Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom has been serving as the incumbent Governor of California since January 2019. Newsom was born on October 10th, 1967 in San Francisco, California. Newsom began his career in 1992 when he established the PlumpJack wine company. In 2003, he was elected to be the Mayor of San Francisco, where he served for nearly 8 years, until he was elected Lieutenant Governor of California in 2010. When incumbent governor Jerry Brown was term limited, he successfully ran for Governor of California in 2018, where he defeated Republican businessman John Cox in the general election. 
== Governorship ==
Upon arriving in office in 2019, one of Newsom's first acts as governor was to announce that he would stay the execution of any and all prisoners on the state of California's death row, effectively outlawing the death penalty in California. This action spurred pro-capital punishment begin a recall campaign to remove Newsom from office. The recall drive was amplified during the Covid-19 Pandemic, where opposition of Newsom's lockdown restrictions took the forefront of the campaign. The petition successfully gathered the required threshold for signatures and was put on the ballot in September 2021. However, voters rejected the recall by a large margin, and voted to keep Gavin Newsom in office until the end of his term in 2023. In 2022, Newsom was elected to a second four-year term.