Newsom deflects on California's cost of living crisis during CNN book tour interview in Nashville

Gov. Gavin Newsom sat down with CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday to promote his new memoir and found himself fielding pointed questions about why families keep fleeing the state he's governed for nearly eight years. His answer: talk about something else.

Bash confronted Newsom during a "State of the Union" interview at the OZ Arts performance center in Nashville, the first stop on his book tour for "Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery." She cited California's status as the most expensive state in the country and told him about a couple she'd met at dinner the night before.

The big pivot

Bash came at Newsom hard, which the California governor surely was not expecting.

"They moved out of California because they couldn't afford the rent or even to buy a home and also start a family."

Newsom pivoted immediately to macro indicators. California has climbed from the sixth to the fourth-largest economy in the world, he said. The population has grown for three consecutive years. The state dominates in AI, quantum computing, robotics, agriculture, forestry, and manufacturing.

Bash pressed again, tying the affordability crisis to the personal narrative Newsom himself has been selling in his memoir.

"But people are struggling to afford things, like your mom was."

This is the core tension Newsom cannot resolve: he wants to campaign on a childhood of hardship while governing a state that mass-produces hardship for ordinary families.

The numbers Newsom doesn't want to discuss

California's prices ran approximately 11% above the national average in 2024, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. That alone understates the problem. Housing costs stood 53% above the national norm. Utilities ran 60% higher, second only to Hawaii.

The migration data tells the rest of the story. According to the American Community Survey, nearly 10 million people left California for other states between 2010 and 2024. Just over seven million moved in. That is a net domestic loss of roughly three million people in a decade and a half.

Newsom pointed to a recent population rebound, and it's true that California has grown for three straight years to about 40 million residents. But a modest uptick does not erase a sustained exodus of Americans who voted with their moving trucks. The couple Bash met at a Nashville restaurant did not leave California because they failed to appreciate the state's GDP ranking. They left because they could not afford to live there.

When a governor has to fly to Tennessee to sell books about his difficult childhood while Tennessee is absorbing his state's refugees, the irony writes itself.

The memoir and the myth

Newsom's book paints a portrait of a young man so strapped for cash he picked up a newspaper delivery route and worked shifts as a busboy to help his recently divorced mother, who "scrambled to keep the family afloat." It is a compelling story. It is also incomplete.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who currently leads the California governor's race with 17% in recent polling, has made the Newsom family mythology a campaign target. Hilton noted that Newsom's grandfather helped elect former Gov. Pat Brown, and that the intertwined fortunes of the two families did not end there.

"The Newsom and Brown families have been trading political favors and lucrative business deals ever since."

Hilton also pointed to the Newsom family's connection to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), noting that Gavin Newsom's family married into the two-time House Speaker's family, reported the New York Post. The Brown, Newsom, Pelosi, and Getty families have operated as something like a political dynasty in San Francisco for generations. A kid from that orbit delivering newspapers does not make him Oliver Twist.

None of this means Newsom's childhood wasn't genuinely difficult at times. Divorce is hard on families regardless of their social connections. But there is a difference between personal adversity and the kind of systemic poverty that Newsom's own policies have inflicted on millions of Californians who lack a network of politically connected families to catch them.

The deflection playbook

Watch how Newsom handled the CNN exchange. Bash cited a specific, human example: a real couple who left his state because they couldn't afford it. Newsom responded with abstract economic rankings. Bash brought it back to struggling families. Newsom cited policy programs.

This is the playbook. Whenever the conversation turns to the lived experience of Californians, Newsom zooms out to the satellite view. Fourth-largest economy in the world. Dominance in key industries. Hundreds of thousands moving in.

But an economy can be enormous and still leave its residents broke. California proves this every single day. The state's GDP is driven by a handful of industries concentrated in a handful of zip codes. The tech worker in Mountain View and the agricultural laborer in Fresno exist in the same "fourth largest economy," but they do not inhabit the same reality. Newsom's macro statistics describe the wealth of California's elite sectors. They say nothing about the family in the Central Valley choosing between groceries and the electric bill, which runs 60% above the national average.

A governor who understood this would not respond to a question about affordability by listing industries. He would answer for why, after nearly eight years of his leadership, California remains the most expensive state in the union.

The 2028 audition

This interview was not really about the book. The book is about the presidential campaign. And the presidential campaign is about whether the rest of America wants what California has.

Newsom is term-limited and openly weighing a 2028 run. A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released last week placed him tied for second among potential Democratic presidential contenders at 15%, alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, behind former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Newsom acknowledged during the interview that he and former Vice President Kamala Harris may find their political paths colliding.

The Nashville book tour, then, is a national introduction. Newsom wants Americans in states like Tennessee to see a different side of him: the scrappy kid, the dyslexic striver, the man behind the hair gel. What he does not want them to see is what he left behind in California.

Three million more people left than arrived over the past fifteen years. Housing costs more than half again the national average. Utility bills are nearly two-thirds higher. A state so expensive that 53% of its own voters have considered leaving because of the cost of living.

That is not a record to run on. That is a record to run from. And judging by the couple Dana Bash met at dinner in Nashville, plenty of Californians already have.