President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has pointed to California as a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation, casting it as a failed state of homelessness and intrusive government. California's Governor Gavin Newsom. Credit:AP "They have to clean it up. We can't have our cities going to hell," Trump told reporters last month after travelling to California to raise money for his re-election campaign. The leader of the alternative universe is Governor Gavin Newsom. The charismatic first-year governor relishes being a Trump adversary and chief of a state that does things before others. Just ahead of the October 13 deadline for him to act on bills, Newsom signed laws requiring public universities to provide abortion medication on campuses, banning the sale and manufacture of fur products, and mandating a later start time for high schools so students could get more sleep.

"(Trump) has forced us to, I think, either roll over or to assert ourselves and lead," Newsom said recently. "I think it's more interesting not just responding and reacting to Trump and Trumpism, but pushing the envelope and moving our agenda and our values forward and promoting them across the country." Hollywood's stars have always been lucrative sources of donations for progressive politicians. Credit:iStock Trump lost California by a wide margin in 2016 and has almost no shot of winning there in 2020. He's visited several times to tour disaster zones or raise money since he won the presidency, but the state is a far more popular destination for Democrats looking to collect campaign cash from tech and Hollywood donors. Democrats hold a super-majority in the Legislature, both US Senate seats, 46 of California's 53 US House seats and all statewide offices. With little influence on policy, Republican state lawmakers can only echo Trump's criticism. They say Democrats are making California prohibitively expensive – millions of people live in poverty and inequality is stark – and wasting money on programs like the $US79 billion high-speed rail project that is years behind schedule.

Critics say California should concentrate more on everyday issues like the price of petrol. Credit:AP State Senator Shannon Grove pointed to petrol that is at least $US1 ($1.45) per gallon more than the national average and worsening homelessness. Los Angeles County now has nearly 60,000 homeless people and in one San Francisco neighbourhood exasperated residents recently paid to put boulders on the footpaths to block people from sleeping there. "It is frustrating that we continue to battle with the administration on the federal side when we have some serious issues here that need to be taken care of," said Grove, who represents a conservative district spanning southern parts of the state's agriculture-rich Central Valley to the high desert. Skepticism about some of California's new policies goes beyond partisan grumbling. Many laws Newsom signed this year were vetoed by his predecessor, fellow Democrat Jerry Brown, who called them superfluous or too expensive. Brown blocked the bill requiring college campuses provide abortion medication, arguing the services were readily available elsewhere, and resisted a ban on smoking on state beaches, saying the power of the state should only stretch so far.

Loading "I think they spend a lot of time on kind of silly things instead of tackling real problems, like homelessness," said 64-year-old Elizabeth Merrill, a Democrat from Sacramento who has lived in the state for nearly four decades. Republican Texas Govrnor Greg Abbott last year mocked the state, saying "Californians genuinely think that government should run every nuanced detail of your life all the way down to dictating to you what type of straw you should drink from." He was referring to a state law that forbids restaurants from handing out single-use plastic straws unless customers ask for them. But Christopher Warshaw, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, said California is serving as a beacon for other liberal states. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently said any suggestion his left-leaning state lags behind California gets his "competitive juices flowing." He was speaking about a California law designed to force Uber, Lyft and other so-called gig companies to give more wage and benefit protections to their workers. The tech giants aggressively fought the legislation but Democratic lawmakers showed no shyness in taking on the companies that call Silicon Valley home, making the calculation that labour unions were a more powerful political ally.

Loading Under the legislation signed by Newsom, California now provides the strictest test in the nation for determining when a worker is an employee versus an independent contractor. All of the major presidential contenders except moderate Joe Biden backed the gig-worker law. Home-state Senator Kamala Harris and others also cheered a new law that will phrase out private prisons. As the race for the Democratic presidential nomination becomes a tug-of-war between the party's liberal and moderate wings, hopefuls are cautiously weighing in on California's policies. California's ideas could someday be tested on the presidential stage. Newsom has been seen as a potential White House hopeful since 2004 when, as mayor of San Francisco, he let gay couples marry in defiance of federal law. Charlie O'Connell, a 38-year-old from San Francisco, said he doubts the rest of the nation wants what California has to offer. A registered Democrat and self-described liberal, O'Connell said even he thinks Democrats sometimes push the wrong priorities.