Democratic Party analysts and left-leaning economists have had quite enough of their fellow Americans’ complaints. As a striking number of poll respondents express alarm, despair even, about the rising cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency, experts shake their heads. Don’t people realize that jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, and inflation is in retreat?

Few have struck this chord more insistently than Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and liberal New York Times columnist. In a February column titled “Vibes, Vegetables and Vitriol,” he suggested that inflation is no longer worrisome and backed up his view with field research.

“Now, I go grocery shopping myself, and am occasionally startled by the total at the cash register—although that’s usually because I wasn’t factoring in the price of that bottle of scotch I picked up along with the meat and vegetables,” Krugman wrote.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous. Poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people experience a different reality. They carry the searing memories of the Great Recession and its foreclosure crisis, when millions of American households lost their home. A large number of these Americans worked in person during the dolorous early days of the pandemic, and saw its toll up close. And since 2019, they’ve weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power. Tell these Americans that the economy is humming, that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate, and that everything’s grand, and you’re likely to see a roll of the eyes.

Krugman in his column confessed that he had “no idea” what he paid for roughly the same groceries three years earlier, although he allowed that olive oil seemed costly. He and other economists talked of a “vibecession”—an admixture of gloom and worry and misinformation that prevents Americans from seeing the rosy nature of the economy. This is a common take among prominent Democrats and left-leaning economists, all of whom speak with an eye on the upcoming presidential election. In late February, California Governor Gavin Newsom appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and declared that Biden had conducted a “master class” in economic helmsmanship. “The economy is booming; inflation is cooling,” Newsom said, adding, “All because of Biden’s wisdom, because of his temperance.”

[Gilad Edelman: The English-muffin problem]

Around the same time, the Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served as chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on social media: “If a year ago you had told someone [that inflation] would come down to 2.5% they would be surprised & delighted.” Just before Biden’s State of the Union address last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted that “Americans will hear a clear theme: America’s economy is accelerating, inflation is decelerating.”

These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?

Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.

But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.

Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.

[Rogé Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]

“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”

The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.

Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.

According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.

Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.

The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.

The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.

All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment. Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper noting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.

Many commentators’ eagerness to ignore inflation’s toll appears inescapably tied to Biden’s precarious reelection prospects. The president is more clear-eyed than his cheerleaders. Several months ago, he largely stopped touting the joys of “Bidenomics” and talked instead about challenging the corporations that raised prices and padded profits. During the State of the Union, Biden pledged to take on corporations that quietly shrink their products and hike prices out of greed. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said that night. “That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price-gouging.”

Mainstream economists cringe at this kind of populist rhetoric; their assumption is that the austerity that follows raising interest rates is an unfortunate but necessary medicine. Similarly, the suggestion that wealthy corporations should bear more of the pain, and the working class less of it, has come to sound radical to some economists. In late 2021, amid the rising prices and supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, Weber, the UMass economist, proposed a once-popular and now unusual form of economic therapy: limiting what companies can charge for food and energy. “Large corporations with market power,” she wrote in The Guardian, “have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits … What we need instead is a serious conversation about strategic price controls.”

Krugman and others harshly dismissed her idea—the Times columnist panned it on Twitter as “truly stupid.” He later deleted the post and apologized. The German and British governments enacted something similar to Weber’s ideas in limited form on energy prices. Weber, whose argument that corporate greed helps accelerate inflation has since been echoed by figures such as European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, has gained acclaim as an iconoclastic thinker about inflation.

“I have been ridiculed in obnoxious ways, but people sense the injustice,” Weber told me. “Many Americans worked throughout COVID; they saw friends die; they think, I did all the things I’m supposed to do, and I still can’t afford this life.”

Perhaps the economic turmoil of Biden’s term will ease in the seven months before the election, and consumer agitation will cool in tandem with inflation. Krugman offers tart counsel to Americans: “Maybe my message here sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi in reverse: Look, don’t trust your feelings.”

The temptation for liberal economists and politicians to deny the pain experienced by many Americans, and to condescend when they might instead try to empathize, is perhaps understandable in a fraught election year. But working- and middle-class Americans might conclude that they are wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.

In the days after the November election in 2020, I traveled from Laredo, Texas, down along the Rio Grande into one of the great heartlands of Mexican America, a place locals proudly refer to by its area code, “the 956.” Along this stretch of the Texas border, towns are up to 98 percent Latino; Spanish is so common that Anglos have to learn the language if they want to order at restaurants. Yet on Election Night, residents had shocked the country by turning out for Donald Trump in record numbers.

