Gavin Newsom Says Democrats Need to Go On the Offense to Win Back Voter Approval | Video

California Gov. Gavin Newsom got into a spirited conversation Tuesday with Minnesota Gov. (and Kamala Harris’ chosen Vice Presidential candidate) Tim Walz on the latest episode of his podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom.”

During their chat, Newsom shared his opinion about how Democrats should combat the growing popularity of the Right in America.

“The bottom line is … we cannot continue to be on the defense,” he said. “We’ve got to go on the offense. We’ve got to meet people where they are. But I also think, and this is part of the conversation I’m trying to have, is you’ve got to respect people you disagree with and you can’t just dismiss people.”

Newsom’s comments come less than a week after CNN released a poll that revealed the Democratic Party currently holds an all-time low 29% favorability score among American voters. At the start of the 2-minute podcast clip that Newsom shared on his X account, Walz pointedly asked if Republicans have simply deduced “that the identity piece of this is more important than the actual substance behind it?”

“They’ve been doing it for decades,” Newsom responded, citing well-known right-wing political messaging strategies of the past. “I mean, we saw the welfare queens. They’ve seen the Southern Strategy. We’ve seen it over and over. It’s an old playbook, and we’re as dumb as we want to be that we allow them to do this with CRT [critical race theory] and ESG [environmental, social and governance] and DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion].”

“[They] demonize and they weaponize grievance. They other people. They talk down to people, past people,” he continued. “They humiliate people. They weaponize difficult issues.” You can watch the full clip, below.

When Walz confessed that he doesn’t know if the proper response to the Right’s current surge is to challenge his political rivals to a “WWE fight,” Newsom countered, “It’s a natural reaction, and I think it’s one of the reasons we’re losing so many men. And again, it’s multi-ethnic. It’s not just white men. We’re losing them to these guys online. We’re losing them to people that I’m bringing on this podcast as well.”

Newsom’s first wave of podcast episodes have featured interviews with notable right-wing figures like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, whom Walz didn’t hesitate to label as “bad guys.” The host replied, “But they exist, and we could deny they exist. Not only do they exist, they persist, and they’re actually influencing young kids every single day.”

Responding to Walz’s question about pushing figures like Bannon and Kirk “back under a rock,” Newsom further dove into his opinion on the matter, saying, “I think we have to first understand what their motivations are. I think we have to understand what they’re actually doing.”

“You don’t think it’s racism and misogyny?” Walz asked. “I think there’s a lot of that, but I don’t think it’s exclusively that,” Newsom admitted. “When you talk to a guy like Steve Bannon, he talks about working folks and he talks about how we hollowed out the industrial core of this country.”

“So we can dismiss the notion of election denialism. We could completely dismiss what he did on Jan. 6. But I don’t think you can dismiss what he’s saying,” the politician concluded, adding, “[It] reminds me a lot of what Bernie Sanders was saying. Reminds me a lot of what Democrats said 20, 30 years ago.”

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