Opinion | Why Is Gavin Newsom Seeking Common Ground With the Right?

I was open to the idea behind Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, in which the California governor has been breaking out of his political bubble to talk at length with right-wing media stars such as Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon.Democrats need to get better at speaking to people who don’t share their assumptions and at long-form conversations requiring improvisation and spontaneity.

They need to be willing to take risks and to use conflict to generate attention.Newsom himself did just that in 2023 when he debated Ron DeSantis on Fox News, drawing almost five million live viewers, plus 700,000 more for the replay.Trying to leverage Kirk and Bannon’s notoriety to reach new audiences could have been an interesting experiment.Instead, it’s a protracted exercise in self-harm for both Newsom and any liberal who decides to listen to him.

That’s because the governor frequently seems less interested in arguing than in finding common ground, assuming the good faith of people who have next to none.He leaves wild right-wing claims unchallenged and repeatedly concedes Republican premises.

When Bannon described rebuilding his movement after what he claimed was the stolen 2020 election, Newsom’s response was, “Well, I appreciate the notion of agency.”What could have been a show of intellectual confidence on Newsom’s part has turned out to be a demeaning display of submission.Listening to the first three episodes of the podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” I got the sense that Newsom had learned exactly the wrong lesson from Donald Trump’s 2024 election.Part of the reason Trump won, it’s true, is that he was able to appeal to increasingly alienated, right-wing young men through podcasts and new media.

As Newsom told Kirk, the governor’s own 13-year-old son is one of his fans.“We’re getting clobbered,” Newsom said at one point, and “you’ve figured something out.”But while there is, in fact, a lot that Democrats can learn from Kirk and Bannon about bu...