In Zapata County, where Trump became the first Republican to win the presidential vote since Warren Harding in 1920, I asked Cynthia Villarreal, a longtime Democratic organizer, what explained Trump’s success after four years of immigration raids and family separation. Villarreal told me that, in South Texas, many Mexican Americans don’t identify as immigrants; her own ancestors lived on the Rio Grande before Texas even existed. In Starr County, where Trump had almost quadrupled Republican turnout, the then–county chair of the GOP, a retired colonel named Ross Barrera, said that he and many other Latinos in Texas wanted a border wall. He felt pity, but no solidarity, for those crossing the border; he explained that some South Texans call them mojaditos—Spanish for the slur “wetback.”

Since 2020, Texas politicians have seemed to absorb the lesson that many Latinos will tolerate border crackdowns. In early 2021, Republican Governor Greg Abbott sent thousands of state police and National Guardsmen into Texas’s southernmost counties as part of his “Operation Lone Star.” Residents appeared to reward him: Even if the police SUVs and razor wire were an eyesore, in the 2022 governor’s election Abbott improved on his 2018 results in almost every border county.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has itself to blame for Texas defying its orders]

But soon, Texas Republicans could test just how harsh an immigration policy Latinos really want. In a raucous legislative session last year, the state’s Republican supermajority sent Abbott a monumental bill, S.B. 4. The law, currently on hold in the courts, would essentially give Texas its own immigration system, making “illegal entry”—traditionally enforced by the federal government—into a state crime. If the law goes into effect, a police officer anywhere in the state will be able to stop, question, and arrest anyone they suspect might have crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Judges will be able to coerce defendants to auto-deport to Mexico by threatening them with serious prison time.

S.B. 4 would go far beyond Operation Lone Star, potentially moving immigration enforcement into the state’s interior. Razor wire along the river is meant to control who gets into the state; policing cities such as Dallas and Houston is about getting people out. Will the Latinos in Texas who have welcomed Republicans’ border crackdown feel the same way if state police start arresting their neighbors?

The history here looks grim for the GOP. When Republicans in California and Arizona tried to create the same sort of “show me your papers” system—California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s S.B. 1070—the measures backfired. Both laws reeked of racial profiling. People who were around in each state, including my father in California, have told me stories from those years. In Latino neighborhoods, many people came to see the laws not as immigration policy, but as a population control: an attempt to make their state less Latino. They responded by organizing into coalitions that eventually eroded Republican power in both states—and perhaps gave birth to the popular assumption that Latinos vote mostly on immigration.

In California, my father was one of the people for whom Prop. 187 fundamentally changed the way they saw themselves and their place in this country. Growing up in a Mexican American family in San Antonio, he didn’t think of himself as an immigrant. Like Villareal’s family, our roots in Texas run deeper than the state, back to when it was called Coahuila y Tejas. And, like Barrera, my dad heard other Mexican kids at his school smear more recent immigrants as mojaditos. When he moved to California in the 1980s, my father thought of himself as a political moderate. He was an entrepreneur and a family man, besides being Mexican by heritage. He voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential race (“Just like everyone else in America,” he joked to me recently).

Things changed when the Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, championed Prop. 187. California was in the midst of a historic immigration surge, and as many as 1.3 million undocumented immigrants were living in the state; Wilson was flagging in his 1994 reelection bid. The measure passed, and he held on to his office. When the law went into effect, it instructed public employees—not just cops, but teachers, nurses, and anyone else who worked for the state—to report anyone they suspected might be undocumented.

“I had to start thinking: Was the name ‘Herrera’ probable cause?” my dad said. Prop. 187 erased the conceptual difference he might have felt between himself and noncitizens. He came to believe that, no matter how he thought of himself, some people in this country would only ever see him as Mexican, as an outsider. He never voted Republican again.

He wasn’t alone. In 1984, 45 percent of Latinos in California had, like my father, voted for Reagan. By 1996, that support had cratered: More than 71 percent of Latinos voted for Bill Clinton (a 16 percent increase over his own 1992 result). Turnout among Latinos in California also increased dramatically each election year after Prop. 187. New Latino voters were far more likely to register as Democrats; in Los Angeles County, for instance, six times as many Latinos registered with the Democratic Party than the GOP.

Prop. 187 “created a multigenerational, anti-Republican coalition” among Latinos in California, Mike Madrid, the political director of the California Republican Party from 1996 to 1998, told me. Madrid, who grew up in a Mexican American family in Sacramento, spent years trying to get Republican campaigns to understand Latinos’ complexity. He thought then, and still thinks today, that the party’s best chance of courting Latino voters was with a message geared toward the working class, an “aspirational conservatism.” But Prop. 187 essentially turned hundreds of thousands of Latinos into single-issue voters. Today some of the more prominent Latino officials in the country, including the former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro and Senator Alex Padilla of California, trace their political roots to their opposition to Prop. 187.

