Mayonnaise Clinic: Was I Wrong About Gavin Newsom?

Some of you have a bone to pick with me and my Central Air co-hosts.

Dear readers,

I’m opening the mayonnaise jar after a while. I’ve been getting some really interesting listener comments and questions since the launch of Central Air — a lot of them about issues I’ve written on extensively in Very Serious — so let’s reopen the Mayonnaise Clinic. By the way, you can always email your questions (on virtually any topic) to mayo@joshbarro.com.

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First, though my distaste for Gavin Newsom is well known, I admitted on this week’s episode that I am increasingly resigned to the prospect that Newsom will be the 2028 Democratic nominee. Brian sent in this response:

This podcast should have a pillar that it will do everything it can to spoil a Newsom nomination. I say this as a Californian. He cannot be the nominee. We will lose by a million. It has to be a Shapiro or Whitmer type.

Look, Newsom continues to be far from my first choice. I don’t think he would put our party’s best foot forward to swing voters. I want Josh Shapiro to be the nominee, and I also think Gretchen Whitmer would be a strong choice. Pete Buttigieg might be fine, too, though I continue to worry about his lack of an electoral track record beyond South Bend.

But when I look back at my screed about Newsom from 2022, I mostly cringe about having scolded him for flirting with a 2024 presidential run at a time when Joe Biden was on a course to run again. Oops! Gavin Newsom was on to something, and I didn’t give him the credit he deserved! So maybe I should consider whether I also owe him credit in other areas.

As I said on the show this week, Democratic voters are hungry for the party to “fight back” against Trump, which is awkward, because Democrats are in the minority in Congress and have few good tools to fight back. Newsom, to his credit, found a good tool: He is leading a likely successful effort to redraw California’s congressional district maps and offset the effects of the redistricting the president demanded in Texas. Winning the nomination is going to require connecting with the party base somehow, and I appreciate that he is finding ways to fire up the Democratic base that don’t involve running hard to the left and taking positions that are likely to become new general election liabilities.

All that said, Newsom has a lot of pre-existing general election liabilities. His margins of victory have been underwhelming, and California’s substantive woes (Rampant unsheltered homelessness and unaffordable homes! Electricity prices up a third in five years!) and the left-wing policies he’s implemented in the state (Medicaid for illegal immigrants!) are both sure to be huge problems for him as a nominee. As with Kamala Harris, his lack of experience campaigning in anything other than a deep-blue electorate is a deficiency. He continues to look like an ‘80s movie villain, and he dined at the French Laundry while he had the state in COVID lockdown.

But: he demonstrates more self-awareness about his deficits than Harris did. He has taken some steps to moderate his image — for example, he admitted that Democrats are out to lunch on the trans sports issue, and he has pushed hard to give California municipalities more tools to force the homeless off the streets — and his podcasting foray, precisely because it is annoying to some Democrats, demonstrates an understanding that he’ll have to connect with and appeal to very different audiences than he has so far in his career.

So here is my qualified praise for Newsom: while I continue to think nominating him would be a mistake, I’d rather nominate him than Harris or JB Pritzker or Tim Walz or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any number of other likely candidates who seem to believe that Democrats can win either by keeping their existing branding and positioning, or by shifting it to the left. And I worry that Newsom will enter the race in a dominant position — he’s already leading the prediction markets, and he’s about as high in the polls as Harris is — and that the main strategy for much of the field will be to differentiate from him by getting to his left, piling on added general election liabilities if we nominate one of the underdogs.

But, again, I am pulling for Shapiro. Shapiro has an argument that I think ought to be very appealing to Democratic primary voters: He has shown that he can win handily in exactly the sort of swing states we need to win to reclaim the presidency, and there’s no evidence that Newsom or most of the other prominent candidates in the field can do that. But I’m not sure that Democratic voters will find that persuasive — they would need to be in a more pragmatic mood than they appear to be in now.

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I’ve written a few pieces recently about how Democrats need to find their way back to the popular side on several issues where they’ve gotten way out of touch with the median voter. Really, I think there are four big ones: immigration, energy and climate, crime (which I guess I should write on soon), and gender issues. On the last topic, I’ve written that Democrats should say that sports leagues should be organized by sex and I’ve urged Texas primary voters not to nominate a Senate candidate who has said “God is non-binary” on tape.

We also had a conversation about the trans sports issue this week on Central Air. And when I write or talk about this topic, I tend to get letters like the one below, which came from listener Eli:

I was listening to episode three with the discussion of trans kids playing sports. My thesis is that modern conservatives will pick on any vulnerable group and target them with cruel and bullying behavior. Not to strawman centrists, but it seems the prescribed reaction is to either join in or leave them to the wolves if they happen to poll below majority support. That was the case for gay people in the 90s and 2000s and I’m curious what the group feels the centrists of the day should have done? The “groups” at the time were raising gobs of money to advocate for HIV/AIDS, advocacy for gay teens, etc. It was a centerpiece of the 2004 election, and yet Democrats continued to keep gay advocacy in the platform and at the convention. Would the centrists of the day say they should’ve been thrown to the wolves instead?

I have a few things to say in response to this.

First, note that Eli makes no real argument for policies like organizing sports leagues around gender identity. All he offers is a conclusory allegation that failure to support this policy amounts to throwing trans people “to the wolves.” This rhetorical approach — emotionality and accusation, not argument — is the typical mode of trans advocacy, and it has not worked at all. In fact, as people have become more aware of trans issues over the years, the percentage of people supporting trans rights has declined. Queer Majority has an excellent essay this week from Jamie Paul on the failure of trans activism that I strongly recommend — in it, Paul faults (among other things) both the strategy and tone of trans activism: telling people they must support a particular agenda around trans issues unless they want to be “cruel and bullying,” as Eli contends in his email, is not just bound to fail. It has failed.