Opinion: Newsom loves Trump? No. But he made the right call on ballot access.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

66% : The ruling, which was based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, is on hold, as Trump promises an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
45% : AdvertisementA day after the ruling, the Democrat wrote Secretary of State Shirley Weber, California's top elections official, urging her to follow Colorado's lead and "explore every legal option" to keep Trump off California's March 5 ballot.
44% : The effort was moldering in the hearts of Trump antagonists until last week when the Colorado Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, disqualified the former president from the state's primary ballot on the grounds of insurrection.
39% : Some argue that allowing Trump to run in 2024 is too risky because, well, he might win.
38% : Banishing Trump from the ballot would only turn him into a martyr and, as his repeated criminal indictments have shown, Trump is a virtuoso at victimhood.
30% : AdvertisementTrump, who channels Mussolini when he isn't plagiarizing Hitler, is, in fact, a pestilence preying on America and its freedoms.
29% : AdvertisementEnding Trump's candidacy via decree would also worsen the lack of faith in our shaky elections process, convincing a not-insignificant portion of the voting population that the system is rigged against Trump, just as he falsely and incessantly claims.
29% : Some fear Trump will refuse to acknowledge his defeat, a stance that seems about as certain as New Year's Day arriving on Jan. 1.
28% : But what if Trump wins the GOP nomination and then loses the White House, again?
27% : Let Trump spew his gaseous claims - which have proven their own renewable energy source - and he can continue to lead his party to defeat at the polls, as he did in three straight elections from 2018 to 2022.
25% : The time to punish Trump for Jan. 6 and politically neuter him came in February 2021 when 43 Republican senators voted to acquit the scheming ex-president after his impeachment in the House.
20% : "There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy," Newsom said in a statement issued last week.
18% : There's a movement across the land to strike Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot as punishment - or justice, if you prefer - for summoning and unleashing the deadly mob that overran the Capitol and desecrated our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.