Last month, while signing a bill to provide a tax credit for struggling local news outlets, Gov. Gavin Newsom reminisced about the days when reporters thronged around him when he was mayor of San Francisco — right around the time tech platforms swept into town and permanently disrupted the media industry.
“There’s not a lot of you,” he said to the assembled Capitol press corps, with whom he said he had enjoyed an “awkwardly healthy” relationship over two terms as governor. “There’s not enough.”
Left unsaid was how much he’s taken advantage of the industry’s transformation in his own political rise.
The past two decades of media contraction have allowed government officials in every town to talk less to traditional news outlets. Instead they talk directly with voters and constituents on their own platforms.
That allows them to dodge tough questions and independent media coverage where they’re “not controlling the narrative,” said Menlo College political science professor Melissa Michelson. Politicians have sought this for decades, Michelson said, but only in recent years — when over half of U.S. adults get news through social media — have they seen it as more important than traditional media.
Newsom has exploited the trend with unique energy, and is now preparing to leave office after eight years as governor as one of the Democratic Party’s most prolific communicators.
The potential 2028 presidential contender has been a Twitch stream guest, a Substacker and a podcast bro. He never stops posting. He picks fights, on X especially, with right-wing media, an industry he is both critical of and fascinated with.
Some of his communications are done on campaign accounts, but much of the jousting comes from his taxpayer-funded governor’s office communications staff, who have played a major role in casting Newsom as the leading Democrat pushing back against the Trump administration in areas well beyond the boundaries of state policy.
During his second term, the post-pandemic, post-recall election Newsom has grown his press and communications team into an around-the-clock, content-creating media operation, even as he rarely takes questions from the media in Sacramento and his agencies shun interview requests. He nearly doubled his communications staff since the pandemic, even adding a full-time photographer, making $212,000 a year, whose LinkedIn profile describes his job as focusing on the office’s “visual messaging, public perception and narrative development.”
Doing it all
Newsom has 24 taxpayer-funded employees on his official communications team who are collectively paid at least $2.6 million a year, including staff who scout locations for events and camera operators who livestream them. That’s up from 12 in January 2020, a year into his first term.
The only other governor with a comparable communications staff was Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an international media sensation whose office credentialed 400 reporters in his first term and held weekly press briefings, said former spokesperson Margita Thompson. Today during one of Newsom’s rare Sacramento press conferences, between 10 and 20 reporters regularly attend. The office stopped issuing its own press credentials years ago.
Newsom’s office payroll includes several spokespeople, writers and researchers who explain state policy. It also has a four-person team of Tiktok- and pop-culture-savvy Gen Z digital staff who churn out a drumbeat of social media content on official accounts.
The size of Newsom’s communications operation reflects his “do it all” style of governing.
He won office with a long list of lofty priorities from expanding healthcare and universal preschool to fighting climate change, and created new state departments for issues previously left to other governments, like a homelessness agency and a state surgeon general’s office. He has expanded the size of the state government to an all-time high.
Newsom treats publicity as part of that public policy strategy, said Erin Mellon, a director of communications for Newsom from 2020 to 2024.
“If you’re not actually telling people about what you’re doing, then doing it doesn’t make a difference because they can’t take advantage of that” policy or program, Mellon said of Newsom’s thinking. “When someone had a problem with the state of California, even if it was a local issue, it reflected on him, on his role and his job as governor. He would insert himself.”
Her team had the inside joke “Everything is a comms problem” printed on mugs, Mellon said.
It’s a stark contrast from the lean, budget-cutting days of his Democratic predecessor Gov. Jerry Brown, who presided over the state’s recovery from the Great Recession. Brown, gruff and unpolished, ran a famously small press shop and often eschewed weighing in on issues. The office had eight staffers at its height — including interns — and borrowed photographers from other agencies.
“He was like, ‘I don’t have to have an opinion on everything that happens and I don’t want to,’” recalled a former spokesperson, Elizabeth Ashford. “I don’t think he was that interested in new media. Newsom is.”
Bob Salladay, a former journalist and Newsom’s senior adviser for communications, said most of his staff’s time is still spent responding to traditional media inquiries and explaining state policy to national reporters and a hollowed-out state press corps. The growth of the communications staff, he said, is “responding to the volume of work that the governor is doing.”
“You cannot overstate the difference between this governor and past governors in terms of what they’re involved in doing,” said Salladay, who makes $242,000 a year. “That generates a huge amount of inquiries into the office.”
The team also takes significant liberties beyond policy communications.
The digital staff’s output includes fan edits of Newsom set to Nicki Minaj and an X post of a pixelated image implying something tawdry about Trump’s chin flesh that got 30 million views. Newsom’s official accounts used a slew of memes and mockery last summer as they promoted both California’s resistance to Trump’s National Guard deployment in LA and Newsom’s anti-GOP gerrymandering initiative. His press office’s X account gained half a million followers last August alone, Newsom’s office said.
There is also more overt overlap with the political side of Newsom’s operation. Izzy Gardon, the spokesperson behind much of Newsom’s more combative public image, has accompanied the governor on his political travels to red and swing states ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. This summer, Salladay said Gardon moved into a part-time role with the office, now making half his $185,000-a-year state salary and doing political work for Newsom during his unpaid time. Other staff take personal time to volunteer for Newsom’s campaign, he said.
