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Gavin Newsom, distancing himself from some of the liberal policies he embraced as California governor, has embarked on an experiment ahead of a potential presidential run: hosting a podcast featuring right-wing guests, including former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon and conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The gambit has achieved one of Newsom's perennial goals: making himself part of the nation's political conversation as he seeks to portray himself as a disrupter within the Democratic Party.
But the rollout of the "This is Gavin Newsom" podcast, which he billed as a forum to engage people with divergent views, has also been messy, divisive and politically risky - angering many of the liberal activists whom Newsom would need to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
The show rocketed as high as No. 3 on the Apple Podcasts charts after Newsom's first interview, with Kirk, and has hovered in the second-highest spot among news podcasts in the week since. Clips from his appearance with Kirk generated hundreds of thousands of views - in part because some Democrats were aghast that Newsom took a stand against transgender women and girls competing in female sports while sitting across from a figure who ascended on the right partly by demonizing marginalized communities.
Newsom capped the week by releasing his friendly conversation with Bannon, a figure reviled by the left who played a central role in building President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement. During the episode, Newsom did not correct Bannon when he falsely asserted that Trump won the 2020 election. The two men bantered about the upside of tariffs - which are anathema to many Democratic governors at the moment - with Bannon joking that he was trying to convert Newsom from "a globalist" to a "populist nationalist."
It is unlikely that Newsom's political evolution will ever go that far. But the podcast is the latest iteration of a notable shift to the middle by Newsom as he winds down his final term as governor and attempts to unravel the right's caricature of him as a pro-trans, pro-illegal-immigration liberal from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Newsom's recent effort to highlight the more-moderate aspects of his record is driven in part by political necessity. In November, the electorate chose Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, a Bay Area liberal whose political views are similar to Newsom's. And even the governor's allies acknowledge that the 2024 outcome could make the Democratic Party skittish about nominating another San Francisco liberal as its standard-bearer in 2028.
The podcast is also a vehicle for Newsom to explore at a deeper level the reasons behind his party's catastrophic losses in November. But for many Democrats, the project's early execution has left much to be desired.
"I can't comprehend what he's trying to accomplish if he's going to run for president as a Democrat," said Steven Maviglio, a Sacramento-based Democratic strategist. "How do you win over Democratic voters by coddling the ultraright?"
The podcast might have been better received, Maviglio said, if it was "a thoughtful exchange of ideas and contrast of philosophies."
"But that's not what we're getting," he said. "We're getting somebody who's bragging about how close he is to the Republicans on issues. How that helps him in a Democratic primary is lost on me."
Newsom has long viewed himself as a reformer within the Democratic Party - someone willing to force uncomfortable conversations about party orthodoxy and ideology, as he did in 2004 when he presided over the nation's first same-sex marriages as mayor of San Francisco. He has often sought out relationships with adversaries including Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and Fox News host Sean Hannity. He said during a recent news conference that he was inspired to launch "This is Gavin Newsom" after finding common ground during recent conversations with people with whom he "deeply disagrees."
Newsom said he wished one of those talks had been recorded so others could listen, because he thought it would "distill a sense of well-being to people that we don't hate each other" despite diverging views. On the day he announced the podcast, he pushed back when a reporter asked whether it was a distraction, saying it was "essential for my day job."
"It's an opportunity to communicate with people directly," Newsom told reporters at an event that had focused on his agenda for job growth in California. "The world's changed. We need to change with it. … We've got to do things differently, keep iterating."
Many Democrats share Newsom's desire to experiment with different platforms to broaden the party's reach. But the governor's initial choice of guests and the ingratiating tone he adopted in his conversations were a jarring departure from the approach he took with Republicans as recently as last year.
