> Gavin Newsom’s bravado about California is undermined by reality. > California’s natural beauty and balmy climate are the envy of every state. Yet a strange thing has happened over the last two years: for the first time in state history, California has begun to shrink. > You wouldn’t know it from Governor Gavin Newsom’s air of public confidence. In the last few weeks, Newsom accepted a national award for education transformation and ran political ads to warn Floridians that their freedom is under attack. In both cases, he offered California’s progressive model as the right fit to reform the rest of America. > But his proud rhetoric doesn’t match California’s declining reality. Americans are voting with their feet to reject Newsom’s California model and heading to the very states that he criticizes.