Gavin Newsom’s podcast has featured Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. Is this the way to the White House?

On the latest episode of This Is Gavin Newsom, the California governor interviewed his Minnesota counterpart, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz. “Thanks for having me,” Walz said, flashing a cheeky smile. “I’m kinda wondering where I fall on this list of guests.”

Walz was not only the first Democrat to make an appearance on Newsom’s splashy new podcast, but also the first participant who had not cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election results or expressed sympathy for the mob that stormed the capitol on January 6.

Newsom has billed his podcast, launched at the beginning of March, as a platform for “honest discussions” with those who “agree AND disagree with us”. Many Democrats share his desire to expand their reach and influence across platforms – but his critics recoil at the approach. Newsom doesn’t seem to conduct the interviews as a blue-state leader raring to defend progressive values – or even as a governor whose response to one of the costliest and most destructive natural disasters in recent memory was undermined by a relentless rightwing campaign of rumors and lies. Instead, he seems to take on the role of an anthropologist conducting fieldwork on the forces fueling Maga fervor – and Democrats’ descent into the political wilderness.

It’s a potentially high-stakes gambit for the term-limited governor widely believed to have national ambitions.

“You’re taking a risk, doing a podcast, doing something to try to fill a void that’s out there and hopefully using it as a platform to try and articulate our values to a broader audience,” Walz told Newsom. “But we’ve not figured this out yet.”

Since launching the podcast earlier this month, Newsom has taped a trio of friendly chats with rightwing figures reviled by the left: Steve Bannon, an architect of Donald Trump’s political rise; Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA and a Maga-world darling; and Michael Savage, a longtime conservative talk-radio host whose Trumpian rhetoric preceded the president’s rise. (According to the Wall Street Journal, Newsom sought help from his ex-wife and Trumpworld insider Kimberly Guilfoyle to connect with Kirk and Bannon.)

Then came Walz. But the parade of conservatives on the Newsom podcast isn’t likely to stop. At one point during the second episode, Savage suggested another guest: Tucker Carlson. “I agree,” Newsom concurred. “I’m fascinated by him.”

Media watchdogs have criticized the lineup, arguing Newsom is elevating and legitimizing rightwing extremists like Kirk, who once suggested Joe Biden should face the death penalty for unspecified “crimes against America”. They were baffled by his praise of Bannon, whom he commended for his “advocacy” and calling “balls and strikes” on the Trump administration.

Many Democrats meanwhile have been infuriated by Newsom’s lack of pushback against his guests’ false or misleading claims, and his agreement with them on issues they had long thought he opposed. Newsom didn’t challenge the baseless assertion by Bannon that Trump won the 2020 election. And in his conversation with Kirk, he shocked longtime allies when he agreed that allowing transgender women and girls to compete in female sports was “deeply unfair”.

Newsom and his representatives did not answer questions from the Guardian about his podcast. But he has said previously that the idea for it was born from a private conversation with a conservative figure he wished had been recorded. A cross-partisan conversation, he had said, could show that “we don’t hate each other”, despite holding deeply opposing political views.

“The world’s changed. We need to change with it in terms of how we communicate,” Newsom told reporters at a press conference in Los Angeles last month. “We’d be as dumb as we want to be if we continue down the old status quo and try to pave over the old cow path. We’ve got to do things differently.”

After the 2024 election, Democrats offered many theories about why they lost. There was widespread agreement that to win again, Democrats needed to do a better job of breaking out of their ideological bubbles and reaching voters the party had alienated in recent years. What they needed, some strategists argued, was a “Joe Rogan of the left”.

Who is Newsom’s intended audience?

For many Democrats and critics of the Maga movement, Newsom’s overtures have gone too far. His chats are doing little to diagnose the problem, and even less to position himself as a solution, they argue.

“If you’re running to be a Republican nominee, this is a great strategy,” the California state assembly member Alex Lee, a member of the LGBTQ+ caucus, said earlier this month in response to the governor’s comments on trans athletes. “But if you want to run as a Democrat and someone who is pro-human rights, this is a terrible look.”

“Cuddling up to the Charlie Kirks and Steve Bannons of the world and truckling to the Michael Savages … is a strange way to try to build national support among fellow Democrats,” the Los Angeles’s Times longtime political columnist, Mark Barabak, wrote.

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky who is also seen as a presidential hopeful, told reporters that the left should be willing to debate “just about anyone” – but that turning over the mic to Bannon was a bridge too far. “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 said.

And Adam Kinzinger, a Republican former representative from Illinois turned anti-Trump campaigner who sat on the January 6 committee, said it was “stupid” to talk to Bannon.

“Bannon is the author of this chaos we’re seeing right now,” he said in a video posted on X.

“Many of us on the right sacrificed our careers taking these people on and Newsom’s trying to make a career with them,” Kinzinger continued. “This is insane.”

But perhaps progressive Democrats, and never-Trump Republicans, aren’t Newsom’s intended audience – at least for the moment.

