The Democrats’ Authenticity Trap
The party keeps trying to engineer viral moments and free-wheeling conversations. It’s self-defeating.
“How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?”
WHEN CALIFORNIA GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM released the inaugural episode of his new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, it left some Democrats bewildered. Even former Newsom aides told me they were shocked he thought it would work.
It wasn’t just that they didn’t love Newsom coming out against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports (some even said it was a smart political position to stake out given public polling). It wasn’t just that he was giving a platform to Charlie Kirk, one of the more reviled activists on the MAGA right. It was that they didn’t get what Newsom was actually trying to do.
If the governor wanted to reach new audiences, there were other ways to do so than launching a podcast that would primarily attract the interest of diehard Democrats. And if he was trying to show authenticity, there were more effective ways to do it than having an agreeable conversation with Kirk, in which a main focus of the discussion was just how lame Democrats have become.
“None of these people are getting it,” one Democratic strategist told me. “It’s so pathetic. . . . Stop reinventing the wheel and do what’s out there.”
Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But in the episode, the governor did shed some light on what he was thinking. He told Kirk that Democrats couldn’t compete if they kept doing the same old three-minute cable news hits. And he nodded along in agreement as Kirk argued that Democrats are woefully incapable of surviving in longform podcast environments because it was “too unscripted” and “too masculine.”
Beyond raising questions about the masculinity of the podcast medium, Newsom’s foray into the forum provided more evidence that Democrats still can’t find their footing there, or frankly in the modern media landscape writ large.
There is no disagreement in the party that voters are increasingly turning to TikTok and Twitch personalities rather than network news anchors to help make sense of the world. But more than four months since their election nightmare materialized, Democrats still seem uncomfortable making the necessary adjustments.
“There are a lot of outlets to go to. The problem is that many Democrats haven’t found those outlets or are not showing up for those outlets because they think that spending their time, energy, and effort on broadcast TV, for example, is going to be effective,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told me in an interview last week. (FWIW, he swore he wasn’t just saying this because he was talking to a reporter publishing on Substack and YouTube.)
The 2024 election was supposed to be a brutal wake-up call for Democrats. Donald Trump won the election by taking advantage of alternative media and building a campaign on viral moments. MAGA had (and has) the most powerful cable channel, the most popular podcast, and the most hyperactive social media site.