Gavin Newsom And The Fake Bestseller Racket
Or, how Democrats stopped worrying and learned to love the fraud
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political action committee spent $1,561,875 buying copies of his book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, and giving them away in exchange for donations to the PAC. Of the 94,700 copies of his book that were ‘sold’, 67,000 — about two thirds — were distributed this way rather than being sold in stores or on Amazon.com.
A spokesman for Mr. Newsom, Nathan Click, said his PAC, the Campaign for Democracy Committee, wound up netting more money from contributors attracted by the book offer than the cost of 67,000 copies of the book that the PAC provided. Mr. Newsom does not receive royalties for books sold through the program, he said.
“We were thrilled with the response,” Mr. Click said. “Our goal was to deepen the relationship between him and the millions of folks who have already expressed support for Governor Newsom’s work. And as it turns out, the tactic more than paid for itself.”
This was “by far the biggest expenditure” by the PAC in the first quarter of 2026. To be clear, this is not illegal and not even original. Kamala Harris reportedly had a similar scheme with her own book. So have Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio. Because whereas this kind of exploit was associated with conservatives a decade ago, it has become bipartisan.
In 2015, the presidential campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz spent $122,000 buying 8,000–10,000 copies of A Time for Truth directly from the publisher, HarperCollins, to redistribute among supporters. The New York Times initially refused to list the book as a bestseller, citing evidence of “strategic bulk purchases”, but eventually they did list it. Cruz’s campaign later spent additional hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the same for a second book.
At the time, progressive leftists made plenty of angry noises about this tactic. They called it “wingnut welfare” and acted as if Democrats would never. Yet here we are, just ten years later, and Democrats use the bulk book purchase exploit all the time, themselves, now. Newsom’s memoir is now climbing bestseller lists courtesy of his own PAC and they do not care at all.
To be clear, I do not consider this hypocrisy on the part of elected Democrats. Gavin Newsom is doing the perfectly-legal thing that Republicans figured out how to do first. The hypocrites here are rank-and-file progressive leftists from a decade ago who are silent or even complicit now. They never actually cared about books, or the integrity of bestseller lists. Their criticism was always about power — who wields it, and who it is wielded against. Morals are fungible in progressive politics, and the rest is just virtue-signaling.
Have a great weekend.