, 2004. He vowed that the city would boycott the hotels by not sponsoring city events at them until they agreed to a contract with workers; the contract dispute was settled in September 2006. In 2005, Newsom pushed for a state law to allow California communities to create policy restricting certain breeds of dogs. In 2007, he signed the law establishing Healthy San Francisco to provide city residents with universal health care, the first city in the nation to do so. Newsom came under attack from the San Francisco Democratic Party in 2009 for his failure to implement the City of San Francisco's sanctuary city rule, under which the city was to not assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Newsom filed initial paperwork to run for lieutenant governor in February 2010, and officially announced his candidacy in March. He received the Democratic nomination in June, and won the election on November 2. Newsom was sworn in as lieutenant governor on January 10, 2011, and served under Governor Jerry Brown. While lieutenant governor, in May 2012, Newsom began hosting The Gavin Newsom Show on Current TV. The same month, he drew criticism for calling Sacramento "dull" and saying he was only there once a week, adding, "there's no reason" to be there otherwise.

Newsom was reelected as lieutenant governor on November 4, 2014, defeating Republican Ron Nehring with 57.2% of the vote. His second term began on January 5, 2015.

Newsom supported a failed measure in 2012 that sought to end capital punishment in California. He said the initiative would save California millions of dollars, citing statistics that California had spent $5 billion since 1978 to execute just 13 people. In 2016, Newsom supported Proposition 62, which also would have repealed the death penalty in California. He argued that Prop. 62 would get rid of a system "that is administered with troubling racial disparities" and said that the death penalty was fundamentally immoral and did not deter crime. Proposition 62 failed.

Newsom joined Long Beach City College Superintendent Eloy Oakley in a November 2015 op-ed calling for the creation of the California College Promise, which would create partnerships between public schools, public universities, and employers and offer a free community college education. Throughout 2016, he joined Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf at the launch of the Oakland Promise and Second Lady Jill Biden and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti at the launch of the LA Promise. In June 2016, Newsom helped secure $15 million in the state budget to support the creation of promise programs throughout the state.

In December 2015, Newsom called on the University of California to reclassify computer science courses as a core academic class to incentivize more high schools to offer computer science curricula. He sponsored successful legislation signed by Governor Brown in September 2016, that began the planning process for expanding computer science education to all state students, beginning as early as kindergarten. In 2016, Newsom led an effort to enact a series of reforms at the University of California to give student-athletes additional academic and injury-related support, and to ensure that contracts for athletic directors and coaches emphasized academic progress. This came in response to several athletics programs, including the University of California–Berkeley's football team, which had the lowest graduation rates in the country.

On April 21, 2009, Newsom announced his candidacy for governor of California in the 2010 election. He named state senator (and future U.S. senator) Alex Padilla to chair his campaign. He received former president Bill Clinton's endorsement in September. Throughout the campaign, he had low poll numbers, trailing Democratic frontrunner Jerry Brown by more than 20 points in most polls. Newsom dropped out of the race in October and ran for lieutenant governor instead.

On February 11, 2015, Newsom announced that he was opening a campaign account for governor in the 2018 elections, allowing him to raise funds for a campaign to succeed Brown as governor of California. On June 5, 2018, he finished in the top two in the nonpartisan blanket primary, and he defeated Republican John H. Cox by a landslide in the November 6 general election.

Newsom was sworn in on January 7, 2019. Several recall attempts were launched against Newsom early in his tenure but failed to gain much traction. On February 21, 2020, a recall petition was introduced by Orrin Heatlie, a deputy sheriff in Yolo County. The petition mentioned Newsom's sanctuary state policy and said laws he endorsed favored "foreign nationals, in our country illegally"; said that California had high homelessness, high taxes, and low quality of life; and described other grievances. The California secretary of state approved it for circulation on June 10, 2020.

Forcing the gubernatorial recall election required a total of 1,495,709 verified signatures. By August 2020, 55,000 signatures were submitted and verified by the secretary of state, and 890 new valid signatures were submitted by October 2020. The petition was initially given a signature deadline of November 17, 2020, but it was extended to March 17, 2021, after Judge James P. Arguelles ruled that petitioners could have more time because of the pandemic. Newsom's attendance at a party at The French Laundry in November 2020, despite his public health measures; voter anger over lockdowns, job losses, school and business closures; and a $31 billion fraud scandal at the state unemployment agency were credited for the recall's growing support. The French Laundry event took place on November 6, and between November 5 and December 7 over 442,000 new signatures were submitted and verified; 1,664,010 verified signatures, representing roughly 98% of the final total of 1,719,900, were submitted between November 2020 and March 17, 2021. In response to the criticism, Newsom said in a statement, "While the First Partner and I followed the restaurant's health protocols and took safety precautions, I should have modeled better behavior and not joined the dinner."

During the campaign, Newsom compared the recall effort to the attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. On September 14, 2021, the recall election was held, and only 38% voted to recall Newsom, so he remained in office.

A CalMatters analysis published in 2019 found Newsom's political positions to be more moderate than those of almost every Democratic state legislator in California.

After U.S. Senator Kamala Harris was elected vice president of the United States in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Newsom appointed Secretary of State of California Alex Padilla to succeed her as California's junior U.S. senator. To replace Padilla as secretary of state, Newsom appointed Assemblywoman Shirley Weber. After the U.S. Senate confirmed Xavier Becerra as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Newsom appointed Rob Bonta Attorney General of California. In an interview with Joy Reid, Newsom was asked whether he would appoint a Black woman to replace Dianne Feinstein if she were to retire from the Senate or die before her term ended in 2024; Newsom replied that he would. Feinstein died in September 2023, and Newsom faced pressure to quickly appoint a successor. He fulfilled his promise and appointed Laphonza Butler to the seat.

On March 13, 2019, three years after voters narrowly rejected its repeal in the 2016 California Proposition 62, Newsom declared a moratorium on the state's death penalty, preventing any execution in the state as long as he remained governor. The move also led to the withdrawal of the state's current lethal injection protocol and the execution chamber's closure at San Quentin State Prison. In a CBS This Morning interview, Newsom said that the death penalty is "a racist system ... that is perpetuating inequality. It's a system that I cannot in good conscience support." The moratorium granted a temporary reprieve for all 737 inmates on California's death row, then the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere.

In January 2022, Newsom directed the state to begin dismantling its death row in San Quentin, to be transformed into a "space for rehabilitation programs", as all the condemned inmates were moving to other prisons that have maximum security facilities. The state's voters upheld capital punishment in 2012 and 2016, agreeing when they did so in 2016 to move the condemned to other prisons. While a 2021 poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times suggested declining support for capital punishment among California's voters, Republican opponents criticized Newsom's moves to halt capital punishment in California as defiance of the will of voters, and capital punishment advocates said they denied closure to murder victims' families.

In response to the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants with criminal records, Newsom gave heightened consideration to people in this situation. A pardon can eliminate the grounds for deportation of immigrants who would otherwise be legal permanent residents. Pardon requests from people facing deportation are given expedited review by the state Board of Parole Hearings, per a 2018 California law. In his first acts of clemency as governor, Newsom pardoned seven formerly incarcerated people in May 2019, including two Cambodian refugees facing deportation. He pardoned three men who were attempting to avoid being deported to Cambodia or Vietnam in November 2019. They had separately committed crimes when they were each 19 years old. In December 2019, Newsom granted parole to a Cambodian refugee who had been held in a California prison due to a murder case. Although immigrant rights groups wanted Newsom to end policies allowing the transfer to federal agents, the refugee was turned over for possible deportation upon release.