After surviving a Republican effort to recall him in 2021 after the pandemic, Newsom became the vanguard in defending Democratic Party values - championing LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, calling out Trump's election falsehoods and sparring with conservative firebrands such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
He seized opportunities to appear on Fox News, which he watched obsessively to stay abreast of the topics and conspiracy theories percolating in the conservative ecosystem. He used his social media platforms to troll Republican governors such as DeSantis, Gregg Abbott of Texas and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, rebuking their efforts to curtail discussions about race and sexual identity in schools and their restrictive abortion policies.
He spoke about the Democrats' messaging problems and said he wanted to use his own political megaphone to help rebuild the party's appeal in conservative areas. In 2023, he formed a political organization to fight "rising authoritarianism" - a knock at Trump - while vowing to help Democrats flourish in "states where freedom is most under attack." He used the copious amounts of small dollars he had raised to run ads in states such as Alabama warning that "Trump Republicans" favored restrictions that would prevent women from traveling across state lines for an abortion.
While President Joe Biden was running an uninspired, low-energy reelection campaign in November 2023, Newsom persuaded then-presidential candidate DeSantis to debate him one-on-one on Fox News. He emerged as one of the most sought-after surrogates for Biden and other Democrats on the campaign trail in 2024.
But Newsom was stunned by the scale of Trump's victory over Biden's successor in the race and the losses Democrats sustained in House and Senate contests in November. He has said he believed the Democratic spin in the final days before the November election: that Democratic voters who had drifted away from Biden were coming home, and that Harris could close the gap and pull off a win.
After the election, he refused to offer snap judgments about why Harris lost. At the Democratic Governors Association meeting in Los Angeles late last year, he carried around almost a dozen pages of handwritten notes on the theories that party strategists, pollsters and commentators were putting forward about why the Democrats fell short.
The conversations on "This is Gavin Newsom" appear to be the next chapter in Newsom's search for why the Democratic message isn't connecting with many Americans. And he is using the forum, as well as some of his recent appearances, to highlight more-moderate aspects of his own record with an eye toward the future.
In late November, Newsom embarked on a "California Jobs First" tour, visiting Republican areas of the state to outline his plans for boosting blue-collar jobs. The following month, he visited the U.S.-Mexico border to announce that he was increasing state resources to intercept illegal drugs, guns and cash in an effort to diminish the power of transnational gangs. While overseeing the recovery from the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles County, he has waived the state's strict environmental regulations to speed rebuilding, while calling for the rules to be reformed. And as other governors have taken an adversarial approach with Trump, Newsom has sought to nurture their relationship, showering the president with praise for the federal government's response to the fires.
Newsom's efforts to get along with the famously transactional president have generally been viewed as necessary diplomacy when the state is relying on the federal government for disaster aid. But the governor's friendly chats with Kirk and Bannon have been perceived differently.
An array of LGBTQ groups criticized Newsom for telling Kirk that allowing transgender girls and women to compete in women's sports was "deeply unfair" and that Democrats are "getting crushed" on the issue. The response to his conversation with Bannon drew an even more vociferous reaction.
Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, a member of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said he was "in shock at the stupidity" of Newsom's inviting Bannon on the podcast.
"Many of us on the right sacrificed careers to fight Bannon, and Newsom is trying to make a career and a presidential run by building him up," Kinzinger said on X. "Unforgivable and insane."
During a House Democrats retreat Thursday night in Virginia, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear - another potential 2028 candidate - said he appreciated Newsom's effort to bring different voices to his podcast. But, he added, "Stephen K. 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."
Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the Democratic activist group Indivisible - which has been helping organize many of the protests against the Trump administration's actions in recent weeks - said Newsom's invitation to Bannon represented "truly epic levels of misreading the moment."
Greenberg said in an interview that many activists share Newsom's view that the Democratic Party should not isolate itself and should drive its message on many different platforms. But "buddying up with right-wingers is both strategically and morally bananas," she said.
"To the extent that a lot of folks gave Gavin Newsom props in 2023 and 2024, it was about his willingness to take the argument to the right wing and make a forceful case for our values," Greenberg said. In trying to find common ground with figures such as Bannon, she said, "he is ceding territory that should not be ceded."