We all know why Gov. Gavin Newsom is inviting right-wing, racist, transphobic nutcases onto his new podcast: He wants to run for president.
It’s part of a pattern we’ve seen for many years: Newsom targets vulnerable people to get votes. He did it attacking unhoused people on welfare with Care Not Cash to get elected mayor. He did the same thing when he went back on a campaign promise and vetoed a bill that would have allowed safe injection sites in San Francisco.
Now he’s attacking transgender people.
Here’s the thing: Turning the unhoused into enemies and taking away their benefits, making the crisis worse, did indeed help Newsom become mayor.
But this podcast does not seem to be helping his presidential ambitions.
Check out some data from Capitol Weekly, which has a lot of polling on the guv.
His support among liberals has dropped dramatically since he started giving the crazies a voice on his podcast. More important, the Republicans and independents aren’t convinced.
So he’s losing his base, and picking up no new voters.
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Doesn’t sound presidential to me.
In fact, it sounds like a total failure.
There’s nothing wrong with a Democrat debating people on the right. Newsom has done that in the past, and successfully challenged the likes of Ron DeSantis. In that televised debate, Newsom stood up for President Joe Biden and made DeSantis look like a fool.
That’s not what he’s doing now.
Margaret Sullivan notes in the UK Guardian:
“We shouldn’t be afraid to talk and to debate just about anyone,” said Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor, “but Steve Bannon espouses hatred and anger, and even at some points violence, and I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform, ever, anywhere.” (Beshear, it should be noted, may also be looking at a presidential run, and was considered as Harris’s running mate last year.)
More:
Democrats are justifiably searching for a way to reach that wide swath of voters who seem permanently turned off to their party.
And whatever one’s politics or affiliation, we all know that the US is terribly and destructively polarized. We must find a way to talk to each other across the great divide. We really do need to seek common ground.
But the way to do it is not to normalize conspiracy theorists who have already done so much damage. It’s not to offer chummy chats – with little or no pushback – to those who want to trash vulnerable people, including transgender individuals and immigrants, or to repeat lies about a stolen election.
This “rebrand” may help Newsom’s efforts to present himself as a healer or a centrist as he prepares to run for president in 2028.
But anybody who’s paying close attention should know that what he’s doing is deeply cynical and ultimately counterproductive.
The right is never going to move toward Newsom. The left is furious and won’t back him in 2028. The center that might trust him is getting smaller and smaller as his podcast makes his politics increasingly fake and untrustworthy. The folks he is associating with are not just wrong and horrible; they have gone far off the deep end.
I’m not sure who the Democrats will nominate in three years. But it doesn’t look like Newsom.
