The Newsom Furor has made this place absolutely unbearable for the last week. Gavin Newsom redistricting (& telling the rest of the country to fuck off & not mess with CA) is an extremely heartening thing w/a chance of real success. He is also never gonna be President & should not be the nom.
Just give me someone who can win. If it's Newsom, that's fine. If it's somebody else, that's fine.
THIS is how we should be talking Not talking shit on potential candidates But you know, dems always have to shoot ourselves in the foot
I disagree. This is the time to most winnow out hopeless candidates, not get emotionally attached because they made us feel good in a speech & with a no-doubt concerted redistricting gesture.
Except it's not the time unless you have another candidate sitting around that nobody knows about that is going to unite us, and make this big tent just fall madly in love with them We might not ever get to vote again, and here you are shooting down potential candidates anyway WRONG priorities
bsky.app/profile/loud...
The choice is not yet Newsom or Trump. Newsom wants people to believe that because Newsom is campaigning & has taken that as his strategy, but we don't have to fall for it. And in any case, look, Newsom is my governor & I'm a Dem. If *I* don't like him, imagine how the rest of the country feels.
The choice isnt anybody right now But it might be him And in the meantime you've spent your time talking shite on the candidate we have to stop trump Thats IF we even get to vote again You're doing trumps work for him
Anyone saying this country would vote for a woman has their head up their ass TWICE they voted in a child rapist over a woman And Walz is forever attached to this loss, he wouldn't win Prtizker is only known online, so he better get moving because he's unknown
He's doing that, fortunately. As far as Harris, while I don't think she's got much of a chance she apparently actually has significantly better approval rates than Newsom. bsky.app/profile/govp...
Ask folks in the real world if they know him
And go out into the real world and ask folks what they think of Andy Beshear "Who?" They better step forward because if they don't, this is what we have and you need to start encouraging folks to show up for him Instead of making people stay home Again
Instead of taking away numbers with this voter suppression shit, how about you encourage folks to turn up in such huge numbers they can't wiggle out of a loss again I mean, that's just common sense right now
People are going into frenzies because Newsom's redistricting proposal made them feel real hope & they're clutching desperately at lifelines in a sea of Trumpian misery. I get that. I even get the argument of harm mitigation. But picking fights with the Left over Newsom is the *illusion* of action
If Newsom is, God forbid, the nominee, of course I would feel morally obligated to vote for him to vote against the GOP, just as I would feel morally obligated to vote for a number of politicians I loathe or who I believe loathe me. But that's extremely unlikely to happen w/o this astroturfing.
Right now Newsom is the Inevitable Nominee is not a thing that's going to happen. He's a CA governor whom the reactionaries think is a frothing leftist and whom the leftists want to guillotine as a soulless weathervane slash corporatist stooge. He has basically no plausible trajectory to success.
We are doing more damage to ourselves meming about the Newsom Nomination than we are the enemy. And again, I get it. The redistricting thing feels like it has a chance of real success bc he told us "if you do this we can de facto end Trump's Presidency!" (& some of us dare to hope ACTUALLY end it)
(this is of course why he made such a promise, bc Gavin Newsom is a weathervane politician who's real good at stirring people's hopes & fears, & the hope of ending the nightmare we've been in for 8 months now early is so unbearably seductive people would do a LOT for it, but it's a long shot folks!)
I'll refer to him, as I've referred to John Fetterman and Kyrsten Sinema as "Elizabeth Holmes" candidates. People who know how to tap in and exploit the image and emotional desires of their audiences, while also papering over their blatant shortcoming to most people who don't check under the hood.
Of course, the difference here is that their woeful shortcomings are brought up in public, yet people still look past because . . . "they're what's needed at the moment!" (As in, they fit the role of "'Fuck You GOP!' fighter" that Dem voters are increasingly aggravated on not seeing enough of).
Not to be cynical or misanthropic, but as someone whose senator is Fetterman and not Lamb or Kenyatta, it's this same emotion overriding logic that's on display with voters and potential voters. Newsom is a bad potential candidate, but a lot of folks on here are so emotionally desperate for an-
-anti-Schumer/Booker/etc. that they're lining behind the guy in the spotlight at the moment who isn't that. Regardless of policies. Because they see the GOP as nothing but attack dogs, and are desperate for even the image of having some as well (even if risking having said dogs attack them first).
Meanwhile Pritzker has been sticking his neck out in local ways & doing meaningful protective policies to relatively little acclaim, and again, I get it. Not only does that not feel as decisive or promise as total a victory, CA voters like me also have a real ax to grind about getting shit on.
