Newsom says AI resentment to dominate future elections. 'The pitchforks are here'

Lia Russell, The Sacramento Bee on May 19, 2026

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Democrats need to address voters’ growing populist resentment towards billionaires and the threat of artificial intelligence to automate jobs out of existence, which will dominate the 2026 and 2028 election cycles, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday.

Newsom spoke at a conference in Washington, D.C., at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. The outgoing term-limited governor blamed outdated inheritance and “broken” tax codes for the widening wealth gap and the downstream effects of Silicon Valley billionaires’ influence in the Trump White House.

“Ten percent of people own two thirds the wealth, the same 10% own 93% of the value of the stock market. A 30-year-old is not doing better than his or her father for the first time in history,” Newsom told CAP President Neera Tanden, a former Biden White House adviser.

Newsom blamed the consolidation of wealth in the U.S. for the reason why California is debating whether to levy a 5% tax on billionaires, which he opposes. The initiative, which is being backed by a healthcare union, just submitted 1.5 million signatures to qualify for the Nov. 3 ballot.

“The pitchforks, yeah, they’re here, they’re not just coming, you know. We saw with all the populism and authoritarianism that came from that,” Newsom said. “But the last 30 years of the rise of these authoritarian tendencies in terms of governance, you know, we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

He floated solutions like instituting universal basic income and universal basic capital, which would allow citizens to earn money from investing in AI via public wealth funds.

“We still have systems that were designed in 1935 that are no longer viable in 2025,” Newsom said. “You don’t need charity, we need ownership. Universal basic capital, by the way, those are creators telling you that, not just me. This was (OpenAI executive) Sam Altman, (Anthropic founder) Dario (Amodei), and others are saying, they’re the ones making that point. And the voters are demanding it. Got to have an ownership stake. You cannot save democracy unless we democratize the economy.”

Leaders in the AI industry have increasingly claimed their technology could render millions of workers in sectors from healthcare to Hollywood redundant by as early as 2027, potentially causing mass unemployment. While evidence of a looming “white collar bloodbath” has been thin, tech companies like Meta, Oracle, Intel, Google and others have laid off 110,000 workers this year alone as they pivot to AI.

Newsom compared those “25-year-old white collar workers that I see in San Francisco that are wondering why they’re not getting a call back on a job interview” to the factory workers made obsolete by trade deals like NAFTA.

“They’re sounding the same. That’s a different kind of coalition, the white collar and blue collar coalition,” he said.

The maybe-2028 presidential hopeful went on to boast that other states like New York are looking to copy a law California passed last year that regulates large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

Newsom reports making millions of dollars from his hospitality business, whose assets are held in a blind trust run by his sister and cousin that he has been barred from accessing since entering office in 2019. First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newson is also worth millions. Both have longstanding ties to Silicon Valley and some of the wealthiest people in the world, like the Getty family — an issue that will likely dog Newsom on the campaign trail if he runs in 2028 as expected.

His friend and sometimes political rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris, is also considering another run for president and has begun staffing up.

Harris recently hired Gabriel Uy, her former White House deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, as a strategist adviser. She also reportedly hired as her chief of staff former U.S. Ambassador Candace Bond, who appeared with Harris at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University last month.

Neither Bond, who recently served as interim manager for the city of Malibu, nor Harris’s office immediately responded to requests for comment.

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