Newsom Caught on Undercover Camera Calling DSA ‘Dominant’ and ‘Mainstream’ in Democratic Party

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, speaking to what he believed was a younger Democratic voter during a mid-October campaign stop in New Hampshire, told an undercover Townhall journalist that the Democratic Socialists of America will become the dominant, mainstream force inside the Democratic Party. 

The exchange, recorded October 17 while Newsom was stumping for Democratic congressional candidate Stefany Shaheen, began with the undercover reporter saying she and other younger voters “don’t want more Kamala Harris” and instead want “more, I guess, democratic socialist policies.” 

Newsom did not push back. He replied that “no one is arguing to manage the status quo and fail more efficiently,” then declared: “So the DSA—the energy, and the desire and demand for bold change, not incremental change—is very much going to be the dominant. I mean, that’s going to be the mainstream Democratic [Party]. Absolutely.”He continued: “You can’t play in the margins any more. The system’s broken. It’s completely unbalanced, and we can’t—we can’t manage the decline. We have to completely reimagine it.”

WATCH:

UNDERCOVER: GAVIN NEWSOM SAYS THE DSA IS "GOING TO BE DOMINANT" AND "MAINSTREAM" IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

"The DSA, the energy and the desire and demand for bold change, not incremental change, is very much going to be dominant. I mean, that's going to be a mainstream Democratic… pic.twitter.com/y83qCrYiwO

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 26, 2026

The comments, released by Townhall on October 26, come as Newsom continues to position himself as a leading 2028 presidential prospect. They also echo earlier Globe reporting on the open radicalization of California Democrats and the DSA’s concrete plans for the state’s largest city.

In February, the California Globe detailed the Democratic Socialists of America Los Angeles chapter’s 40-page, 9,000-word “Democratic Socialist Program for Los Angeles.” The document lays out a six-to-eight-year roadmap to seize control of the nation’s second-largest city through “working class power.” 

Among its demands: “creative use of eminent domain” to seize privately owned housing and convert it to public or “social” housing; bans on unhosted short-term rentals; vacancy taxes; universal rent control; expropriation of golf courses; replacement of armed police with unarmed social workers; shuttering Men’s Central Jail without replacement; city takeover of grocery, restaurant, and internet enterprises; a full shift to 100% renewable energy by 2035; and local voting rights for non-citizens.

DSA-LA, which claims roughly 3,500 members, has already helped elect City Council members including Nithya Raman (now challenging Mayor Karen Bass), Eunisses Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Ysabel Jurado. The manifesto brands the current Democratic establishment a “status quo coalition” of capitalist sellouts and frames the choice as “socialism or barbarism.”

The Globe’s June reporting on Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley) described a similar dynamic as the progressive “mask” slipping. After Khanna publicly celebrated the primary victory of a DSA-backed candidate in New York, we noted that Democratic socialists “aren’t infiltrating the Democrat Party. They define its activist core and policy direction today.” 

The piece observed that the party’s “big tent” has become a “socialist circus” that elevates candidates who treat American symbols with open contempt while pushing wealth seizure, open borders, and anti-Israel framing — the same priorities outlined in the DSA-LA document. 

Newsom’s private comments to the undercover reporter track that trajectory. When the “younger voter” explicitly rejected Kamala Harris in favor of more democratic-socialist policies, the governor treated the shift as inevitable and desirable. He has previously described the Democratic Party as “pretty aligned” with DSA principles on issues such as money in politics, while publicly maintaining a more moderate posture in national media.

California has already tested many of the policies the DSA now seeks to scale statewide and nationally—aggressive rent control, reduced law-enforcement capacity, expansive housing regulation, and high taxes on producers. The results include increasing homelessness, systemic fraud, business and middle-class out-migration, pervasive filth, medieval diseases, and strained public services. Newsom’s undercover admission suggests that, rather than course-correct, he views the DSA’s demand for “bold change” as the future of the party he seeks to lead.