SACRAMENTO — Since his podcast debuted in March, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has flummoxed Democrats who fear that the politician they considered a liberal prizefighter is turning MAGA-friendly.
The rap against “This Is Gavin Newsom,” in which the governor spoke out against trans athletes competing in women’s sports and disavowed the gender-inclusive term “Latinx,” is that he doesn’t sound like the Newsom they know at all.
“What in God’s name is going on with Gavin Newsom?” asked CNN anchor Erin Burnett, quoting a headline criticizing the podcast, during a recent segment ripping the governor’s apparent shift.
“The country is trying to figure out how he went from progressive hero and governor of the most liberal state in the country to interviewing and spending time with MAGA favorites like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.”
The Democratic governor was also surprised, but by the response.
“I did what I said I was going to do. I mean, when I launched this, I said I was going to have, not debates with people I disagree with, I said we’re gonna have people on we disagree and agree with to have civil conversations to try to understand each other at this time of such polarization,” Newsom said in an interview with The Times on Friday. “And I said I was going to specifically meet with members of the MAGA movement. And then we did it and people were shocked.”
A common takeaway from the podcast is that Newsom is attempting to shape-shift into a moderate as he gears up to run for president in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2024 election.
Newsom disputed that “exhausting” assumption, which he said others have attributed to actions for more than two decades. The governor offered his own blistering critique of his party to explain why he’s sitting down with controversial GOP figures now.
“Because our party’s getting our ass kicked,” Newsom said. “Because the Democratic Party brand is toxic. Because people don’t think we make any damn sense. They think we make noise. They don’t think we support them. You fill in the generic them. They don’t think we have their values. They think we’re elite. We talk down to people. We talk past people. They think we just think we’re smarter than other people, that we’re so judgmental and full of ourselves.”
The governor paused to say he loves his party, but “we’ve lost our way” and he wants people to know he hears it.
“I think you do that by having people you disagree with [on the podcast] without being disagreeable.”
It’s not the first time the governor has disagreed with his fellow Democrats.
As speculation mounted about whether then-President Biden was fit to run for president last summer, Newsom called the chatter from his own party “unhelpful” and “unnecessary” as he encouraged Democrats to back the president. A year earlier, he scolded the Democratic Party for its passive response to Republicans and for its lack of an offensive political playbook.
Newsom created headlines across the country in the premiere episode of his podcast when he told Kirk, a conservative activist and Trump loyalist, that allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports is “deeply unfair.” Newsom’s comments represented a clear break from progressives.
The backlash from the left was swift. Newsom was accused of deserting his core LGBTQ+ constituency and flip-flopping after old social media posts surfaced with him expressing support for the California law signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown that gave trans students more rights in public schools, including the ability to compete in sports and use bathrooms based on their gender preference.
Newsom’s position aligned with 66% of American adults, who in a Pew Research survey in February said trans athletes should be required to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth.
The governor also was criticized for suggesting, in his podcast with Kirk, that no one in his office used the term “Latinx,” a gender neutral term, to describe Latinos, despite direct quotes of the governor that prove otherwise. A Pew poll from 2024 found that only 4% of Latinos describe themselves as “Latinx.”
Eric Jaye, the chief consultant for Newsom’s 2003 mayoral campaign, said the governor is an astute politician, though he disagreed with his decision to speak out against transgender athletes.
“San Francisco has produced many extraordinary politicians — Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown, Kamala Harris — but in terms of the ability to adapt to changing political times and climes, Gavin Newsom’s head and shoulders above all of them,” Jaye said. “He’s deeply, deeply attuned to which way the political wind is blowing and he has so far shown an extraordinary ability to navigate changing political weather.”
“Now the challenge is, the question will be, at what point does that stop seeming like someone adapted to changing times and start seeming inauthentic, if not outright fake?”
On Friday, Newsom said he understood why people might view his podcast as a departure from his liberal image, shaped largely by his groundbreaking support for gay marriage as mayor of San Francisco and as an advocate for universal healthcare.
But the governor said his politics has never fit into an “ideological prism.”
Anyone who knows him, he said, remembers when he was the “small business supervisor” in San Francisco, raging against the board for raising fees on business owners and championing “Care Not Cash,” a policy to take welfare checks from homeless people and use the savings to pay for treatment options.
“I’m open to argument,” Newsom said. “I’m interested in evidence. I have very strong values. I’m a progressive but I’m a pragmatic one, and that’s something that anyone who has followed me knows, and people that don’t, they’re learning a little bit about that now.”
Still, Newsom always has been the main architect of his public image.
A wine entrepreneur allied with the business community, he ran as a moderate to win the mayor’s office in 2003 against a Green Party candidate. “Care Not Cash” was widely panned by progressives but helped seal his victory.
When Newsom set his sights on the biggest political prize in California in the 2018 governor’s race, he ran as a progressive advocate for single-payer healthcare and pledged to build more affordable housing.
Yet even as he effused his liberal platform, Newsom couldn’t shake criticism from his opponents that his positions were a mirage.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a moderate Democrat, accused Newsom of selling “snake oil” with his support for single-payer healthcare in order to win over the nurses union and progressives.
Newsom delivered some of his campaign pledges in his first term as governor. He successfully advocated for universal preschool and state-sponsored healthcare coverage to all income-eligible Californians regardless of immigration status. He also paused death row executions.
The governor, who has a close relationship with the tech industry and counts Google founder Sergey Brin and Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff as his friends, has shown more of his moderate side in his second term.
He drew criticism from truck drivers for rejecting their push to require more regulation of autonomous big rigs. He vetoed a marquee bill last year that would have required artificial intelligence developers to put safeguards on the technology. Newsom rebuffed Hollywood unions when he rejected a bill that would have allowed workers to receive unemployment benefits when on strike.
He made a show this year of saying he would veto a bill for a second time that sought to restrict the state prison system’s ability to coordinate with federal immigration authorities attempting to deport felons. He’s also rejected proposals to allow immigrants who are in the country illegally to participate in a subsidized home loan program and to allow undocumented students to work at public universities.
Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said she wasn’t shocked to see Newsom appear more moderate on the podcast.
“He has always been more or less a tech bro from Northern California with the same kind of politics as we thought,” Gonzalez said.
Perhaps, she said, “He’s done playing liberal and now he’s just going to be himself.”
Steve Kawa, Newsom’s chief of staff as mayor, scoffed at the idea that Newsom has changed. He said the governor has always been interested in speaking to people on all sides of a policy idea. Politicians, like regular people, aren’t one-dimensional.
“Maybe he’s moderate on this issue,” Kawa said. “Maybe he’s progressive on this issue. I don’t think he looks at it in terms of under what column is this solution to make life better for the public and I can only be in this column.”
To criticism that he appears too comfortable talking to Bannon, a Trump campaign architect, and Kirk one day and Democrats such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and commentator Ezra Klein the next, Newsom said he meets with people he disagrees with all the time. He mentioned his 90-minute sit-down with Trump in the Oval Office.
“That’s called life,” Newsom said. “I don’t decide who my friends are on the basis of their politics. I’d never met Charlie Kirk. I’d never met Bannon, but I know people that think like them and they’re good parents and they’re good people, and I vehemently disagree with their politics and they’re Trumpers.”
The amicability he displayed in the podcast toward Republican figures whom Democrats perceive as villains doesn’t come as a surprise to people who have closely followed his career.
“He sounds evenhanded about the views of people that you would think he would find an anathema to his being. That’s because of how he is on a path of existence beyond politics and I think that’s reflected in the podcast,” said David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University.
“He’s always lived a charmed life in terms of politics, but there’s also been more to him.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