“You can build a multigenerational coalition when a community is perceived to be personally, individually, and as a community under attack,” Madrid said. “If I was naturalized, or my kids were born here, or my grandchildren—everyone came home” to Democrats after Prop. 187. (Madrid clashed with the Republican Party in a very public way when Donald Trump was nominated in 2016.)

[From the March 2022 issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]

Prop. 187 died in the courts; judges ruled that it violated the supremacy clause in the Constitution and infringed on the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. Almost 15 years would pass before Republicans tried again, this time in Arizona, where Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070 in 2010. Seeking to stop undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, the law mandated that all immigrants over age 18 carry their “papers” with them at all times, and it empowered cops to arrest anyone caught without proper ID.

Academics are still studying how S.B. 1070 changed Arizona. When the bill passed, the state had not only a Republican governor but two Republican senators. Now a Democrat is in the governor’s mansion, along with one and a half Democrats in the senate (Kyrsten Sinema became an independent in 2022). Since S.B. 1070, turnout has exploded in Latino communities, far outstripping population growth. In 2008, just 291,000 Latinos voted in Arizona. By 2012, turnout had increased to 400,000; by 2016, it was more than 550,000. Voter registration has heavily favored Democrats. According to analysis by Televisa Univision, as of 2022, just 17 percent of Latinos in Arizona are registered as Republican, compared with 44 percent as Democrats and 39 percent as independents.

In 2020, more than 813,000 Latinos showed up to vote in Arizona. While some Latino communities in Arizona saw a rightward shift, it was much more muted than it was in Texas; some areas even shifted left. In all, Latino Arizonans voted overwhelmingly for President Joe Biden, sealing his victory in the state.

Underneath Biden’s win was a large network of activists and a get-out-the-vote infrastructure that had first gotten organized in response to S.B. 1070. Belén Sisa, who immigrated with her parents from Buenos Aires at the age of 6, was in high school when the law passed. “I was homecoming queen, varsity cheerleader—like, the last person you would think would be the undocumented girl,” she told me. On the school bus each morning in Florence, Arizona, she looked out at an ICE detention center that employed some of her classmates’ parents, and imagined getting locked up there.

In the years after the law passed, Sisa and her family saw cities like nearby Mesa become relative “ghost towns” as immigrants left the state in large numbers. Sometimes, her family watched protests, but they were too frightened to join in. When Sisa went to college at Arizona State University, she began meeting other undocumented young people, many of whom had started openly identifying as “Dreamers.” She became part of a group of activists that grew throughout the state, often supporting Democrats’ electoral efforts. By 2020, Sisa herself was working as the national Latino press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down the sections of S.B. 1070 that made immigration violations state crimes—though it allowed Arizona police to continue to question the immigration status of the people they stopped or detained. At the time, some wondered whether the Supreme Court had handed a victory to Democrats by keeping part of the law in place, because of how strong Latino opposition to it was.

Sisa recalled having conversations with other Latinos, some of whom had citizenship.“I could say: ‘You’re a lot closer to my situation than you will ever be to people that are white and born here,’” she said.

As any Texan will tell you, things are different down here. Latinos in the state are more socially conservative than their counterparts farther west. Not only do many of them not see themselves as immigrants—many identify as racially white. Across the country, immigrants are also becoming a smaller percentage of the Latino population. It’s tough to predict how S.B. 4 will play out if it goes into effect.

“Unlike, say, people in New York, I think Hispanics in Texas are more open to the idea that we need to close that border and do the right thing,” Jason Villalba, who served as a Republican in the Texas house from 2013 to 2019, told me.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Texas pulls an ugly stunt on the border]

As controversy around S.B. 4 has grown, and connections to laws like Prop. 187 have been drawn, some Republican architects of the bill have begun signaling that they intend for the law to target recent border crossers, not immigrants already living in the state. Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson told judges at a hearing last week, “There wouldn’t be probable cause in almost all cases, unless a Texas officer sees somebody crossing the border.” Abbott has been ambiguous: After the law was blocked, he said, “Texas has the legal authority to arrest people coming across the razor-wire barriers on our border.”

