Three Democratic candidates running to replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood on a debate stage Wednesday evening and gave him a passing grade on homelessness, the same crisis that has swallowed $20 billion in state spending and left more people on the streets than when he took office seven years ago.
Not one of the Democrats went below a B-minus. The Republicans on the stage were less generous.
The exchange, reported by Fox News Digital, came during a gubernatorial debate at KRON Studios in San Francisco, a city that became a national symbol of the homelessness disaster after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held up a map during a 2023 televised debate with Newsom documenting more than 270,000 reported instances of feces found on San Francisco streets. That moment gave the crisis a shorthand name: the "poop map."
California's primary is set for June 2, with the top two finishers advancing to the November 3 general election. The debate offered voters an early look at how the candidates plan to handle the state's most visible policy failure, and how willing the Democrats are to separate themselves from the outgoing governor's record.
Former congresswoman Katie Porter led the Democratic grading. She told the audience she'd give Newsom a B on homelessness, framing herself as a demanding evaluator:
"I'm a notoriously tough grader, but I would probably give him a B on homelessness. I don't think this has been an easy problem to solve, but I do give him a lot of credit for calling attention to the problem."
Credit for calling attention to a problem is not the same as credit for solving it. And the numbers make that distinction hard to ignore.
When Newsom took office in January 2019, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development put California's homeless population at 108,400. By 2024, the California State Senate Housing Committee reported that figure had risen to 161,400 people experiencing homelessness on any given night, a jump of roughly 49 percent.
Over that same period, from 2019 to 2025, California spent approximately $20 billion on homeless initiatives, according to the California Budget and Policy Center, which Fox News Digital described as a left-leaning think tank. Twenty billion dollars, and the number went up.
Billionaire businessman Tom Steyer offered Newsom a B-minus. Former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra went further, he argued even that grade was too low. Becerra said he would give Newsom an A on "effort," praising the governor for visiting Los Angeles and personally trying to clean streets:
"I would say that the governor has made efforts. We've seen him come down to Los Angeles, actually go out and try to clean some of these streets. On effort, I would give him an A."
An A for effort. That is a phrase parents use for a child who tried hard on a spelling test and failed. It is not a standard most Californians would accept for a governor who presided over a 49-percent increase in street homelessness while burning through $20 billion in public funds.
Becerra's performance at the debate drew attention for other reasons as well. In a separate exchange, he dodged questions about what he knew regarding misconduct allegations involving a fellow California Democrat, another moment that underscored the reluctance of these candidates to break with their party's establishment.
The two Republican candidates on the stage saw the same facts and reached a different conclusion. Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, did not hesitate when asked to grade Newsom:
"My goodness, of course it's an F. It shames our state, the situation with homelessness. We have about 10% of the U.S. population, around 50% of the country's homeless."
That ratio, ten percent of the nation's people, half its homeless, is a figure that has haunted California politics for years. It frames the crisis not as a national problem California happens to share, but as a distinctly Californian failure of governance.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco was blunter still, challenging not just the grade but the entire way the debate was framed:
"It is an absolute dismal failure, and anyone that says it's not is fooling themselves, or trying to fool voters."
Bianco then pushed the conversation past the usual policy abstractions. He argued the state's leadership was misdiagnosing the problem entirely:
"We are not dealing with homeless, so stop calling it homeless. It has nothing to do with homes. These people are suffering from drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness."
That distinction matters. If the problem is primarily about housing costs, the answer is more construction and more subsidies, the approach California has pursued at enormous expense. If the problem is primarily about addiction and untreated mental illness, the answer requires a fundamentally different set of interventions. Bianco's point was that California has spent two decades and tens of billions treating a mental health and substance abuse crisis as a housing shortage, and the results speak for themselves.
The most telling detail from Wednesday's debate was not any single grade. It was the uniformity of the Democratic response. Three candidates, each competing for the same nomination, each presumably eager to distinguish themselves, and none willing to assign a failing mark to the governor whose endorsement they may need.
That is the incentive structure at work. California's top-two primary system means Democratic candidates are competing against each other and against Republicans simultaneously. Alienating Newsom's political network carries real costs. So does alienating the progressive base that has defended the governor's approach to homelessness as compassionate and well-funded, even as the numbers have moved in the wrong direction.
Newsom himself has faced persistent criticism from multiple directions. His national ambitions have drawn skepticism even from figures sympathetic to the Democratic Party. And his attention to California's day-to-day governance has been questioned, travel records showed he spent 229 days outside the state since 2023, fueling accusations that he had already moved on from Sacramento.
None of the Democratic debate candidates raised those concerns on Wednesday. Instead, they offered variations on the same theme: Newsom tried, the problem is hard, and the next governor will do better.
Strip away the letter grades and the debate-stage diplomacy, and the facts are straightforward. California accounts for nearly 30 percent of the country's homeless population. The state spent roughly $20 billion on the problem over six years. The homeless population rose from 108,400 to 161,400 during that time.
Those figures come from federal data and from a committee of California's own state legislature. They are not partisan talking points. They are the measurable output of the policies Newsom championed and the Democratic supermajority in Sacramento funded.
The broader fiscal picture in California only deepens the concern. Democrats in the state sat on a $2 billion budget miscalculation for months before it became public, a reminder that accountability for how taxpayer money is spent has not been Sacramento's strong suit.
And the problem is not abstract. It plays out on sidewalks, in parks, along the CA-101 highway, and in neighborhoods like Echo Park in Los Angeles, where encampments have become a permanent feature of the landscape. The people living in those encampments are real. The taxpayers funding the programs that have failed to help them are real. The residents who have watched their neighborhoods deteriorate are real.
Wednesday's exchange at KRON Studios was a small moment in a long campaign. But it revealed something important about the state of California's Democratic establishment. Faced with a clear, documented policy failure, one measured in billions of dollars and tens of thousands of human lives, the party's leading candidates chose to award passing grades and praise effort.
The Republicans on the stage named the failure plainly. Whether California voters are ready to hear that is the question the June 2 primary will begin to answer.
Even prominent progressives have started to distance themselves from Newsom's political brand. But the candidates who want to succeed him in Sacramento are not there yet. They are still grading on a curve, a generous one, paid for with $20 billion in public money and nothing to show for it.
When you spend that kind of money and the problem gets worse, a B is not a tough grade. It is a tell.
