Gavin Newsom ran California into the ground and 200,000 people fled the state.
This week, he flew to South Carolina to explain why Democrats keep losing.
What he said out loud would have gotten any other politician laughed off the stage.
Newsom Hits South Carolina With a Democrat Confession on Rural America
Standing before a room of South Carolina Democrats, the man who turned San Francisco into a street camp confessed something his party hasn't said publicly in years.
"We've not delivered," Newsom told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview during his four-day swing through Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
"We stopped showing up," he said.
"I remember a case where we just saw red, and we said, 'It's not worth the drive.'"
That's the hardest truth Democrats have heard from one of their own in a decade – and it came from the man most responsible for proving it.
Newsom said Democrats made a strategic catastrophe after the 2010 midterm shellacking, ceding state legislatures, county seats, and rural communities to Republicans while fixating on Washington.
He pointed directly at Karl Rove.
"Rove had a strategy and a plan," Newsom said. "He delivered 675 seats."
Democrats, Newsom admitted, watched that happen and kept heading to coastal fundraisers instead of rural courthouses.
"In 2010, we were in the majority down here, and the party said, 'Well, just not worth the investment,'" he said.
He also told the crowd Democrats had lost their "big tent" – that the party imposed ideological purity tests on its own members and drove away anyone who didn't pass them.
"We've lost the big tent," he said. "We're not the big tent party anymore."
He said it like it was an observation. It reads like a confession.
Newsom said it standing in a state Democrats haven't carried in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter.
That's not a rough patch. That's four decades of exactly what Newsom just described.
Newsom Eyes a 2028 Presidential Run While California Homelessness Hits 187000
While Newsom was polishing his national profile, Californians were packing up and leaving the state he ran.
Texas and Florida took them in – the same two states Newsom spent years attacking from Sacramento.
Under his watch, California became home to 187,000 people sleeping on its streets – one in every four homeless Americans in the entire country – in a state that already carries the highest cost of living in the nation.
Newsom's gas tax will cost California drivers $2 per gallon by the end of 2026.
The median home price in California crossed $800,000 last year.
California’s public schools rank 40th in the nation.
The middle class that used to define the state is somewhere in Phoenix now.
None of that came up on Newsom’s "Take It Back" tour.
South Carolina Republicans made sure the full picture stayed in frame anyway.
Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, gave Newsom the welcome he deserved: "Gavin Newsom can come to South Carolina as often as he likes, but changing the scenery doesn't change his failed, liberal record. Californians have been leaving a state defined by high costs, high taxes, and liberal government, while people and businesses continue moving to South Carolina."
Protesters outside his events waved signs reading "Wrong Coast" and "Clean Up Your State First."
One Republican activist in Dorchester County said: "We don't want Gavin Newsom to California our South Carolina."
Newsom dismissed the criticism as "California Derangement Syndrome."
The man whose policies drove a quarter-million residents fleeing his own state is now telling America they're deranged for noticing.
Newsom got one thing right: Democrats did stop showing up.
They abandoned rural America, threw working-class voters overboard, and replaced them with a coastal donor base that hasn't won a national election without Barack Obama on the ticket.
Newsom ran that experiment at scale in the most powerful state in the country – and the results are driving down the freeway to Arizona and Nevada in a U-Haul right now.
The diagnosis is accurate. The doctor is the disease.
Sources:
- Barnini Chakraborty, "Newsom's Hard Truth for Democrats: 'It's Our Performance,'" Washington Examiner, September 9, 2026.
- Amy Curtis, "You'll Never Guess Who Gavin Newsom Blames for California's Bad Reputation," Townhall, September 8, 2026.
- Christopher J. Calton, "Gavin Newsom Cannot Escape His Embarrassing Legacy on Homelessness," Independent Institute, May 23, 2025.
- "Gavin Newsom's California Gets Humiliated By Florida And Texas, Yet Again," OutKick, January 27, 2026.
- "Exposing Gavin Newsom's Top 10 Failures," Reform California, July 2024.