California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will decide by early January whether to run for president in 2028, giving his clearest timeline yet for a White House bid — and setting up a potential collision with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Newsom made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Turkey's Anadolu news agency while in Turkey for the COP31 international climate conference, according to Fox News Politics. "I'll make the determination at the beginning of the year," Newsom said, per Anadolu. "So we'll spend the next few weeks with the family and make a decision early January."
The governor's timetable lines up with the end of his term governing California in early January, according to coverage of his remarks. Newsom had previously avoided committing to a specific date, saying that the buy-in of his four children would be determinative.
Newsom also used the overseas platform to characterize the midterm elections, describing them as a "rebuke" of President Donald Trump. "Donald Trump's presidency as we know it ended last week in the U.S.," Newsom told Anadolu. "It was an historic rebuke of his tenure and now it's incumbent upon those that were successful to govern and to lead my party, the Democratic Party, and now has to set forth a positive alternative, agenda, to Donald Trump."
HARRIS LOOMS OVER THE TIMELINE
The January decision date leaves a major variable unresolved for Democrats: whether Kamala Harris, the 49th Vice President, enters the 2028 race. Newsom told CNN's Jake Tapper in September that he would not run if Harris did, calling a potential contest between the two "mutual assured destruction" given their overlapping networks of friends and supporters, according to coverage of those remarks.
"I don't know if she runs, but we'll see," Newsom said at the time, per that coverage. "I wouldn't run if she ran."
During the Turkey trip, Newsom met Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to discuss expanding California's climate partnership with Brazil, and his office announced a new climate agreement with Portugal, according to reports on the trip. He and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, also visited a forestry training center to exchange lessons on wildfire management, and he attended a gathering organized by UN Secretary-General António Guterres alongside Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
A photo indexed on Instagram — captioned "California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said he will not run for ..." — circulated online during the trip. The post's caption references a pledge not to run, but the posting did not include the full context of Newsom's conditional statement about Harris, which he made during the September CNN interview.
THE DEMOCRATIC FIELD IS ALREADY MOVING
Newsom's timeline is landing in a Democratic field that is already taking shape. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said Wednesday she will deliberate privately over a potential 2028 presidential campaign and probably will not share anything publicly "for a little while," according to an interview with the Washington Sun. The announcement, first reported elsewhere, came just over a week after Democrats made major gains in the November midterm elections.
On the Republican side, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ruled out a 2028 campaign on Wednesday, telling CNBC: "I am not running in 2028, but I will continue to talk about the things that I care about." Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has also pushed back on reports he is laying groundwork for another run, writing on X, "I have not reached out to anybody about running for anything."
For California voters, the January timeline means Newsom will exit the governor's office with his national ambitions unresolved. For Democrats nationally, it means the party's most prominent governors and its most prominent progressive will all be making their moves within weeks of each other — with Harris's decision hanging over all of it.
Our Take
Leave it to Gavin Newsom to announce his presidential timeline from a UN climate summit in Turkey, alongside Antonio Guterres and Sadiq Khan, while his own state struggles with the basics.
The man who runs California — a state that has exported its population, its businesses and its homeless crisis to Texas, Florida and Arizona — is now auditioning for the job of exporting those same policies to the rest of America. That's the real agenda behind the COP31 photo ops and the Portugal climate deal. It's not about the environment. It's about building a national brand for a 2028 run.
And notice the timing he chose. Newsom says he'll decide in early January, the same window when he leaves the governor's mansion. But he also said he wouldn't run if Kamala Harris runs. So which is it? Either he's waiting on the 49th Vice President to make his decision for him, or he's already decided and is just waiting for the field to clear. Either way, it's not leadership — it's calculation.
Meanwhile, Democrats are telling us the midterms were a "rebuke" of Trump, and they're already measuring the drapes in the Oval Office. But conservative voters should read this as a warning shot. The Left is lining up early. Newsom, Ocasio-Cortez, Harris — they're all moving. The question for patriots is simple: are we going to spend the next two years fighting among ourselves, or are we going to make sure this January announcement is the last presidential kickoff Gavin Newsom ever gets?
