Gavin Newsom’s new podcast might have been the last place I would have looked for wisdom about the future of the Democratic Party. I’ve always thought of the California governor as the prince of smarm. His go-to gesture seems to always be the hearty two-handed handshake, which even his podcast’s title and intro sequence—the booming “This is Gavin Newsom,” followed by the diminuendo subheading, “And this is [insert name of guest]”—evokes. Most commentators have assumed that the podcast is just a soft-launch for Newsom’s widely anticipated 2028 presidential campaign.
But as I listened, something odd happened to me: I was mesmerized. It wasn’t so much the guests that Newsom had on—his initial guests were the right-wing influencers Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Michael Savage, who mostly reiterated their usual talking points; it was that Newsom was actually listening, and that produced the rarest-possible spectacle in our political discourse: an actual conversation.
I also had the sense that I was seeing something new take shape, inchoate for the moment but perhaps irresistible: a new Democratic middle ground that cuts off the left and takes in MAGA flair and MAGA cultural messaging while distancing itself from the more extreme MAGA positions. Whether that ends up tied to Newsom’s political fortunes or not, it somehow felt that there was no way to square the circle without something like that, no other real path forward for an electorally viable Democratic Party.