Democratic governors with likely 2028 ambitions want you to know: President Donald Trump is screwing you over, but we have things under control.
It’s the common theme across this year’s State of the State addresses, the annual ceremonial rite in which governors make lofty pronouncements ahead of a new budget season. It’s a time for them to assert their bully pulpit and lay out what they want to see from legislative leaders — and position themselves against Trump as they contemplate their own campaigns for the White House.
In a tense national political environment, Democratic governors are laying blame on the White House for continued increased costs facing Americans while trumpeting their own leadership. It all comes as the White House is repeatedly attacking blue states, revoking millions of dollars in promised federal funding and surging federal immigration agents into cities.
Some of those potential presidential contenders are drawing clear distinctions between the good they’re creating for their states and the damage they say the current White House occupant is inflicting upon them. It’s a preview of how they’ll present themselves on the campaign trail. And their policy prescriptions foreshadow how their party is bound to lean into issues of affordability, housing and child care both for the midterms and in 2028, when Democrats attempt to reclaim the White House.
Here’s what Democratic governors had to say on the top issues facing their states.
Pillorying the president
Democrats across the board returned to their most effective foil. They castigated Trump for withholding billions in federal funding from states, firing tens of thousands of federal workers and gutting access to health care and food aid. They mocked his executive orders — or, as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said, “edicts that read like proclamations from the Lollipop guild.” They blamed his tariff gambit for pushing up the prices of housing materials and household goods and condemned his administration’s aggressive crime crackdown and hard-line immigration enforcement tactics.
And they juxtaposed it all with steps they’re taking to grow their states’ economies and make life more affordable for their residents, from lowering health care and housing costs to passing tax breaks for working families.
“We’re not retreating. We are a beacon,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, characterizing his state as a bastion for “compassion, courage and a commitment to something larger than our own self-interest” in contrast to Trump’s “carnival of chaos on the national stage.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro accused the Trump administration of “breaking [the] compact they have with the people of Pennsylvania” by withholding money for public safety and infrastructure projects in the battleground state. He touted how he took them to court over it and won, “bringing billions of dollars back to our commonwealth.”
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, one of the few Democrats to lead a GOP-leaning state, also directly blamed any lack of progress in his state on the federal government.
“The impact of the president’s ‘big, ugly bill’ is going to hit Kentucky the hardest. It could close 35 rural hospitals, fire 20,000 health care workers, and eliminate coverage for 200,000 Kentuckians,” Beshear said. “The combination of these federal failures threatens the American dream.”
The governors also sought to turn Trump’s dystopian mockery of their states on its head.
“While Donald Trump says it’s a ‘hellhole’ here, 113 million domestic and international visitors still flock to Illinois — spending a record $48.5 billion, driving an all-time high in hotel tax revenue and restoring O’Hare as the busiest airport in the nation,” Pritzker said.
It wasn’t a complete pile-on, though: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been more conciliatory toward the president in his second term than many of her peers, thanked Trump for helping bring a new fighter mission to Selfridge Air Base. “Probably not on the bingo card,” she quipped.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai fired back in a statement accusing the governors of whining about problems their party created.
“Joe Biden and Democrats spent four years inflicting the worst inflation, illegal alien crime, and border crisis in a generation. Now they’re complaining about President Trump cleaning up their mess,” Desai said. “Democrats can keep talking about the problems they created, but President Trump and Republicans are focused on continuing to deliver for the American people.”
Immigration and crime
Governors who’ve battled Trump in court over deploying National Guard troops and federal immigration agents into their states issued scathing rebukes of his attempts to militarize municipalities and stoke chaos in immigrant communities with his deportation push. As Trump cast their cities as lawless hellscapes to justify the use of force, Democrats likened his administration’s actions to authoritarianism. Federal agents “brutalized our people,” Pritzker said, while Gov. Wes Moore spoke of how “terrified” Marylanders are of getting detained when they show up for work or drop their kids off at school.
