Gavin Newsom, the California governor whose name often appears on a shortlist of politicians who could replace Joe Biden if the president were to ever drop out as the presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election, has apparently broken with efforts by the Democratic establishment to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee by simply barring him from ballot access.
“There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy but in California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction,” Newsom said in a statement.
The Democratic governor’s comments come following Colorado’s controversial decision to ban Trump from the state’s primaries, and a letter by California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis this week asking Secretary of State Shirley Weber to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.”
The strategy, coming in the face of polls showing that Trump is almost certain to clinch the Republican nomination, and has a good shot of defeating President Biden in the general election next November, comes after previous efforts to dissuade Trump from another presidential run failed.
Trump currently faces four indictments constituting 91 separate federal and state charges in New York, Washington, DC, Florida, and Georgia, ranging from the alleged falsification of business records for the purposes of paying hush money to a porn star, to the mishandling of classified documents, to a purported plot to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. In the unlikely event that he is convicted on all counts, Trump would face over 700 years in jail.
The former president has denied all wrongdoing, and has accused his adversaries of a “witch hunt” after the collapse of Russiagate and twin impeachments.
The US Supreme Court is widely expected to rule on the Colorado Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision to bar Trump’s ballot access, although no date for possible deliberations has been set. The Republican Party will hold its primaries in Colorado in early March together with fifteen other states, giving the former president’s legal team about two months to try to challenge the decision.