But legislators have frequently referred to statewide enforcement. When the Fort Worth chief of police released a video in March arguing that immigration enforcement should be left to the feds, Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house, wrote on X: “Any local law enforcement agency that refuses to enforce Senate Bill 4 is abandoning their sworn duty to uphold the rule of law.” State Senator Charles Perry, the author of the bill, has said in interviews that Texas essentially was forced to pass S.B. 4, because of what lawmakers see as inaction by the Biden administration. The Constitution makes exceptions to federal supremacy during times of “invasion,” and Perry and other Republicans argue that migration constitutes an invasion, one that the feds have failed to prevent. “We’re not challenging federal supremacy. We’re saying you got supremacy. You just chose not to do anything with it. We’re going to take that role for you,” Perry told conservative news site The Texan. (Perry did not respond to an interview request.)

Villalba, the former Republican lawmaker, told me he is a believer in border security; for him, and for many other Latinos in Texas, the fact that the state wants more of a say in what happens on its own border makes sense. “But this is different,” he said about S.B. 4. “On a Saturday afternoon, when I take my son to go play hockey, and I’m wearing a baseball cap, and, you know, and a T-shirt that might not be as clean and crisp as I normally wear, and I have brown hair and brown eyes and brown skin, are they going to do that to me”—ask for his papers—“in front of my son?”

Deep south in the Rio Grande Valley, Tania Chavez is the executive director of LUPE, a direct-aid organization founded by the labor-rights icon Cesar Chavez (no relation). She and her team have spent months running “know your rights” clinics for community members to help them prepare for S.B. 4. She said she has talked with parents about what will happen if they get arrested. “Who’s going to take legal guardianship of their kids? … Who else is listed on your bank account? … What is going to happen to your property? Those are all the things that we’re planning and thinking,” she told me. At one recent meeting, Chavez said she saw something she hadn’t seen before: Two groups of young people had driven all the way from Houston and Corpus Christi to join.

“We’re starting to see a lot of new faces,” she said.

On March 19, the Supreme Court briefly allowed S.B. 4 to go into effect, sending the law back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges issued a new injunction less than 24 hours later. Oral arguments are ongoing, and Texas’s defense has gotten less vociferous. Last week, Nielson, Texas’s lawyer, told judges: “Now, to be fair, maybe Texas went too far. And that’s the question this court is going to have to decide.”

But, during those few hours the law was in effect, I felt an alien thought cross my mind as I sat in my home in Austin: Should I start carrying my passport? I won’t exaggerate how worried I felt; I’m insulated by citizenship and light-beige skin. Just having that thought, however, made me dissociate: It was like someone else had forced the worry into my brain.

It’s a species of fear many people live with daily. In the Rio Grande Valley, Chavez spent two decades of her life undocumented; she knows what it’s like driving to work each day wondering if a broken taillight will bring her time in this country to an end. She said that feeling is what gets many young citizens engaged in organizing in the Valley.

But when asked if she thinks S.B. 4 might change the minds of Latinos who aren’t immigrants, who have so far supported Texas’s border crackdown, Chavez was dubious.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen until those people start getting arrested,” she said.

“We don’t need magazine profiles,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told me. “We don’t need any problems.”

We were sitting on opposing couches in his Sacramento office, a makeshift space across the street from his usual suite in the state capitol, currently being renovated. Newsom, leaning his head back into his intertwined hands, looked every bit the sleek pol he plays on TV—the big smile, the suit, the hair gel. He had just led me on a tour of this sterile habitat that he likens to a “dentist’s office.” Everything about it felt slapdash and temporary. “People know they’re not here for very long,” said Newsom, who is 56 but emits the frenetic energy of an upstart.  

This aura can invite distrust. So can participating in magazine profiles when you don’t want to be seen as buffing your national image at the expense of being a team player—the team being President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.

“The shadow campaign” is what Newsom calls the theory, happily promoted by Republicans and the occasional Democrat, that he’s been plotting a clandestine effort to supplant Biden as his party’s nominee. Newsom is clearly sensitive to this perception and eager to disprove it. He has spent the past several months vouching for the president in a variety of adverse settings: after a Republican debate at the Reagan Library, on Fox News, and across several red states, from South Carolina to Idaho. He managed to put off our interview for nearly two months, long enough for Biden to clinch his nomination. By the time we met at the end of March, Newsom had fashioned himself as a kind of presidential super-surrogate—a chief alleviator of fears about Biden’s lagging poll numbers, advanced age, and ability to again defeat Donald Trump.

But being a super-surrogate requires a performative humility, subordinating one’s own ambition to the candidate’s. This is not something that comes naturally to a restless dazzler such as Newsom. “You’re good at this,” Bill Maher told the governor during a January appearance on HBO’s Real Time, praising Newsom’s pugnacious strikes against Republicans and his willingness to be “kinda mean” at times. Newsom then blasted off into a diatribe about how Democrats need to stop being so timid, earning an extended ovation. At which point, Maher paused, looked approvingly at Newsom, and asked: “Can you teach that speech to Biden?”