“In Washington, the president believes that might makes right, that the courts are simply speed bumps, not stop signs — that democracy is a nuisance to be circumvented,” Newsom said. Secret police, businesses being raided, windows smashed, citizens detained, citizens shot. Masked men snatching people in broad daylight, people disappearing. Using American cities as training grounds for the U.S. military — purposeful chaos emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
California was the first state where Trump deployed National Guard troops in his second term. After California, Trump sent troops to Washington, D.C., and announced deployments in other cities including Memphis, New Orleans and Chicago.
“It’s a playbook as old as the game — overwhelm communities, provoke fear, suggest that those tasked with enforcing the law are also above it, and drip authoritarianism bit by bit into our veins in the hopes that we won’t notice we are being poisoned by it,” said Pritzker.
He added: “The problem for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller was that Illinoisans did notice.”
Affordability
It wasn’t all about Trump, though. In a midterm dominated by cost-of-living concerns, Democratic governors zeroed in on three ways to ease the pinch on voters’ wallets: more housing, more energy and more access to health care.
They pitched programs to build more affordable housing and called for crackdowns on private investors “snatching up homes by the hundreds and thousands at a time” and driving up rents. They scolded PJM, the regional electricity grid manager in the mid-Atlantic, for being too slow in bringing new power projects online and called for a two-year price-cap extension. And they touted their efforts to drive economic investment in their state and create more jobs.
“Affordability: It’s not a word we just discovered — certainly not a hoax,” Newsom said in another swipe at Trump, adding later that “I recognize that the new ‘cost of eggs’ is now your energy bill.”
Whitmer, who bashed tariffs for hiking the cost of building materials and “further exacerbating our housing shortage,” proposed an affordable-housing tax credit along with modernizing zoning and construction rules. She also called to cap interest rates on medical debt. Beshear’s budget called for $100 million to lower the cost of health care coverage, $125 million for a rural hospital fund and $50 million for food banks. Shapiro included a $1 billion “critical infrastructure fund” in his budget to help bankroll more housing.
“Last year, the majority in Washington, D.C., voted to slash Medicaid and SNAP by a trillion dollars, ripping health care and food away from millions of our neighbors, family, and friends. They went home and did nothing and let premiums on the Affordable Care Act skyrocket,” Whitmer said. “I’m calling on members of Congress: Renew the ACA subsidies. ”
Artificial Intelligence
Democrats who rushed to embrace the artificial intelligence industry are recalibrating amid voter backlash. At least half a dozen of the party’s governors are pushing to pause tax incentives for data centers or put new guardrails around them in an effort to protect ratepayers and resources. Some of those same state executives are calling to regulate AI chatbots and implement other safeguards for consumers.
But, in a sign of the tricky and fast-moving politics of AI, they’re still seeking industry investments to boost their states’ economies and are even integrating AI into their workforces and government functions.
“I know Pennsylvanians have real concerns about these data centers and the impact they could have on our communities, our utility bills and our environment. And so do I,” Shapiro said, adding, “We can play a leading role in winning the battle for AI supremacy. We have to do it in a way that puts the good people of Pennsylvania first.”
Moore also pushed for new data centers to hire local workers and engage Maryland municipalities and neighborhoods — and cover the cost of their own power needs.
“We are not going to choose between affordability and innovation. We can, and we will, lead in both,” Moore said.
Social media and cellphones
Out: Cellphones in classrooms. In: More say over kids’ scrolling.
Democratic governors are cracking down on youth cellphone and social media use as embracing bans for younger teens and giving parents more control over their kids’ online feeds grows more politically popular.
Shapiro and Pritzker both demanded lawmakers send them bills banning cellphones in schools. Newsom celebrated similar restrictions his state passed in 2024. And Whitmer championed legislation she recently signed to “limit phones during class time,” so “students can better focus on learning and our teachers can do what they do best: teach.”
Pritzker also pitched a series of safety measures allowing parents to “more easily restrict their kids’ access on exploitative websites and apps.” That includes a “social media platform fee” that he said would generate $200 million per year for K-12 education — casting it as mitigation money for the harms the companies’ algorithms can cause kids.
“Parents and kids deserve to have better-funded schools. If social media giants are going to feed off of Illinois families, they ought to support Illinois families,” Pritzker said.
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