As Rivas Fills In, Newsom’s Growing List of Out-of-State Trips Draws Scrutiny

By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report  |  July 24, 2026

On Wednesday, California briefly had two governor’s offices in operation — one empty, one filling in. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas of Salinas spent the day as Acting Governor, signing a proclamation declaring July 2026 “Disability Pride Month,” while Gov. Gavin Newsom was, once again, out of state. The California Constitution hands the Assembly Speaker the acting-governor title whenever the governor, lieutenant governor and Senate president pro tempore are all beyond state lines simultaneously — a low bar that Newsom’s travel schedule has cleared with increasing regularity this year.

Rivas, who represents Central Coast communities across the Salinas Valley and San Benito, Monterey, Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties, is among the first Latinos to hold the acting-governor role. His office framed the stand-in duty matter-of-factly: routine business, signed and filed, until Newsom’s plane lands again.

A pattern, not an anomaly

The July 22 hand-off is consistent with a broader trend documented by the Bay Area News Group, which reviewed the governor’s office’s own travel-notification emails to reporters. The analysis counted 45 out-of-state trips during Newsom’s second term, totaling 229 travel days since January 2023 — nearly one-fifth of his time in office, or roughly two months a year. That is a substantial jump from his first term, when Newsom left California 25 times for 107 days, about 7 percent of his tenure, a stretch that included COVID-era travel restrictions.

Newsom’s office pushes back on the idea that the travel is aimed at national ambitions. Spokesperson Izzy Gardon has said the governor’s job is to grow California’s economy and create jobs, which he argues often requires travel, and that some trips are personal family time taken on his own dime. The office has not broken out how many of the 229 days fall into official, political or personal categories.

This year’s itinerary

The travel log for 2026 alone is dense. Newsom appeared at the Munich Security Conference in February. He toured South Carolina, an early presidential primary state, making five stops in the northeast corner of the state and appearing alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn — a visit that drew a pointed rebuke from South Carolina’s Republican attorney general, Alan Wilson, who is running for governor there. In early July, Newsom kicked off a national tour in Nevada, headlining a Democratic Party canvassing event and fundraising for Attorney General Aaron Ford’s gubernatorial campaign, part of an effort to help Democrats flip statehouses and congressional seats tied to the redistricting won under Proposition 50. He has also made stops promoting his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” including a ticketed appearance in Miami with Univision anchor Jorge Ramos.

Newsom is term-limited after this year and has said he will decide whether to seek the presidency in 2028 only after the November midterms. In the meantime, his political committee, Campaign for Democracy, has raised more than $5 million for candidates in battleground and red states, and his team says a single fundraising email recently generated over $120,000 for three California House candidates running in districts reshaped by Proposition 50.

Who’s minding Sacramento

None of this is illegal, unusual for a term-limited governor eyeing a national profile, or even, by his office’s account, unpaid for out of state coffers. But it does mean California’s day-to-day executive business — the appointments, proclamations and routine signings — increasingly falls to Rivas and the constitutional line of succession behind him. This week it was Disability Pride Month. Before that, it was a raft of appointments to state boards and commissions, most of them announced under Newsom’s own name on the days he was actually in Sacramento to sign them.

The state’s business is still getting done. The question California voters may increasingly ask, as the governor’s travel days accumulate ahead of a possible 2028 run, is who is actually driving it — and how much of Sacramento’s routine work is being handled by a rotating cast of stand-ins while the governor auditions on a bigger stage.