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]

Newsom chuckled awkwardly. He did the same when I recounted the Maher exchange to him. The subtext is obvious, and gets at the thorniness of being Newsom these days: the risk of being so “good at this” that it can seem like he’s running himself.

When pressed about his own presidential aspirations, as he still often is, Newsom is adept at pivoting to his reverential spiel about Biden. “He’s doing things that I could never imagine doing,” the governor told me. He said he has gotten to know Biden and has “really grown to deeply admire him, with conviction.” Newsom has objected in numerous ways, in numerous forums, to the idea that the 81-year-old president is slowing down. “You become an SNL meme,” he said of the challenge Biden surrogates face when trying to defend the president’s geriatric fitness in fresh and credible ways.

I mentioned to Newsom that age seems to be the intractable issue for Biden: Large majorities of Americans keep telling pollsters, over and over, that he is too old to run again. At a certain point, can anything really be done? Newsom swerved the conversation onto delicate terrain.

“Well, there’s Pretagen, and all those things on TV that seem to argue—to help—with that,” he said. He seemed to be referring to an over-the-counter supplement called Prevagen that supposedly promotes brain health. “I can’t turn on the damn TV without the vegetable and fruit supplements,” said Newsom, who professes to watch a lot of Fox News.

“Have you talked to Biden about maybe going on a more vigorous Prevagen regimen?” I deadpanned.

“Look, I mean, I was—” Newsom faltered for a moment. “I don’t know if I was joking, but I was lamenting about how many different ways, on different networks, I’ve answered this question in an effort to try to answer a little differently each time.”

On that, Newsom succeeded. His Prevagen answer was novel, if risky. Sometimes he can’t help himself.

President Joe Biden speaks with California Governor Gavin Newsom as Biden arrives in Santa Clara County, California, in June 2023. (Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux)

Newsom has solicitous eyes that often dart around a room, as if he’s scanning for something that might entertain his guest, or him. He is a fourth-generation Californian who himself embodies many dimensions of the unruly dream-state he is attempting to govern: He is profuse and thirsty at the same time, high-reaching, a bit dramatic, and never far from some disaster.

“I don’t want to be derivative,” Newsom said in our interview. He loves the word derivative almost as much as, he says, he hates things that are derivative—the kind of repetitive sound-biting that can be as basic to a politician’s job as throwing a baseball is to being a pitcher (which Newsom was in his youth, a lefty).

I have known Newsom for about 15 years, but hadn’t officially interviewed him since he was finishing his second term as mayor of San Francisco and preparing to run for governor in 2010. The campaign was short-lived, as it became clear that Newsom had limited reach beyond the Bay Area and little shot against California’s former and future governor, Jerry Brown. Newsom instead ran for lieutenant governor, winning the privilege of spending eight restive years as Brown’s understudy.

[From the June 2013 issue: Jerry Brown’s political reboot]

One of the few highlights of Newsom’s tenure, he told me, occurred in 2013, when Brown was on a trade mission to China. Newsom, in his brief stint as acting governor, issued a proclamation designating the avocado as California’s state fruit. Newsom said he felt like Brown was not showing him or his office “a lot of respect,” so he undertook the avocado gambit as a benign “act of defiance.” (He insists that his love of avocados is genuine and that he tries to eat one “six to seven days a week.”) The rogue operation extended to artichokes (which Newsom named as the state vegetable), rice (the state grain), and almonds (the state nut).

Newsom seemed to take immense pride in this small harvest of edicts, milking them for laughs and press coverage. He boasted of the “cornucopia of landmark accomplishments” that he had achieved “over these magical six days.” More than a decade later, Newsom still sounds amused, even if Governor Brown, upon his return from China, apparently was not. “I don’t know that amused and Jerry Brown have ever been used in the same sentence,” Newsom said. (Brown declined to be interviewed, but praised Newsom in a brief statement for providing “much needed continuity” on climate and China policy—two issues central to Brown’s time in office.)

For much of his political career, Newsom has been perceived as something of a wild child. He has nurtured that image by getting into occasional trouble. In 2007, as mayor, he admitted to an affair with his appointments secretary, who’d been married to Newsom’s close friend and deputy chief of staff; this was following the breakup of Newsom’s first marriage—to the future Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr. As recently as 2020, Newsom violated COVID restrictions by attending a group dinner at the French Laundry, one of California’s fanciest restaurants, which became a major issue in an unsuccessful campaign to recall him.