“He wants to be in the national conversation for the possibility of running for president,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University.

If he does seek the White House, Newsom will need to prove to his skeptics that he is more nuanced than the rightwing caricature of him as a “knee-jerk liberal”, McCuan argued, the same attack conservatives leveled against Newsom’s “political cousin”, Kamala Harris, in last year’s election.

Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco mayor, and Kamala Harris, then district attorney, in San Francisco, California, on 19 January 2004. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

The podcast is the latest iteration in a much broader effort by the governor’s team to show that Newsom has matured politically, McCuan said, and make the case that he is capable of taking on Trump and the heir to Maga.

It has certainly catapulted Newsom into the national political conversation, at a moment when his party appears rudderless, divided and desperate for new leadership.

Each episode has generated headlines and the endeavor has sparked a wider debate about whether the governor is being savvy, cynical – or both.

Howard Polskin, who documents rightwing media on his website TheRighting, said Newsom’s podcast is more about marketing and public relations for Newsom himself than a platform for making content or clearly articulating his political views.

“Its value is that he’s getting people talking about himself,” he said. “This is like a page out of the Trump playbook. Doesn’t matter what they’re saying, they are talking about Gavin Newsom.”

His conservative guests don’t gain converts from their appearances on Newsom’s show – they already have far larger audiences than the governor anyway, Polskin said, while the governor’s supporters are likely turned off by the rightwing figures he has invited on.

But his guests gain something else: access. “Who wouldn’t want a relationship with the governor of California?” Polskin said. “It’s power. It’s proximity to power, someone who could arguably become the next president of the United States.”

Polskin said it’s a smart move for Newsom as a branding play, and it’s “gutsy” for him to engage directly with top Magaworld influencers and try to have civil discussions. Whatever Democrats have been doing before clearly wasn’t working, he argued, so why not try something new?

It’s a play he expects more Democrats to attempt in the run-up to the next presidential election. “He’s taken a controversial stand here. He’s getting a lot of attention for it. I think that’s smart,” he said.

From antagonistic to calculated

When asked by a reporter whether the podcast was a “distraction” from his day job as a governor, Newsom said it was not. Opening new lines of communication with constituents – and providing a forum for civil dialogue between political opponents – was “essential” and “important” in an era defined by deep polarization and media fragmentation, he argued.

It reflects a slight shift in tactics for the California governor.

During Trump’s first term, Newsom, the leader of the largest blue state, embraced the role of liberal antagonist, holding up California as a bulwark against the administration’s attacks on immigrants and the environment.

After soundly defeating a Republican recall effort in 2021, and handily winning re-election in 2022, an emboldened Newsom grew his national profile, acting as a prominent surrogate for Joe Biden and frequently taking the fight directly to the right.

Before the 2022 congressional midterms, he implored Democrats to launch a “counteroffensive” to defend abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections. He debated the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, on Fox News. His political action committee ran ads in Republican states – including ones a Democratic nominee would never hope to win, such as Alabama.

But he’s also hedged his bets, barring state legislation that might have wound up in ads fueling California’s ultra-liberal image: Newsom has used his veto pen to reject bills that would have required a warning label on gas stoves and provided free condoms in schools. California’s prison system has long cooperated with federal immigration authorities, and this year the governor vetoed a bill that would have limited state prison officials’ cooperation with Ice.

Newsom is taking a far more cautious approach with Trump, too, in the president’s second term. As Trump threatened to withhold federal disaster aid for the state following the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, Newsom greeted Trump warmly on the tarmac when Trump came to survey the damage. Shortly after, Newsom traveled to Washington for a lengthy Oval Office meeting. “We’re getting along, Trump and I,” he said in one of his podcast episodes.

Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican consultant and podcast host, has argued that Newsom not only grasps the depth of Democrats’ engagement deficit but also the the urgency of creating a liberal “media infrastructure” to counter the right’s influence.

“He knows he needs to get into that cultural space to be relevant,” Madrid said, noting that the governor is a longtime observer of rightwing media. “It doesn’t necessarily need to be the rightwing media ecosystem, but he’s keenly aware that you can’t just have a large Twitter account like he does and be a dominant national force.” He pointed out that it’s not Newsom’s first foray into podcasting. He also hosts Politickin’ with the former NFL star Marshawn Lynch and his agent, Doug Hendrickson.

In an opinion piece for Fox News, Kirk wrote that his invitation to appear on Newsom’s podcast had been part of a “calculated play” by the governor to “present as a centrist” and shed his image in conservative media as the well-coifed leader of liberal America.

“It might work,” Kirk warned. “One thing I learned in my podcast experience: the governor isn’t a joke. He has a shark’s instincts and is hoping that voters will have a goldfish’s memory.”

Barabak, the LA Times columnist, couldn’t disagree more: “If Newsom really hopes to be president someday, the best thing he could do is a bang-up job in his final 22 months as governor, not waste time on glib and self-flattering diversions.”