Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom appears comfortable with borrowing from Bernie Sanders’ playbook and embracing single-payer health care in his bid to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown in the June open primary and the November general election.

That’s a key takeaway of campaign watchers from the past month of the California gubernatorial campaign. Perhaps the signature moment: Newsom taunting “defeatist Democrats” in a San Diego debate last week – a clear shot at his main Democratic rivals, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state Treasurer John Chiang, who both support expanded state health care but are leery of single-payer’s potential cost.

The emergence of the former San Francisco mayor as an outspoken advocate of single-payer amounts to a triumph for the California Nurses Association, the leading champions of Senate Bill 562 – which commits the state to providing health care for all residents without providing key details on how that would be achieved. Despite the lack of details, the bill – known as the Healthy California Act and co-sponsored by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Garden, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego – passed the Senate on a 23-14 vote last June.

But Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, incensed the nurses union later in June when he shelved the bill, declaring it “woefully incomplete.” Rendon cited its failure to identify how it would pay the estimated $400 billion that SB562 would cost per year – more than triple the state’s general fund budget. He also faulted the measure for violating spending limits in the state Constitution and for not making the case on how California would get many needed federal waivers to proceed.

In January, Rendon repeated his criticisms, saying there had been no progress in making SB562 into a serious legislative proposal.

But with polls showing national Democrats consider single-payer health care a high priority, Newsom is eager to take advantage of their enthusiasm. Yet while it may help him in the short term in the run-up to the June primary, it is unclear whether backing SB562 will be popular with the broad electorate in the long term.

A May 2017 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 65 percent of adults surveyed support single-payer health care – but that the number plunged to 43 percent when those being surveyed were told substantial new taxes would be needed. A follow-up PPIC poll in September found just 32 percent of likely state voters backed single-payer.

Rendon recall bid fails without collecting a single signature

Another sign that single-payer support may have its limits has been the collapse of an effort to recall Rendon that was launched last summer after he blocked the advance of SB562. The bid received national attention after an Associated Press story depicted it as one more sign of how divided California Democrats had become.

But the recall campaign unceremoniously ended in early February, with organizers saying they were now focused on defeating Rendon’s bid for re-election – not on recalling him. To force a recall vote, 23,000 petition signatures would have to be gathered. According to the Los Angeles Times, the most recent official report on the recall campaign filed with the state showed no signatures had been gathered.

Public and private polls for months have generally shown Newsom to be leading Villaraigosa, with Chiang, former Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin (a Democrat) and Republican candidates Travis Allen, a Huntington Beach assemblyman, and Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox substantially behind them. But the last poll by PPIC, released Feb. 7, showed a statistical dead heat, with Newsom getting 23 percent and Villaraigosa 21 percent – within the poll’s margin of error.

The 2018 governor’s race got off to an informal start last week with candidate forums in Anaheim and San Francisco.

Former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom leads all gubernatorial candidates in polling and fundraising. A September Berkeley IGS survey showed he had support from 26 percent of likely voters, followed by Republican businessman John Cox with 11 percent. In campaign finance filings from July, Newsom had $5.3 million in donations this year, state Treasurer John Chiang $2.6 million, Villaraigosa $2.3 million and former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin just over $300,000. His fundraising advantage is even bigger when available funds from previous years are included, an August Los Angeles Times analysis noted.

In the San Francisco forum moderated by Chronicle editorial-page editor John Diaz, Newsom showed why he was recently endorsed by the California Teachers Association. He declined to discuss the specifics of the Vergara v. California case, which pose difficult questions for social justice activists. In the lawsuit, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge found in 2014 that the state’s teacher job-protection laws were unconstitutional because they had led to schools in poor minority communities being much more likely to have ineffective teachers and much more likely to face major layoffs in years with budget cuts. An appellate court threw out the trial court ruling.

Villaraigosa was the only Democratic candidate in the forums to support the Vergara plaintiffs, saying it had long been evident in Los Angeles that tenure and seniority laws hurt schools with heavy concentrations of English-language learners.

Newsom declared that the issues in the Vergara matter had been “litigated” and said that if tenure and seniority changes were needed, they could be collectively bargained. “In other words: They would not happen,” Diaz wrote tartly in his Chronicle column about the forum.

Worries about cost of single-payer dismissed as ‘specious’

On health care, all four Democrats support the concept of a single-payer system, the biggest issue of the California Nurses Association, which endorsed Newsom nearly a year ago. But while Villaraigosa and Chiang have said California needs to figure out how to pay for such a system, Newsom says concerns about cost are “the most specious argument” against a state health-care-for-all system. Senate Bill 562, a bill committing the state to single-payer, passed the Senate earlier this year but stalled in the Assembly after estimates that its annual cost could be $400 billion – more than double the entire state budget.

If Newsom and Villaraigosa finish first and second in the June “top two” primary and give voters a choice between two Democrats in November 2018 – as happened in California’s 2016 U.S. Senate race – teacher tenure/seniority laws and how to adopt and pay for single-payer could dominate the general election fight.

In the forums, there was little difference between the two men on other top issues. Both agreed with the need to build millions of new housing units, to resist Trump administration immigration policies and to provide much more money to public schools.

There is a possibility other prominent Democrats might get in the race. The filing deadline for the June 5 primary isn’t until March 9, and there has been speculation that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti might jump in. But Sunday, Garcetti said on Twitter that he was definitely not going to run for governor.