Hours after his own Department of Finance published data showing California shed more than 50,000 residents last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom sat down on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" and told a national audience that the state's population is on the rise. The numbers, released by Newsom's own administration, say otherwise.
The contradiction landed like a gift in the laps of Republican critics, who called the governor's Friday-night performance dishonest on its face. But the deeper problem for California isn't a single TV appearance. It is a pattern of governance that drives people out and then blames Washington for the result.
The California Department of Finance issued a press release Friday documenting a statewide population decline of more than 50,000 people. The agency characterized the loss as "slight", less than one-seventh of 1 percent. But slight or not, it is a decline, not growth.
The ten largest counties in California, home to 72 percent of the state's residents, lost a combined 52,000 people. Los Angeles County, the state's biggest, saw its population dip 0.6 percent, landing at roughly 9.8 million. The city of Los Angeles itself fell to 3.8 million, a 0.9 percent drop. Four of the state's ten biggest cities shrank.
Statewide, 333 cities lost residents. Only 148 gained.
Not every corner of California is emptying out. Sacramento County added about 9,000 residents. The city of Sacramento grew 1.3 percent, or 6,809 people. San Diego picked up 10,102 residents for a 0.7 percent gain. Placer County posted the state's fastest growth rate at 1.39 percent, followed by Yuba County at 1.24 percent and San Benito County at 0.69 percent. Riverside and San Bernardino continued to see modest growth.
But the overall trend is unmistakable: more Californians are leaving than arriving. And the places losing people are the state's urban centers, the very cities that have been governed most aggressively by Sacramento's progressive policy agenda.
On Friday evening, Newsom appeared on Maher's show and offered this assessment of California's trajectory:
"We've also seen the last three year population growth, we've got to update our talking points."
The governor's press office amplified the appearance on X, posting on May 3, 2026: "THIS CLIP TRIGGERED DONALD TRUMP'S LATEST TRUTH SOCIAL MELTDOWN!" The tone was triumphant. The timing was unfortunate.
Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host and a leading Republican candidate for governor, was among the first to point out the gap between Newsom's televised boast and the data his own administration had released hours earlier. Hilton told the New York Post:
"This shows that Newsom was blatantly lying to Bill Maher on Friday night, when he claimed California's population was actually increasing. His own statistics show the opposite!"
This is hardly the first time Newsom has faced scrutiny for making claims that don't hold up under examination. But the Friday episode is notable because the contradiction is so clean: same administration, same day, opposite messages.
The Department of Finance press release leaned heavily on federal immigration enforcement as the explanation for the population loss. State officials said a "full year of restrictive federal policy changes" had cut into legal international migration, which plunged from 248,400 people in 2024, the highest level since 2018, to just 126,400 in 2025.
The agency described legal international migration as "a significant driver of California's overall population, offsetting declines in natural increase, the net number of births and deaths, and net domestic migration from California." Officials claimed that absent federal policy changes on immigration, California's population would have grown by 66,000 people.
Read that again. The state's own officials are conceding that California cannot hold its population without a steady inflow of international migrants to replace the Americans who keep leaving. Domestic migration, the movement of people between states, continues to run against California. The state's natural increase (births minus deaths) is not enough to fill the gap. The only thing that had been papering over the exodus was legal international migration, and when that slowed, the underlying reality became visible.
Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, rejected the blame-Washington framing in a text message to the Post:
"Californians are not leaving because Washington finally started enforcing the law. They are leaving because Sacramento made this state too expensive, too unsafe, and too hard to build a future."
Rankin's diagnosis aligns with what Californians have been saying with their feet for years. The state's cost of living, crime rates, and regulatory burden have been driving domestic out-migration long before any change in federal immigration policy. Blaming enforcement of existing immigration law for a population decline is a remarkable admission: it says the state's economic and social model depends on continuous high immigration to offset the residents it keeps losing.
Friday's report also covered housing. California added 115,165 housing units in 2025, a 0.77 percent increase, down from 0.84 percent the prior year. Accessory dwelling units, the backyard cottages and garage conversions that Sacramento has championed as a housing fix, accounted for 29,710 of those units.
Wildfires made the picture worse. The Eaton and Palisades fires eliminated 11,160 housing units. Newsom has faced pointed questions about the state's infrastructure priorities, including its troubled high-speed rail project, while basic needs like fire prevention and affordable housing remain unmet.
Hilton hammered the housing numbers as well:
"Now they're bragging about hitting less than half their goal, it's failure on every front."
He added a broader indictment of the state's trajectory:
"This is the most amazing place anywhere in the country, and yet people just can't afford to live here, and they can't take the crime, chaos and homelessness anymore. That's why we've got to vote for change in November."
Nick Poche, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, offered a sharper political framing in comments to the Post:
"Gavin Newsom is only losing his mind because President Trump is taking away his biggest supporters."
The quip is pointed, but the underlying policy question is serious. If California's leadership views reduced legal immigration as a crisis rather than a policy difference to be debated, it reveals how dependent the state's model has become on external population inflows. A state of nearly 40 million people should not need a quarter-million new international arrivals every year just to avoid shrinking.
The governor's record of accountability has drawn scrutiny from multiple directions. Critics have noted his extensive time spent outside California, raising questions about how closely he is managing the state's mounting problems. Even voices outside the Republican Party have expressed skepticism about Newsom's political trajectory and his credibility as a national figure.
The Friday episode fits a pattern. The governor makes a bold public claim. His own data contradicts it. His administration blames someone else, usually the federal government, for the bad numbers. And the cycle repeats.
Strip away the spin and the Department of Finance report tells a straightforward story. California lost people. Its biggest cities and counties drove the losses. Domestic migration continues to flow outward. The only demographic lifeline, legal international migration, was cut roughly in half. Housing construction slowed. Wildfires destroyed more than 11,000 units. And the governor went on national television the same day and said the state is growing.
The people leaving California are not abstract statistics. They are families who decided the cost of a mortgage, the state of their kids' schools, the safety of their neighborhoods, or the burden of regulation was no longer worth it. They moved to Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and elsewhere. They voted with moving trucks.
Sacramento can blame Washington. It can call the decline "slight." It can redefine growth as something that would have happened if only federal policy had been different. But 333 cities lost residents last year. More than 50,000 people, net, chose somewhere else. And the governor's credibility continues to erode each time the rhetoric and the reality diverge this sharply.
When a state has to rely on international migration to mask domestic flight, the problem isn't the migration policy. The problem is why so many people already there want to leave.
