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The governor’s race was looking so dire for Democrats earlier this year that many started to criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom for not telling them how to vote.
The thinking seemed to be that the large field of small candidates needed a big brother to step in, crown a successor and boot out the pretenders. Otherwise, the Democrats could cancel each other out and leave no one in the runoff but two conservative Republicans.
Newsom declined, and the election results suggest he was wise to do so. The Democrats got a candidate in the runoff, and Newsom avoided looking like a kingmaker.
Yet he is, in a manner of speaking, a prince-and-princess-maker. No California governor in living memory has filled more statewide elected posts or so thoroughly put his stamp on major elected offices. An entire generation of officials owe their current jobs and their political prospects to Newsom. The phenomenon is due in part to decisions by President Joe Biden.
As a candidate, Biden promised to pick a Black woman as his running mate, and he ultimately decided on U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris. The ticket was successful, so Harris resigned her Senate seat to become vice president in 2021.
To fill the Senate vacancy, Newson tapped Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Padilla was widely seen as a potential Senate candidate, and was a close Newsom ally. He was Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign chairman in 2010 before Newsom deferred to Jerry Brown and ran instead for lieutenant governor.
Padilla’s appointment left an opening for California secretary of state. Newsom picked Assemblymember Shirley Weber.
Then Biden picked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to be secretary of Health and Human Services, leaving yet another vacancy. Newsom chose Assemblymember Rob Bonta, who was widely known to be eyeing an eventual run for AG.
On the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2023, Newsom appointed union organizer and Harris ally Laphonza Butler to fill the vacancy. For a brief period, both U.S. Senate seats and a third of the state’s constitutional offices — all elected positions — were filled by Newsom (including Newsom himself).
After filling out the terms of their predecessors, Weber and Bonta won terms on their own in 2022.
So did Padilla, but with a twist. As a Senate appointee, he had to run twice, to satisfy legislation intended to satisfy court interpretations of the 1913 constitutional amendment that gave voters — rather than state legislators — power to elect senators. Under the new law, the appointment lasted only until the November election, so Padilla was on the ballot once to serve in Harris’s seat for two months until the end of her term, and simultaneously on another for a new six-year term.
It was different for Butler. Newsom was criticized for not replacing Harris in the Senate with another Black woman, then vowed to pick a Black woman to succeed Feinstein, who was under pressure to resign. Newsom also said his appointee had to promise not to run for a full term, but then said she could.
Upon her appointment, though, Butler said she would not. Instead, Adam Schiff won the election to a full term, Butler resigned her seat, and Newsom appointed Schiff to fill the short period between the end of Butler’s brief term and the beginning of Schiff’s own term, giving him a measure of Senate seniority.
So Newsom in the end made three appointments to the Senate.
Most of his appointments broke ground. Padilla is California’s first Latino U.S. senator. Butler was its first openly LGBTQ senator. Bonta is its first Filipino American attorney general and Weber its first Black secretary of state. If Newsom’s aim was to ensure that his appointments covered a swath of long-marginalized communities, he succeeded.
Along the way, Newsom also filled vacancies on eight county boards of supervisors. Nine, actually, if you include the San Francisco supervisor he appointed years earlier when he was mayor of that city and county.
Plus he has appointed three justices of the seven-seat state Supreme Court, and is expected to appoint a fourth any day now.
Jerry Brown, in his 16 years as governor, appointed more Supreme Court justices but neither he nor any other governor in the last 100 years can match the sheer volume of Newsom’s other appointments to high office. It’s also worth noting, though, that Brown helped get the Newsom appointment cascade underway by picking Becerra as AG when Harris was elected to the Senate. With both Harris and Becerra moving to the Biden administration, Newsom filled their empty seats.
Is any of this a big deal? Certainly, for two reasons. First, the appointments and the broadened accessibility to high office are important parts of the lasting stamp that Newsom will leave on the state. And second, he is likely to run for president in two years. If he vies for the Democratic nomination against other Californians — Harris, for example — it won’t hurt to have a bevy of elected officials beholden to him. And it won’t hurt to remind voters that he helped smash an assortment of glass ceilings, in much the same way that he made same-sex marriage a political reality during his mayoral tenure.
It won’t hurt, either, to be able to push back against “tough on crime” Republicans who point out, as they surely will, that Newsom appointed George Gascón to be San Francisco police chief and then San Francisco district attorney. “What of it?” Newsom may say. “Those were good appointments and, besides, so were all my many others.”
