LOS ANGELES — Former vice president Kamala Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) returned to the campaign trail together in their home state Sunday, marking their first joint appearance in nearly a year.
In this last stretch of the midterms, the pair, who have often been dubbed “frenemies” throughout their close and fraught history, evoked a shared sense of purpose, effusively praising California’s Democratic candidate for governor, the former health secretary Xavier Becerra, and urging supporters to help turn out the vote on Tuesday.
At a rally in Hollywood called Stop the Power Grab, they billed Tuesday’s election as a chance for voters in California, the United States’ most populous and wealthiest blue stronghold, to take a stand against President Donald Trump and the damage they say his administration has wrought.
“That was Kamala Harris in the house,” Newsom exclaimed as he took the stage after the former vice president. “A big round of applause!”
It was a show of some unity at a time when Newsom and Harris are widely seen as political rivals while they both weigh possible presidential bids in 2028.
Their appearance capped a day of internecine fighting among Democrats, after Rep. Haley Stevens caused an uproar when she ditched Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to endorse his Republican opponent, in a race that could decide which party takes the Senate. The Michigan Democratic Party ousted Stevens, and her decision to endorse Mike Rogers drew swift rebuke from party leaders across the nation.
Asked about Stevens’s split from Democrats earlier Sunday at a campaign event in Irvine, Newsom said: “We can only control what we can control, which is what’s happening here on the ground in California.”
Harris and Newsom last appeared publicly together in 2025 during a rally in Los Angeles to boost support for California’s redistricting efforts. Newsom led the successful campaign, Proposition 50, which gave the state the chance to redraw seats to lean more Democratic and to counteract the Republican-led redistricting that added seats to favor the GOP in red states.
Their previous time sharing the stage was in 2021, when Harris stumped for him while he was facing a recall attempt as governor.
This year, Harris and Newsom have been active surrogates on the midterms circuit, and their remarks Sunday were drawn in large part from their stump speeches elsewhere, lambasting the Trump administration. Harris began campaigning in September with a stop in Michigan to support El-Sayed after his primary win. She visited Nevada, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Georgia before returning to California. On Sunday, Harris told the crowd packed at the Hollywood Palladium: “I’m glad to be home.”
“And let me tell you,” she said, “like we see here in California, the momentum is on our side.”
Newsom has visited many of the same states over the last year. He has also focused on helping Democrats running in federal and state races in California, including those competing in the newly redrawn districts.
On Sunday, Newsom said the midterm results could bring an “end to Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it” if Democrats retake one or both of the congressional chambers.
In recent weeks, the governor has zeroed in on the president’s attempts to reshape American elections and voting — and his own efforts to protect California’s ballot boxes. Newsom this week wrote a letter to federal judges in the state saying he had “grave concerns” that the Trump administration would try to get search warrants to seize midterm ballots.
“Donald Trump is not screwing around, nor are we,” Newsom said Sunday.
The grapevine chatter that had spun around Newsom and Harris’s 2028 considerations only intensified in September, when the governor said for the first time publicly that he would not run for president if Harris decided to. Since then, he has repeated the assertion in interviews and on the campaign trail. The former vice president has said that she hasn’t yet made a decision on 2028 and would do so after the midterms.
Newsom and Harris share a deep history in San Francisco and California politics, often drawing from the same donors and Bay Area-political base.
Newsom was first elected to public office in the state in 1998 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and Harris in 2003 as the city’s district attorney. In 2004, Newsom became San Francisco’s mayor. They were sworn in on the same day.
Although Newsom held the higher-profile job in those earlier years, her term in the U.S. Senate, her historic turn as Biden’s vice president and the party’s 2024 presidential nominee turned the tables. Her loss to Trump has left her in political limbo.
Newsom has said it would be a “waste of everyone’s time” for the pair to run for president in the same cycle because their political circles overlap too much. Still, the political commentariat wondered if Newsom made the pledge only because he thought it could pressure her into making a decision or because he thought she wouldn’t launch a bid.
Last week, Newsom told late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel that it was a “sincere point of view.”
“I think we should respect her service,” Newsom said. “She was our nominee.”
And again, he said in that interview there was “no scenario” in which they would appear on the presidential stage simultaneously.
After their program ended Sunday, Harris, Newsom, Becerra and the other California Democrats who rallied with them came back onstage. The American flag behind them, they clasped their hands together and raised them in the air.
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