His breakneck impulses also resulted in the signature policy action that would establish Newsom as a national figure—his 2004 order for San Francisco to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. “It’s the Roger Bannister theory of life,” Newsom told me, referring to the English runner who broke the four-minute-mile barrier. Newsom said that, like Bannister, he was young and dumb and “didn’t know that he couldn’t.” He quoted his political idol, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., who in a 1966 address in South Africa said that the world “demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity.”

Today, Newsom has logged two terms each as a big-city mayor and as lieutenant governor, plus five years leading the nation-state of California. He married again in 2008, and has four children with his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a filmmaker and former actor. Newsom’s tenure as governor has featured high-profile moves that have positioned him as a national avatar of blue-state boosterism: an executive order mandating that new cars sold in California be zero-emission by 2035; a call for a constitutional amendment that would raise the legal age to purchase firearms to 21; a commitment to make California a “sanctuary” for abortion access.

As much as Newsom believes that it’s important to “continue to iterate,” I was struck by how often he talked about keeping experienced mentors close by. During the early crisis months of COVID, Newsom told me, he convened Zoom meetings with his living predecessors—Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis, and Pete Wilson. “To have these kinds of legendary figures—” Newsom said, shaking his head. Sometimes he would just sit back and absorb the exchanges. “Just the weird history, and the dynamic—it was a lot of fun,” Newsom said. He referred to the group as his “council of the elders.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last act]

“He has grown, learned, and matured in terms of his approach,” says Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, who has known Newsom since “before he was born.” (Bill Newsom, Gavin’s father, was a well-connected Bay Area judge—appointed to the bench by Jerry Brown—whose sister was married to the brother of Pelosi’s husband, Paul.)

Pelosi is among a gallery of California political giants who have nurtured Newsom through his career. Willie Brown, the longtime speaker of the state assembly and mayor of San Francisco, appointed Newsom to his first political job in 1996, on the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and later to a vacant seat on its board of supervisors. Newsom told me he also took boundless knowledge from watching Jerry Brown for eight years in Sacramento, even though the two almost never interacted and Newsom’s impact as lieutenant governor was mostly limited to his heroic advocacy of the avocado.

By any measure, Brown had a remarkable leadership résumé—two previous terms as governor in the 1970s and ’80s, three presidential campaigns, stints as California’s attorney general and secretary of state, time as chair of the state Democratic Party, and two terms as mayor of Oakland. Like Newsom, he was known early in his career for his zesty and impatient style. “He was a man on a mission. He was the guy running for president over and over again,” Newsom said of Brown. But the late-career version of Brown “was just a different Jerry,” Newsom said. He sometimes watched Brown and wondered, “Why hasn’t he said anything about issue x, y, z?” And then, a few months later, the shrewdness of Brown’s silence would reveal itself.

“I want temperance. I want wisdom. I want someone who can govern, someone that’s not unhinged,” Newsom told me. He was talking now about Joe Biden, and trying to make the case that the president’s age should be seen as an asset, just as it was for Brown near the end of his career. It’s a compelling parallel, except that Brown left office at 80, and Biden is running for his second term at a year older. I noted to Newsom that Biden clearly has been well served by his wealth of experience, but that what his skeptics question is his ability to beat Donald Trump. “It’s an election question, I got it,” Newsom told me. “You gotta win.”

As the president departed on a trip to Los Angeles in February, a reporter shouted a question from the White House lawn about whether Newsom should be standing by in case a Democratic alternative was needed for 2024. Biden blew it off, but the episode highlighted the ongoing nuisance of the age issue, which had just been revived by Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report describing the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” As Newsom has denied any interest in replacing Biden, the president in turn has flattered him on the subject. “He’s been one hell of a governor, man,” Biden said of Newsom during a stop in San Francisco last November. “He could have the job I’m looking for.”

For much of last year, however, aides close to the president were wary of Newsom’s motives. He aroused particular suspicion by challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to debate him on Fox News in November, in what the network billed as the “Great Red vs. Blue State Debate,” to be “moderated” by Sean Hannity. Newsom told me he would’ve skipped the debate if asked, but he heard nothing from the White House. “They never said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’” he said. “But I can imagine they were like, What is he doing?” (A spokesperson for Biden’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Viewers watch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis debate California Governor Gavin Newsom in Alpharetta, Georgia, in November. (Elijah Nouvelage / Reuters)

“Yes, there was chatter,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks co-founder, who’s a longtime supporter of Newsom and a co-chair of the Biden reelection campaign, confirmed to me. “It wasn’t, ‘This is terrible. He shouldn’t be doing it.’ But I do think there was chatter like, ‘Really?’” Katzenberg added. “‘Why give DeSantis the platform? You’re elevating him.’”

