California Democrats Give Newsom Passing Grades on Homelessness While State Burns

There’s something profoundly broken when politicians stand on a debate stage and hand out B grades for what any honest person would call catastrophic failure. Wednesday night’s California gubernatorial debate exposed the Democratic Party’s most glaring weakness: an inability to call out their own, even when the evidence is literally sleeping on every street corner in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.

Let’s talk numbers because they don’t lie the way politicians do. California holds roughly 10% of America’s population but accounts for nearly 50% of the nation’s homeless crisis. That’s not a rounding error. That’s not bad luck. That’s policy failure on a scale so massive it should disqualify anyone who defends it from holding public office. Yet there stood Katie Porter, Xavier Becerra, and Tom Steyer, falling over themselves to praise Gavin Newsom’s handling of an issue that’s turned the Golden State into a national embarrassment.

Porter, who brands herself as a tough-talking populist, gave Newsom a B. Her reasoning? He called attention to the problem. You know what else calls attention to problems? Alarm bells. Warning sirens. Flashing lights. We don’t give them grades for effort. The job isn’t to notice the fire. The job is to put it out.

Then there’s Becerra, who somehow found it in himself to award an A for effort because Newsom showed up in Los Angeles and pretended to clean streets for the cameras. This is participation trophy politics at its most insulting. Effort doesn’t house people. Effort doesn’t clear tent cities that have become permanent fixtures of California’s landscape. Effort is what you praise in a child learning to tie their shoes, not a governor managing billions in taxpayer dollars with nothing to show but worsening conditions.

Tom Steyer’s B-minus was almost refreshing by comparison, though calling any part of this disaster “refreshing” tells you how low the bar has sunk. These grades reveal something deeper than simple political loyalty. They expose a fundamental unwillingness among Democrats to acknowledge that their approach to homelessness has failed spectacularly. Billions spent. Thousands of bureaucrats employed. Countless task forces and blue-ribbon panels. And the problem gets worse every single year.

Republican candidate Steve Hilton cut through the nonsense with the kind of clarity voters are starving for. “My goodness, of course it’s an F,” he said. That’s not partisan talking points. That’s observable reality. California’s homelessness crisis has become so severe that apps tracking human waste on city streets became a dark joke about progressive governance. The “poop map” shouldn’t exist in the wealthiest state in the wealthiest nation on earth.

The reluctance to criticize Newsom isn’t mysterious. He hasn’t endorsed anyone in the race yet, and Democratic candidates are terrified of alienating him. So they perform this awkward dance, praising failure and calling it pragmatism. This is what happens when party loyalty trumps basic honesty. When getting the nod from the outgoing governor matters more than telling voters the truth about what’s happening in their communities.

Here’s the thing about traditional conservative principles. Individual liberty means nothing if people can’t walk down their own streets safely. Free markets can’t function when businesses board up windows and flee cities overrun with encampments. Limited government doesn’t mean no government. It means effective government that actually solves problems instead of throwing money at them and declaring victory based on intentions rather than results.

California’s homeless crisis is a moral failure dressed up in progressive rhetoric and defended with academic language about “systemic issues” and “complex challenges.” Sometimes problems are exactly as simple as they appear. When policies don’t work, you change them. When leaders fail, you replace them. When an entire political class refuses to acknowledge reality, voters should show them the door.

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