FLORENCE, S.C. — After nearly six months of President Trump in the White House, California Gov. Gavin Newsom descended on a coffee shop in this small South Carolina city to preach his gospel of resistance.
Suddenly, Democrats here felt they were witnessing a spiritual and political revival: After all the pain and trauma of the 2024 election, they seemed in the presence of an uplifting leader with the savvy to awaken the Democratic grassroots.
“I’ve been so depressed,” Marion Wagner, a retired postal worker, said as she waited for Newsom at his first stop in LilJazZi’s cafe Tuesday. “This is a ray of hope.”
“Thank you for suing Trump!” Suzanne La Rochelle, the executive director of the Florence County Democratic party, told the tall, svelte 57-year-old West Coast politician after he delivered his political sermon.
“This is just the jolt that South Carolina needs,” said Joyce Black, a 63-year-old grant writer, pumping her first.
Newsom promoted his more than 2,000-mile jaunt from California to South Carolina as a bid to help the party win back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026 and connect directly with rural Deep South communities that had been overlooked by Republicans.
But most people believed the governor, who is mulling over a White House bid in 2028, was in the Palmetto State to forge connections in a crucial election state that traditionally hosts the South’s first presidential primary. There are a dozen competitive House districts right now in California, but not a single one is in South Carolina.
The state’s Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress and renowned Democratic kingmaker who rescued former President Biden’s 2020 campaign, addressed the elephant in the room when he joined Newsom in Camden, S.C.
“As we go around welcoming these candidates who are running for president, let’s not forget about school boards,” Clyburn said.
Newsom grinned awkwardly and the crowd roared with laughter. Jokingly, Newsom turned around as if looking for another, unidentified, politician behind him.
Clyburn stopped short of endorsing Newsom, but he told The Times “he’d be a hell of a candidate.”
“He’s demonstrated that over and over again,” Clyburn said. “I feel good about his chances.”
Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor who was first elected governor in 2018, would face steep hurdles if he threw his hat into the race for president.
Just being a Californian, some argue, is a liability.
The Golden State boasts the world’s fourth-largest economy and is a high-tech powerhouse. But as income inequality soars along with the cost of living, Republicans paint the state as the poster child of elite “woke” activism and rail against the state’s high taxes, rampant homelessness and crime.
The signs Republican activists waved outside Newsom’s “Meet and Greet” in Pickens, a staunchly red county that voted 76% for Trump, distilled the GOP narrative:
“Newsom, your state is a MESS & you want to run this country. NO WAY!”
“Keep your socialist junk in CA!”
Tamra Misseijer, a Pickens County middle school teacher, said she and her husband moved from Woodland Hills to South Carolina in 2021 because they could no longer afford to raise their eight children there. Compounding their frustration, she said, homeless people threw needles and sex toys over her fence into their yard. She also lashed out at the restrictions Newsom imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We traded… unconstitutional lockdowns and masks for freedom and fresh air,” the registered Republican’s placard said. “High crime, looting & destruction for peace and order.”
Even some Democrats worry that Newsom is too progressive, too rich and too slick to win over working-class and swing voters in Republican and closely divided states.
Richard Harpootlian, a South Carolina attorney, former state senator and former chairman of the state Democratic Party, predicted Newsom would find it hard to find a foothold in many places in South Carolina.
“He’s a very, very handsome man,” Harpootlian conceded. “But the party is searching for a left-of-moderate candidate who can articulate blue-collar hopes and desires. I’m not sure that’s him.”
Dismissing Newsom as “just another rich guy” who became wealthy because of his connections with heirs to the Getty oil fortune, Harpootlian said he did not think Newsom was attuned to winning back blue-collar voters.
“If he had a track record of solving huge problems like homelessness, or the social safety net, he’d be a more palatable candidate,” he said. “I just think he’s going to have a tough time explaining why there’s so many failures in California.”
Newsom’s tour was organized last week by the South Carolina Democratic Party to energize the grassroots and raise money.
SCDP Chair Christale Spain said that she invited a bunch of prominent national Democratic leaders to tour the state, but that Newsom was the only one to immediately agree to jump on a plane.
After an email and a few text messages, a Newsom advisor said, Newsom raised $160,000 for South Carolina’s Democratic Party — nearly two-thirds of what the Democratic National Committee gives the party for its annual budget.