Senator Laphonza Butler of California, whom Newsom appointed to her job in October after the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein, told me: “Had I been advising him, I’m not sure I would have said, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea.’”

Newsom went ahead with the debate anyway, in part, he said, because he had already committed to it. “I’m glad for no other reason [than] you develop a muscle you didn’t know you had,” he told me. It was helpful, he said, that the event was delayed for months, allowing Newsom to prove himself a reliable partner to the White House. He has brought in large sums of cash for the reelection campaign and, last March, started a PAC that has raised more than $9 million for Biden and other Democratic candidates. Still, the Fox spectacle, which occurred not long before the start of the primaries, was an odd look for both participants.

[David Frum: Ron DeSantis debates his grievances]

Newsom received generally positive reviews. “I thought he made some solid points,” Butler said. “He made DeSantis stumble.” He delivered perhaps the line of the night when he mentioned that he and DeSantis had something in common: “Neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024”—another signal to the White House that Newsom was fully onboard. It was also one of several times that Newsom hammered DeSantis over how Trump was beating him badly in the Republican primary, something that undoubtedly delighted the former president.

Trump represents a more natural foil to Newsom than DeSantis. Both are outsize, sensitive, and at times self-immolating showmen. Newsom clearly enjoys pitting himself against the former president, whose deep unpopularity among Democrats makes his antagonism an unquestioned political asset. Trump recently started calling the governor “New-scum,” which Newsom belittled to me as a lame “seventh-grade nickname.”

At the start of our interview, Newsom pointed across his room to a photo of himself with Donald and Melania in the Oval Office. “My staff put it up there, kind of as a joke, and I kept it,” Newsom told me. It is also a conversation piece, over which Newsom became quite animated. He appears to have a fascination with Trump, and not just as an evil adversary. Newsom, who campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to make California “a resistance state,” likes to mention that he worked well with Trump during his first two years in Sacramento. “We had the baseline of a relationship that benefited California significantly,” he told me. He watched Trump closely and tried to decipher how best to manage the needy president during COVID and severe wildfires in his state. He stroked Trump in public. “I want to thank you and acknowledge the work that you’ve done to be immediate in terms of your response,” Newsom told Trump in front of reporters at Sacramento’s McClellan Airport during a visit from the president in September 2020.

As Newsom continued a prolonged riff about Trump during our interview—what he learned watching Trump’s “dialectic” with the media or riding with him on Air Force One—he sounded strangely captivated, as if he had been privileged to observe a feral and predatory peacock in the wild. The association sounded more important to Newsom than I might have imagined.

Newsom told me that every time he placed a call to Trump in the White House, someone would patch him through or the president would call right back. That changed when Newsom reached out a few days after Trump lost the 2020 election. He heard nothing. “And I was like, Wow,” Newsom said. “And then I called a few days later—I figured he was busy—and they said, ‘He’s not available.’ And I’m like, Whoa.” He said he was genuinely taken aback by the snub, despite the addled state Trump was obviously in at the time and the overall madhouse that the White House had become.

I asked Newsom if he had spoken with Trump since, or heard from him after the DeSantis donnybrook. He said no (a spokesperson for the former president echoed this), but my query appeared to trigger an odd reaction in Newsom. His face turned red, which I noted to him. “No, that’s because the sunlight is beaming on me,” he protested, pointing out the window into the expansive California glare.

Newsom said that my “line of questioning is interesting.” He offered a wordy zigzag of a reply: “The fact that you are not the first person to ask me ‘Did he call you?’—particularly some of your sophisticated colleagues—is suggestive.”

I found Newsom’s labyrinthine answer to also be “suggestive.”

Newsom has a personal connection to Trump, via his first wife, Guilfoyle. He does not love to discuss his ex. “I’m sensitive to the world I’m currently living in, at home particularly,” he told me. Still, he is asked about Guilfoyle a lot, mostly in the vein of “What’s the deal there?”

[From the October 2019 issue: The heir]

Newsom and Guilfoyle met in 1994, at a Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco. She worked in the district attorney’s office, and he owned a chain of local food and wine establishments. They married seven years later and were dubbed “The New Kennedys” in a Harper’s Bazaar spread. “Do I think he could be president of the United States?” Guilfoyle told the magazine. “Absolutely. I’d gladly vote for him.” That comment appears no longer operative. (Guilfoyle declined to comment for this article.)

Newsom and Guilfoyle divorced in 2006. Things ended amicably, Newsom said: “No kids, respect, both sides.” Newsom told me he wished Guilfoyle well, and not “backhandedly.” He did not want to say anything negative about her, even though, he said, “She’s taken shots at me publicly.”