Also he needs to be read as a “I didn’t inhale” type where he makes meaningless gestures that have no policy behind them. Obama did something similar with gay marriage to try to straddle the fence. I’m so tired of the fucking temper tantrums around here when people are being hurt *right now*
Ehhh, his statements on podcasts have done real harm and should be seen as part of the cohesive media & Beltway assault on trans rights. I will never expect people to smile for someone who tells them the state violating their bodies is just good sense.
Oh it’s gross, don’t get me wrong but I was also living here in 2004 when he approved the city covering transitions for municipal employees so it’s hard to square as a clear and present danger.
I mean it's not really that hard? That was then, this is now, and the media outlets are absolutely frothingly obsessed with normalizing & propagating transphobia. Newsom being a weathervane means he'll go with whatever he thinks will get him attention & votes.
I understand and agree that CA's actual government under Newsom has been better on trans rights but his statements about it should be disqualifying until he actually repudiates them & does real work to atone, imo, not just going "watch what he does, not what he says." What he says matters.
But - while Newsom's actual admin is better on trans rights than Newsom the Dipshit Wannabe Podcast Bro - we should not just fall over ourselves early to coronate an unlikely candidate because he was savvy enough to promise us our most desperate forlorn hope. And trends suggest he won't be the nom.
His ONLY path to success would be in... convincing a bunch of people desperate for a savior from Trump & feeling deep parasocial investment bc of a decently charismatic speech to move heaven & earth treating his nomination like a fait accompli 3 years too early. And it still likely won't work.
Instead what it's mostly doing so far is redirecting people's combative energies into fighting OTHER DEM VOTERS, bc to them Republicans are the weather, & to refight old grudges that have fermented until they're wine at this point. That sort of thing is, if anything, disqualifying to me!
So in conclusion: Newsom's redistricting plan? Quite likely to work, probably a concerted plan by Democratics, very heartening. Newsom the presidential candidate? Imo DOA, unless he can convince you his rise is inevitable, which a lot of folks are unwittingly falling for. Use him & discard him.
OMG yes. Thanks.
"bc to them Republicans are the weather" describes one of the great divides on here. Because like two-thirds of the user base is on the other side of that divide and it's EXASPERATING to the rest of us lol. Life is short.
Right, yeah. And it's so overwhelmingly LIKELY not to work that it's just not a super-interesting topic right at the moment given all the [GESTURES WILDLY] going on, etc. But here we are. But I guess everybody on BlueSky knows the deal and that this is what people do, so SHRUG.
People are in the depths of despair and think world affairs and political institutions make decisions to torment them personally.
Newsom is talking, which is needed. Pritzer appears to be walking.
He's doing talking too, which is why the astroturf brigade is imo so eager to erase Pritzker and act like it's Newsom or Nothing. bsky.app/profile/govp...
I was living in San Francisco in 2004 when Newsom allowed gay marriage and it was an amazing happy hopeful time. A stunt? Maybe, but it directly led to gay marriage becoming legal in California. That's meaningful.
That's 20 years past though.
Yes, but it goes to show the man has a track record of knowing how to push the agenda forward.
Your opinion is noted.
Social media ain't reality. I've heard Newsom's name come up in recent weeks from people who normally don't pay attention to politics.
more importantly than either of those, the rank and file of the Democratic Party do not trust him, even if they appreciate him doing something dramatic and good, but it gives a certain kind of person a permission structure to already declare that they won’t vote in ‘28 lol
As with so much social media discourse, the Newsom stuff feels very much to me like two sides with perspectives I both understand and can very much sympathize with talking past each other in a frustrating pile-up of presumptions.
Me applauding Newsom for taking necessary action to fight lawless Republican gerrymandering in August 2025 is not going to lead to me accidentally voting for him in a primary in 32 months. It's not even a slippery slope.
I highly doubt the next Democratic President will be a Californian. The media's slow-drip demonization of California has just been going on too long.
I swear a bunch our friends on the left simply don't want to fight at all.
Because. . . . . ?
bsky.app/profile/loud...
Well, I'm an official Leftist who would vote for him in a second.
I mean, you can say that about ANY potential candidate because our tent is huge What folks SHOULD be saying is, whoever we get in there, this is what needs to happen to fix shit Not talking shit on potential candidates, and essentially engaging in voters suppression We DONT need voter suppression
It's not voter suppression to make people aware of a potential candidate's shitty statements. It IS voter suppression to tell them "this guy will be the guy, the Dem party decrees it!" in advance. But he's not going to be the guy! He's not actually popular!
I would rather Newsom not be the 2028 nominee, but it’s too early to even speculate on that. What matters is what’s happening right now, and at the moment, he’s proving himself useful.
"Never gonna be President." After 2016, NEVER SAY NEVER.
Exactly. Save your fire for the fascists. We can all kill each other later.