Anita Chabria: Yes, Newsom's new podcast is cringe. But is it also smart?

Gavin Newsom's new podcast, "This is Gavin Newsom," has Democrats in a tizzy. Republicans too.

It has been nearly universally panned (or celebrated, depending on your political stripes) for being fawning toward his far-right guests — Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage and Steve Bannon — leaving pundits asking, why is Gavin Newsom handing Steve Bannon a megaphone? and who is Gavin Newsom's podcast for?

Let me answer both of those. Like everything any politician does, the podcast is for the man himself. And to be fair, no one is handing Steven Bannon a microphone because he already has one bigger than any Democrat's. If anything, by appearing on the show, Bannon is letting Newsom ride his wake — that episode has helped boost Newsom onto top 10 lists for listeners.

Put those two truths together and, no matter how cringe or even appalling these first episodes have been (and oh, have they been appalling), the endeavor is undeniably smart.

Newsom has long been a student of the right, both its message and its mediums. He may be one of the few Democrats who regularly listens to outlets such as Fox News, or even the Kirks of the world. He is also six years into a job that may be the end of elected office for him, unless he can find a way to make himself viable for a presidential run — no easy task.

He understands there is a new political order, and it's not about rising through the ranks of the party or appeasing a base. It's about audience, politics aside, and Newsom is savvy enough to chase it.

If he pulls it off, he could make himself an attractive presidential candidate in a field crowded with likable white guys on one side (Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, JB Pritzker and Andy Beshear to name a few) and everyone else on the other (Gretchen Whitmer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even Kamala Harris). But even if this media venture doesn't open a path to the Oval Office, it could offer the Democratic Party a vision for how to win back a slice of disinterested and disillusioned voters who handed Donald Trump his slim victory.

Democrats are in shambles. They have no center and no consensus. And certainly no discernible path toward wins in 2026 or 2028.

As much as there is disarray, there is also a divide within the party. There's the Ocasio-Cortez-Bernie Sanders crowd that wants to double down on progressive values. And there's the big tent folks who are running for the middle ground like rats from fire, undone by the scorched earth policies of our president.

Newsom may be forging his own path, politically and personally, trying to capture an audience that doesn't really know left from right, and loves to dismiss fact in favor of "common sense."

Those voters may be frustrating, but they are also key to wins.

In his first episode with Kirk, Newsom threw transgender athletes under the bus, agreeing with Kirk that, "it's deeply unfair" for them to compete against women. That's a safe political position — almost 80% of Americans share it — but Newsom let Kirk gloss by with only minimal pushback about the way MAGA has demonized and weaponized transgender people in general, leaving a community already subject to high levels of violence in an even more precarious position.

In his interview with Bannon, he agreed Deep State-style that "there's a clay layer of bureaucracy, and you're right, unaccountable folks making a lot of decisions," and offered no dissent when Bannon claimed, "this is part of the process to unwind you from being a globalist, to make you a populist nationalist. ... It's a long journey, but I think you'll get there."

Newsom expressed disdain for meetings where people identify their pronouns, didn't argue with Bannon when he forcefully claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and spent a long time telling Kirk how much his teenage son was a fan.

Yuck.

The danger, of course, with cuddling up to extremists is getting covered in their scent. Newsom claims he wants to have respectful conversations with people who disagree, but MAGA doesn't respect Newsom. One-way respect makes you a doormat, and unless Newsom calls out his guests with more force, he risks being the punchline instead of the provocateur.

Voting data expert Paul Mitchell surveyed California voters before and after Newsom's debut, and found his overall favorability rating fell by more than 10 points after people watched some of these clips. He also found that, "the Democrats felt super double-crossed and the Republicans were like ... I agree with what he is saying but he is a liar."

After being shown three bits from the Kirk podcast, Mitchell found that 26% of voters said it "harmed their perception" of Newsom, while 37% of self-identified liberals said the clips "harmed their perception of the Governor."

But to a certain extent, what Democrats think of Newsom right now may not matter that much. Democrats will, mostly, still be Democrats when we all go to the polls again.

It's the disengaged voters that matter, and that had the final say in the last election — the so-called "low information" voters who don't follow politics all that much and get their often-questionable information from nontraditional sources.

Democrats, Mitchell warns, "are going to have to figure out a way to bring the low information voters back to them."

For young men, whose well-being we are all angsting about right now, world views are being shaped by the voices of the manosphere, such as Bannon and Kirk, who have polished their grievance rhetoric until it shines like the civil rights speeches of old. Once, it was Democrats who owned talk of working people and their struggles. Now, Bannon's got that nailed.

"We believe in bringing power back to the grassroots level," he told Newsom. "One of the reasons is we think the elites in this country, you know, the highly educated elites, the political class, the Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, all of it, have really forgotten the underlying kind of principles of the country and kind of left working-class people, regardless of their race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference. You know, you pick it, they've kind of forgotten."

That's a seductive and powerful message, and one Democrats used to own.

Newsom might be one of the only Democrats who truly understands just how much of this working-class space has been lost to MAGA. If he can peel just a portion of that audience off and give them a Democratic take that resonates enough to carry into 2026 and beyond, he will have accomplished both an impressive feat for himself and his party.

For himself, he will have established a power outside the traditional confines of politics — a kind of influence that has been shown to be a new path to the top by Republicans. It might not clear the way to the presidency, but it could open other options.

Need proof?

Conservative former podcaster Dan Bongino was sworn in Tuesday as deputy director of the FBI. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used to work for Fox. Bannon has kept himself close to the White House in no small part because of the popularity of his "War Room" show, giving him enough clout to challenge even the king of social media power, Elon Musk. (Bannon has called Musk a "parasitic illegal immigrant.")

Also Tuesday, Newsom dropped his first interview with a Democrat, Walz, and the two mused about how to fight MAGA.

"These are bad guys," Walz warned.

"But they exist," countered Newsom. "We cannot continue to be on the defense."

Even if the offense makes all of us cringe.

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