A Gavin Newsom 2028 presidential run is off the table if Kamala Harris decides to run, the California governor told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview released Monday.
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“I don’t know if she runs, but we’ll see,” Newsom said. “But I wouldn’t run if she ran.”Tapper, standing in a Montana river fly fishing with Newsom when the answer came, asked him to confirm it. “If she runs, you will not?”
“Of course not. Why would I?” Newsom said. “I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t waste everyone’s time. Who needs that?”
The reason he gave is about math, not sentiment. Newsom said there is “pure crossover” between his supporters and hers. Same base, same friends, same donors. In a presidential primary, candidates inside the same party run against each other and voters decide who carries the party into the general election. Two Californians pulling from one pot of money and one pot of voters would split that pot in half and leave everybody else a clear lane. Newsom described that scenario as “mutual assured destruction,” a Cold War phrase for two sides with enough firepower that neither one can strike without getting wiped out in the same exchange.
“Electorally it’s a gift from God for everybody else,” he said.
Tapper made the obvious counterargument. Harris has run twice and lost once at the top of the ticket. Newsom has never run for president at all. Why step aside for someone who already had the shot?
“That’d be the approach to the campaign, certainly. That’d be the case you’d make,” Newsom said. “Pretty good one, actually. That’s objectively true.”
What makes the Gavin Newsom 2028 answer land the way it does is that the people who bet money on elections currently like his odds better than hers. Polymarket and Kalshi, prediction markets where users put real cash behind political outcomes, both give Newsom roughly a 13 percent shot at the Democratic nomination. That puts him third, behind Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Harris sits around 8 percent on both platforms. He is the one polling stronger in those markets, and he is the one volunteering to get out of the way.
The two go back more than twenty years. They came up together in San Francisco politics in the early 2000s, when he was mayor and she was district attorney, and the relationship has been described as friendly and competitive in equal measure ever since. Newsom campaigned for Harris during the 2024 cycle, and the widely expected collision between them has been treated for years as a matter of when, not if.
His recent moves have not exactly read like a man stepping back. Newsom traveled to South Carolina this month, the early voting state that decided the 2020 Democratic race and the kind of stop candidates make when they are quietly building something. Harris, for her part, announced she would not run for governor of California, saying her leadership and public service would not be in elected office for now while pointedly leaving the White House question open.
Tapper also asked whether Newsom should have challenged Joe Biden in 2024. He said no.
“I wasn’t ready,” Newsom said. “First of all, I wouldn’t do that. Second, if I did, I would have gotten crushed because I didn’t have a why. If you don’t have a big enough why, then you don’t belong there.”
He said any decision about a Gavin Newsom 2028 campaign runs through his house first. His wife and his four school-aged children would have to be with it.
“They’ve got to be on board. If they’re not on board, that’s a non-starter,” he said. “I am not screwing anything up anymore, man. I know what matters in life. I got four kids.”
The interview was taped at his in-laws’ ranch in Montana and ran as part of Tapper’s series where he meets politicians from both parties somewhere they actually like being. The full report aired Tuesday morning on CNN.
Harris has not said whether she is running in 2028. Her loss to Donald Trump in 2024 has hung over every Democratic conversation about the next cycle, and the biggest open question in the party has been whether she tries again. Newsom just answered a question she has not, and he answered it in her favor.