Newsom — who traveled to Georgia in 2023 for a much-hyped debate in Georgia with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Carolina in 2024 to stump for Biden — said national Democratic leaders have abandoned people in the rural South.
“I’ve got a little gripe with my party,” Newsom said at a packed gathering in Fisher Hill Community Baptist Church in Chesterfield. “We let you down for decades and decades.”
Newsom sidestepped the question of whether he would run for president, arguing that Democrats couldn’t afford to wait 3 ½ years for a savior.
“I think one of the big mistakes for any party, but particularly the Democratic Party, is looking for the guy or gal on the white horse to come save the day,” he said.
But Newsom offered a glimpse of what a potential presidential campaign might look like: He touted his record of filing 122 lawsuits against Trump during his first time in office, he celebrated California as the “most un-Trump state in America,” and he railed against Trump’s recent immigration raids in MacArthur Park as a display of “cruelty and vulgarity.”
“What we’re experiencing is America in reverse,” Newsom told supporters in Camden. “They’re trying to bring us back to a pre-1960s world on voting rights. You know it well: civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and not just access to abortion, but also access to simple reproductive contraception. It’s a moment that few of us could have imagined. “
But even as Newsom warned about book bans and immigration raids as fundamental assaults on democracy, he resisted the idea that America is a nation neatly divided by east and west, rural and urban, Democrat and Republican.
“Don’t forget California is a large red state,” he said, noting he represented 6 million Trump voters, more than the entire population of South Carolina.
After the 2024 election, Newsom said he, like many other Democrats, turned off the cable news.
“I just, I tapped out,” he told the crowd at the church. “I never thought that would happen. All those years of self-medicating, watching Rachel Maddow with a glass of white wine or a beer. I thought I would never give it up. … The election, you know, it’s a body blow.”
It didn’t take him long to jump back in. On Nov. 7, two days after the election, Newsom convened a special session of the state Legislature to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights” against the incoming Trump administration.
He said Democrats across the country, from California to South Carolina, bore a responsibility to take action.
“We’re not bystanders in this world,” he said. “We can shape the future, we have agency. … You could have dialed it in to stay home. You could have given in, given up. You could have fallen right on the cynicism, the negativity, all the anxiety that I’m sure you’re all feeling about this moment.”
Many in the crowd were clearly awed by Newsom. Some swooned over his “beautiful hair” and “charisma.” Others marveled at his ability to stand up to Trump with clarity and compassion.
One woman informed Newsom her friend was “in love with you, by the way.” Another told friends she blacked out when she met him, so starstruck that she could not come up with words.
“He’s a cool dude,” Carol Abraham, wife of the mayor of Bennettsville, said after Newsom spoke at a meet and greet on Main Street. “He has swag.”
After Newsom wrapped up his talk at Fisher Hill Community Baptist Church, Bryanna Velazquez, a 31-year-old business owner wearing a “Jesús era un immigrante” T-shirt, waited in a long line to thank Newsom for speaking out against the immigration raids.
“I’m married to a Mexican, so it means a lot,” she told him.
Her husband was a citizen, Valazquez said, but still, she was afraid.
“The fact that he is brown makes him a target.”
Since Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, Newsom has taken on the role of the president’s most outspoken Democratic critic while taking steps to defy left-wing orthodoxies and broaden his national appeal in a country that, politically, is far different from Californiaa.
In March, he infuriated the progressive wing of his party by hosting conservatives such as MAGA loyalists Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on his podcast and breaking away from many Democrats on the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
“My position is I don’t think it’s fair,” he told reporters Tuesday. “But I also think it’s demeaning to talk down to people and to belittle the trans community. … These people just want to survive and so I hold both things in my hand.”
It is too early to say how many Americans will get on board with Newsom as he experiments with how to balance competing ideas of common sense and sensitivity in the hyperpartisan culture wars.
As the California leader of the Trump resistance stressed the importance of standing tall and firm and pushing back, he also called for more grace and humility, invoking the words of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We’re all, as Dr. King said, bound together by a web of mutuality,” he said in Florence, playing to his Deep South audience. “We’re many parts, as the Bible said, but one body. One part suffers, we all suffer.”
“Let’s not talk down to people,” he told the crowd in Chesterfield. “Let’s not talk past people, good people who disagree with us.”
“Amen,” a man said. “That’s right,” a woman murmured.
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