‘The View’ Cohosts Clash Over Gavin Newsom’s Grim Election Warning

The cohosts of The View might have started Friday’s (October 31) edition with a fun Halloween skit, but things got pretty serious (and mildly combative) during the first “Hot Topic” discussion about the most recent concerns shared by California Governor Gavin Newsom over what Donald Trump‘s second administration is doing — particularly when it comes to the upcoming 2028 midterm elections.

The segment started with the cohosts reviewing footage of Newsom warning, “I really am scared to death about what’s going on in this country. I really believe it is code red. It’s a five-alarm fire. We won’t have a country — we won’t have an election that’s fair and free — if we don’t stand up. We won’t. There will not be a fair, free election. It will be a Putin election…. That’s what Trump wants.”

Sara Haines was the first to weigh in on it and shared her reasoning why she wasn’t a fan of Newsom’s words there. “More likely than fraud will be disincentivizing voting in a democracy, which is the currency of a democracy,” she said. “In the midterms, which can right now be very important, only 47% of Americans show up at the polls. People fought hard for those rights to vote, and we already don’t have people showing up in our polls. We don’t need to plant seeds. You always go out, you always vote. Let the rest be determined as it plays out, because when fraud was claimed last time, not one judge in this country saw any proof of any fraud. So by planting these seeds, you’re already taking a public that lost trust in everything, and saying, ‘Your vote doesn’t matter.’ That’s the fastest way to affect an election.”

Sunny Hostin, however, had a drastically different take on the matter, praising Newsom for his words. “I think sunlight is the best disinfectant. I think that you need to speak truth to power, and you need to expose what may be going on,” she said. She also noted that the concerns shared by her and others that Project 2025 would be prophetic were ignored by voters in the 2024 election. “What’s happened since Trump was elected, some of the policies outlined the Project 2025 are happening right now: reshaping the federal bureaucracy, reducing the size and influence, and empowering the executive branch, aggressively militarizing an approach to immigration, the use of active duty military personnel and National Guards into assisted border security and return to a more isolationist foreign policy, dismantling the Department of Education. It goes on and on and on. Everything he promised he did would do he did. And so when Gavin Newsom is saying, ‘I am concerned about this,’ I think we need to listen. That’s the problem with this country. We don’t want to say the quiet part out loud. We don’t want to challenge authority. We don’t want to challenge authoritarianism silence. There’s no place for silence when Democracy is under attack.”

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Joy Behar then jumped in to add, “I don’t think Gavin Newsom would be saying this if Donald Trump hadn’t thrown in the gauntlet in the first place.”

However, Haines stuck to her guns, saying, “It’s like in vogue for every candidate to say, ‘It’s probably rigged!'”

“Yeah, but who started this?” Behar retorted.

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t win a bad idea with a bad idea. The point is, the only power a regular American person has is to go to the polls.”

“Why is he sending election monitors to California?” Hostin then asked.

Before Haines could answer, Alyssa Farah Griffin then entered the conversation with, “I think it’s one thing for pundits and for spectators to say, ‘I’m concerned that there will be free and fair elections.’ I think it is wholly irresponsible for the governor of the most populous state, who, by the way, oversees elections in his own state. He oversees the cybersecurity infrastructure. He oversees the secretary of state, down to poll watchers to election workers. Gavin Newsom has a lot of power. He could, at minimum, say, ‘I can promise you, California will have a free and fair election, and I’ll work with every governor to make sure that there’s no efforts to undermine them.’ But that’s not what he’s doing.”

Hostin vehemently disagreed, saying, “How can he do that when Donald Trump is sending federal monitors?”

Griffin maintained that, as the chief executive of the state, Newsom has powers in California before pivoting to criticize Democrats for complaining about gerrymandering when they’ve responded to Texas’ move to add more Republican-leaning House seats by doing the same in blue states like California.

Ana Navarro then spoke for the first time, reminding that she herself grew up in an authoritarian government system in Nicaragua before she “fled” with her family to the United States. “The things that I’m seeing happen in this country, I never thought I would see happen in this country. I never thought I would see an insurrection and people mob of rioters at the Capitol trying to stop an election result. So I think, from my personal experience, I look at this and I really feel we need to be vigilant… Every day, it’s something different.” She then went on to wonder aloud, “[Trump] always talks about how high his poll numbers are and how he’s got the best poll numbers of anybody; if his poll numbers are so good, and if he feels so confident about his approval rating in this country, why then does he find that he and Republicans find it necessary to change the Congressional maps to give them more sure wins for Republicans?” She then answered her own question, saying, “Because they think they’re going to lose in the midterm, and if they lose, that means that for the first time in this term, there will be pushback, there will be oversight, and there will be reigning in of his authoritarian.”

The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC