If you needed an actor to play an elected official, you could do worse than issuing a casting call for a Gavin Newsom type.

The governor of California is a tall and polished, blandly handsome middle-aged white guy,

charming with constituents one-on-one, good at giving speeches. Wherever you land on his policies,

he does fit the Hollywood stereotype of a politician. How far could that take him if, as most

observers predict, he officially makes a run at the Democratic presidential

nomination for 28. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Newsom has been well known

in California since the early 2000s when he first ran for mayor of San Francisco. Later, he spent

eight years as lieutenant governor before winning the state's top position in 2018.

But at the end of this year, term limits will leave him without a job.

And although Newsom hasn't announced what is next, my guest says all signs point to a run for the Democratic nomination in 2028.

So Americans far outside California may want to know who is Gavin Newsom, really. Helen Lewis is a

staff writer at the Atlantic, which published her profile of California's governor under the

headline, The Front Runner. Helen, welcome back to think. Thank you very much for having me.

What are some of the clues that suggest to anybody paying attention that Gavin Newsom's next move

will be to throw his hat in the ring for the Democratic presidential nomination?

Well, he's been out and he's done kind of barbecues and visits to neighboring states, including

Texas. He's obviously also turned himself into one of the primary kind of anti-Trump foils, you know, which other

governors have had success in doing. But he's really been pursuing this incredibly aggressive,

trollish social media strategy, you know, which is, I mean, I'm kind of ambivalent against it.

Some of it is very funny and some of it kind of pains me to think that, you know, that having seen Donald Trump's tweets, the way to fight that is to kind of essentially replicate them. But, you know, very mean stuff about, you know, Donald Trump having swollen ankles or the fact that he can't get down the stairs on Air Force One, you know, this kind of stuff. All of it really aimed at just saying, you know, you don't scare me. You know, Trump is known in American

politics as the kind of biggest bully out there. And Gavin Newsom's thing is, well, you know what,

I'm this six foot three jock, like, you know, and I'm much younger than you. Come and have a go

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