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Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” is etched by Democrats. Republicans too.
Fed up towards far-right guests of Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage and Steve Bannon, almost universally pan (or celebrated in response to your political stripes). And who is Gavin Newsom’s podcast?
Let me answer both of them. Like everything politicians do, the podcast is for the men themselves. And to be fair, no one has given Stephen Bannon the microphone. If anything, by appearing on the show, Bannon is making Newsom wake up to him. That episode helped boost Newsom onto his top 10 list of listeners.
To summarise these two truths, no matter how shrunken or appalling these first episodes are (and ah, horrifying), the effort is definitely clever.
Newsom has long been a student of both the rights of its message and its medium. He may be one of the few Democrats who regularly listen to outlets such as Fox News and even Kirks around the world. He is also six years from work that could be the end of an elected office for him, unless he can find a way to make himself viable for the president’s run. There’s no easy job.
He understands there is a new political order, not to climb the ranks of the party or to soften the base. It’s on the side of the audience, politics, and Newsom is well-versed enough to chase it.
Once he pulls it off, he managed to become an attractive presidential candidate on a crowded field with white guys who like to one side (Tim Waltz, Pete Battigigue, J.B. Pretzker, Andy Besher, the other (even Gretchen Whitmer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Kamala Harris). But even if this media venture doesn’t pave the way for an oval office, he can still offer Democrats a vision of how to reclaim the slice of indifferent and disillusioned voters who handed Donald Trump to a slim victory.
Democrats are in a hellish situation. They have no center or consensus. And certainly there is no identifiable path to victory in 2026 or 2028.
As long as there is confusion, there is also a gap within the party. There is a crowd of Ocasio-Cortez-Bernie Sanders who want to double their progressive value. And there are people in big tents running into a rat-like midway from the fire, thanks to the president’s burnt earth policy.
Newsom may be trying to build his own path politically and personally, capturing an unknown audience from right to left.
Those voters may be frustrating, but they are also key to victory.
In his first episode with Kirk, Newsom threw a trans athlete under the bus and agreed to Kirk. It’s a safe political position and shares almost 80% of Americans, but Newsom has made Kirk gloss with just a minimal pushback on how Maga demonized and weaponized trans people in general, and the community is already subject to high levels of violence in an even more unstable position.
In an interview with Bannon, he did not object when he insisted that “there is a clay layer of bureaucracy, that you are right and unexplained people will make many decisions and that Bannon “imagines a poplist citizen, part of the process of rewinding you from being a globalist.”
Newsom expressed a light-hearted meeting that he didn’t discuss with Bannon when people identified their pronouns and forced them to insist on telling Kirk how much of a fan his teenage son was.
Yeah.
Of course, the danger of embracing extremists is covered in their scent. Newsom insists he wants to have a respectful conversation with people he disagrees with, but Maga doesn’t respect Newsom. One-way respect will make you a doormat, and unless Newsom calls out his guests with more force, he risks being a punchline rather than a provocateur.
Voting data expert Paul Mitchell surveyed California voters before and after Newsom’s debut and found his overall approval rating fell by more than 10 points after people saw some of these clips. He also discovered, “Democrats crossed in double circles, Republicans… I agreed to what he was saying, but he is a liar.”
After being shown three bits from the Kirk Podcast, Mitchell found that 26% of voters said it “had hurt their perceptions,” while 37% of self-identified Liberals said the clip “had hurt their perceptions of the governor.”
But to some extent, it may not be that important for Democrats to think about Newsom for now. Democrats are mostly still Democrats when we all go to vote again.
The key is the liberated voters, who had the final say in the last election. So-called “low-information” voters are less likely to follow politics and often get information they can ask questions from non-traditional sources.
Democrats will “have to find a way to get low-informed voters back to them,” Mitchell warns.
For young men, who are all angry now, the views of the world are shaped by the voices of manospheres like Bannon and Kirk. It was Democrats who once owned stories about workers and their struggles. Now Bannon has nailed it.
“We believe in bringing power back to the grassroots level,” he told Newsom. “One reason for this is that we really forget all the fundamental kinds of principles: the elites of this country, the highly educated elites, the political class, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and more.
It was a fascinating and powerful message, once owned by one Democrat.
Newsom may be one of the only Democrats who truly understand how much of this working-class space has been lost to Maga. If he can strip off only a portion of that audience and give them enough resonant democratic take to bring in after 2026, he will achieve both impressive feats for himself and his party.
For himself, he would have established power outside the traditional scope of politics – a kind of influence that was shown by the Republicans as a new path to the top. The path to presidency may not be clear, but other options can be opened.
Do you need evidence?
Conservative former podcaster Dan Bongino was sworn in as deputy director of the FBI on Tuesday. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegses worked for Fox. Bannon approached the White House in just a few parts due to the popularity of his “Warroom” show, giving him enough influence to challenge even the social media power of Elon Musk. (Bannon calls masks “illegal parasitized immigrants.”
Also on Tuesday, Newsom dropped his first interview with Democrat Waltz, where the two meditated on how to fight the Maga.
“These are the bad guys,” Walz warned.
“But they exist,” Newsom retorted. “We can’t continue to defend.”
Even if the attacks made us all nagging.
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