In fact, in an interview on CNN’s The Axe Files podcast last year, Newsom said Guilfoyle had been a “different person” when they were married. He told me she was committed to “social justice and social” values, and that she was a Republican, “but it was more traditional conservatism.”

“She fell prey, I think, to the culture at Fox,” he said on the podcast. He added, “She would disagree with that assessment.”

Yes, she did.

“I didn’t change; he did,” Guilfoyle fired back in an interview with the right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. She said Newsom was once a champion of entrepreneurs and small business but has since become “unrecognizable” to her. “He’s fallen prey to the left, the radical left.”

If Trump wins in November, Newsom will remain the governor of the nation’s most populous state and biggest resistance zone. In his office, he keeps a marked-up copy of a policy blueprint, “Project 2025,” prepared by the Heritage Foundation as a possible preview of a next Trump term. “I’m going through 100 pages of this. I’m not screwing around,” Newsom told me. He said his team is “Trump-proofing California,” preparing to enact whatever measures they can to thwart a hostile Republican White House. To better understand his political opposition, Newsom begins each morning with a heavy intake of far-right media. “There’s so many things that come our way that are so batshit-crazy,” he said. “You can’t deny where half of America lives.”

Newsom has endured a difficult few months in California. His approval ratings recently dropped under 50 percent for the first time since he became governor. He devoted a great deal of time and capital to promoting a ballot measure—Proposition 1—to allocate $6.4 billion to mental-health treatment programs. The proposal was expected to pass easily in March but barely did—a possible sign of weakness as Newsom faces another recall effort and a budget crisis.

After 90 minutes of conversation in his office, Newsom was getting antsy, as he does. He rose from the couch and walked over to his massive desk, where he would soon devour his daily helping of the California state fruit, over chicken salad.

Newsom is a student of workspaces. “I always like going in people’s offices, going, ‘Why is that there?’” he told me. He loved his usual quarters across the street, now deep in renovation. His desk there used to belong to Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and the governor of California from 1943 to 1953. But Newsom assured me that no serious thought went into decorating these temporary quarters. He seemed pleased to give the impression of being a short-timer. “This is literally the things that came out of the first boxes,” he said. “We threw it up; a lot of it’s no rhyme or reason.”

One of Newsom’s prized mementos is a framed letter he received during the height of the COVID crisis, from none other than the baseball legend Willie Mays. “I don’t write many letters, but I’ve been watching you on TV and thought you might appreciate some words of encouragement,” the “Say Hey Kid” wrote.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Moneyball broke baseball]

Newsom can be deeply cynical at times when discussing politics. But he can also display a boyish and even starstruck side. I watched him stare wide-eyed at his note from Mays and marvel. “Piles of ‘Go fuck yourself,’” Newsom said, describing his typical mail. “And then Willie Mays sends a letter.”

He showed me a few items in a side office, at the moment dominated by the big-screened head of the legal commentator Jonathan Turley yammering on Fox. A few feet away stood a picture of Newsom and Pelosi from the 1990s, in his first race for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; shots of Schwarzenegger, Newsom’s late father, and various Kennedys; and a small table full of booze. Newsom hoisted a bottle of wine someone had recently given him: DeSantis, the vintage is called. I imagined a libation of complex and astringent notes, not at all supple or aromatic.

“I may send it to him,” Newsom told me. He said he wanted to strike up at least some tiny bit of rapport with the Florida governor during their Hannity encounter. “I tried, during every commercial break,” Newsom said. “We did the makeup.” Nothing. Newsom shook his head and imitated DeSantis, looking at his shoes, hands shoved into his pockets.

“Impossible,” he said. “Complete asshole.” (A DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment.)

Newsom said his distaste for DeSantis stems from what he describes as his Florida counterpart’s attacks on vulnerable targets—migrants, transgender and disabled people, often kids. Newsom himself was bullied as a child. He struggled with dyslexia, had a bowl haircut, and walked around school with a briefcase. The neighborhood kids could be merciless. He grew into a star athlete, 6-foot-3 with a potential run for president in his future. “But I’m still that kid,” he told me.

Being around Newsom, you sense an ongoing tug between boyish and sober impulses. He can fall heavily on nostalgia—and RFK quotes—while asserting himself as an agent of the future. He reveres the old-school pols who mentored him while striving to be inventive and distinct. It is vital, Newsom told me, “to take risks and not be reckless, but keep trying things.” To be original but restrained when necessary. “I don’t want to be derivative” might be as close as he comes to codifying a leadership philosophy: the Roger Bannister theory of life tempered by the venerated principle of waiting one’s turn, if it ever comes.