‘If we were Trumpian’
The relentless drumbeat of snarky posts from the governor’s official press office and Newsom’s foray into podcasting and other media known to be frequented by young men online have gotten him plenty of attention ahead of his anticipated decision.
Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster who has worked with other politicians considering 2028 runs, said Newsom stands out in the party for his unique comfort communicating on platforms that tend to be dominated by younger, insurgent progressives or conservatives. She called his digital operation “very effective” and “one of the best out there.”
“He has mastered being able to set the agenda and being able to get other people to respond to him,” she said.
The strategies are not without criticism. Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who was once a spokesperson for Schwarzenegger, said Newsom has blurred ethical lines by using his office “to basically run a political account” in ways that mirror how the president treats his political opponents and the press.
Newsom’s office tells conservative writers they are not “real journalists.” The social media posts range from routine policy announcements to AI-generated memes boosting Newsom and sexualized taunts at Republicans. The account frequently engages in fights with the right, scorning them for their alignment with Trump, who is widely unpopular in California. In a recent flurry of posts, Newsom’s office called for California’s GOP congressmembers to condemn Trump’s declaration to “let (Iran) take out Los Angeles or San Diego.” When Republican-turned-independent Kevin Kiley responded that he criticized the comment, Newsom’s office wrote it was insufficient and replied, “You’re a weak little noodle.”
“Trump has changed the norms,” Stutzman said. “And Newsom, his operation basically adopted the Trump playbook.”
But for every alleged offense Newsom’s team points to a bigger one from the president, like his recent taxpayer-paid pro-Trump political ads. Newsom himself has attested to satirizing Trump’s rhetoric to to call attention to the president’s many disputes with California, like his withholding of federal aid in the wake of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
“These last two years with Trump are different than any other moment in modern American history, so you have to deal with it in different ways,” Salladay said. He added later, “If we were Trumpian, we would have cut off the California Post by now. But we work with them every day,” referring to the Rupert Murdoch-owned offshoot of the New York Post that started publishing in January.
Countering the right
Two full-time staff members are assigned to “rapid response,” which involves fact-checking claims and misinformation about Newsom, his policies and his governance of California on four social media platforms, as well as pushing traditional media outlets to change things they deem incorrect.
The office boasts of requesting 453 corrections since 2024. Salladay said the rapid response operation grew out of narratives on right-wing media and social media about the Los Angeles fires, crime and the state’s business climate.
He denied that the effort amounts to using state funds to burnish Newsom’s political image. Misinformed notions of California, he said, could result in policy decisions that affect constituents, like the federal government withholding aid.
“When people tell you San Francisco is a hellhole or California is driving out businesses, that’s the propaganda we have to counter,” he said. “That is a state operation. We are defending the state and we have a right to do that, because the narrative can be incredibly damaging.”
In 2025, the Public Policy Institute of California found the number of business headquarters leaving California annually increased between 2011 and 2021, but found their share of all business activity was small, as was the overall effect on jobs.
But even as Newsom’s subordinates argue with and dismiss right-wing media outlets online, he maintains a fascination and friendliness with many of them. In 2025, in the wake of bruising election losses for the Democratic Party and young men tilting rightward hard, he shocked fellow liberals by launching a podcast, “This is Gavin Newsom,” featuring a string of conservative activists and media figures as guests.
Pitched as a way to have friendly debate with his ideological opposites and to learn from right-wing communications successes, he launched the show with Charlie Kirk. The conservative activist put Newsom in a defensive position with a string of questionable claims about California schools, asserting their libraries contained pornography and that they were teaching “against white people.” On the show, Newsom also agreed with Kirk that it’s unfair for trans girls to play girls’ sports, and laughingly helped Kirk analyze how a 2024 campaign ad about Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for gender reassignment surgery for prisoners was bad optics for Democrats.
It got Newsom a lot of attention and turned some heads on the right. Thompson, the former Schwarzenegger spokesperson, said she was alerted to the podcast a few months later by a conservative friend, who was surprised that in an episode with the conservative podcast host Shawn Ryan, Newsom talked of hunting and accepted a gift gun. (Earlier this year Newsom, in a financial disclosure, revealed he never took possession of the gun and his office would not say whether it’s in California.)
“I liked that he’s going places where he is unexpected,” Thompson said, though she was turned off by the “bro talk.”
Since then, the podcast, which is produced by iHeartRadio and for which Newsom is not paid, has taken a more expected liberal turn. Newsom has used it to promote Democrats, push last year for his successful gerrymandering initiative Prop. 50 and to discuss AI policy. But every few episodes, he returns to figures from the right, most recently Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.
Newsom spokesperson Anthony York said Newsom picks most of the guests from his personal contact list, calling the show “a reflection of who he is and his interests.”
Newsom said last month that he hopes to keep the podcast going after he leaves office in January.
Lake, the national strategist, said Newsom will have no trouble maintaining public attention.
“The race starts Jan. 1, 2027,” she said. “He’s set up the infrastructure to keep it going.”