When bragging about life in California, Gavin Newsom ignores our reality | Opinion

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently bragged on X about the quality of life in California as a way to put someone in their place.

California has natural beauty, great weather and many outdoor activities. It has a great history and culture, and home is where the heart is.

But is the quality of life here really that good compared to other states?

Newsom felt compelled to respond when Fox News’ Sean Hannity suggested on X that Newsom stop posting and podcasting so much and start governing. Newsom wrote, in part, that “six of the top ten U.S. cities for quality of life in 2025 are located in California” in what he seemed to think was a mic-drop moment.

Six California cities in a list of top 10 in terms of quality of life sounds impressive, but does that actually mean Californians have a high quality of life?

Well, that’s certainly the impression Newsom was trying to give. But it defies the average Californian’s lived experience. And even a modest look under the hood of our state reveals a lemon.

First, California has 482 cities, so six cities are just a very small ripple in the pond. It would be one thing if we were talking about major cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Bakersfield and Oakland.

But we’re not.

Instead, the six cities listed on the Social Progress Imperative’s U.S. Social Progress Map are: San Ramon, Pleasanton, Folsom, Carlsbad, Irvine and Fremont. These are all fine cities, but they’re not very representative of the state. Sure, Irvine is a big city, but it, too, feels like an outlier.

In fact, these six cities are so unrepresentative that California itself is nowhere near the top 10 in terms of states with the highest quality of life, ranking middle of the pack. The study itself tries to redefine quality of life by expanding beyond conventional measurements like access to the internet, 9th grade education, home ownership and violent crime rate, to less traditional measures like “loss of teeth” and “linguistic isolation” and “ozone average 8 hour concentration.”

But even in rankings more favorable to progressive ideology, California was just meh.

Using more traditional metrics and polling, U.S. News & World Report ranks California 37th. Newsweek ranks California 32nd and getting worse.

And with good reason: California has a lot of problems.

California leads, or nearly leads, the nation in homelessness, poverty, cost of living, housing shortage, unemployment, illiteracy, bad roads, violent crime and tax burdens. Is this every conceivable measure of quality of life? No, but it’s a pretty good list.

If objective measurements are not persuasive enough, Californians themselves are leaving in droves. California’s population recently started growing again after a few years of decline, but it leads in net domestic outmigration, and the population is propped up by people coming from other countries.

When asked if they think things in California are headed in the right direction, 60% of Californians say the state is headed in the wrong direction, while 75% say they are bracing for bad economic times over the next year.

Californians have historically been a pretty happy bunch, but even that’s declining. Polling by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that the percentage of those who say they’re “very happy” has declined by 12% since 1998, while those who are “not very happy” has doubled in that time.

It would be easy to dismiss this whole thing as overblown. But Newsom has spent the past six years begging for national attention at the expense of governing the state, which was the point Hannity was making.

Newsom’s entire pitch to a national audience is a work of fiction about how great everything is in California, when it’s hard to think of anything that’s improved since he took office.

Newsom is spending all his time trying to convince Americans he’s doing a good job despite all the evidence to the contrary, but he’d have an easier time if he actually solved a few problems and then ran on that.

Matt Fleming is an opinion writer living in Placer County. He is a former Republican staffer and spokesperson. You can follow him on X @Flemingwords or connect via email: flemingwords@gmail.com

This story was originally published October 6, 2025 at 6:00 AM.