Gavin Newsom vs Tim Walz: If this was a Democrat primary debate, the party would be disbanded

Newsom came across as a politically-savvy chameleon with no ideological platform.

PUBLISHED MAR 19, 2025

Both Newsom and Walz, in their current avatars, would get a hiding at the polls by JD Vance.

Los Angeles: Gavin Newsom has had some very interesting guests on his ‘This Is Gavin Newsom’ podcast. And in each case Newsom revealed a little bit more about what a 2028 Presidential run by the California governor would look like.

He admitted to Charlie Kirk that his son was a fan of Kirk’s extremely successful campus initiative, Turning Point USA, even as he marveled at that phenomenon.

He almost seemed enamored – if slightly envious – of Steve Bannon’s populism, and his ability to lay it out without fear of political retribution.

He oozed respect for Republican stalwart and political seer Michael Savage, who took Newsom on a journey down memory lane and up around the corner, arriving at the malaise afflicting the current Democratic Party.

His first guest was the startlngly intelligent conservative icon Charlie Kirk (right).

And then he did something bizarre. He invited Tim Walz onto the show. The governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024 was a lightning rod for the right’s mockery on the trail. He was awkward and often looked like someone who had just woken from a deep slumber only to find himself on the downward dip of a particularly ill-made rollercoaster. But worse, he was so far to the Left that his decision to put tampons in boys’ toilets led to the ‘Tampon Tim’ monicker that utterly demolished any credibility he may have had.

So why have him on the podcast? If Newsom is looking to frame himself as a moderate liberal with a heavy dose of common sense, then it makes sense to have a possible far-left rival on the show to highlight just how out of touch with working class America his competitors are.

But while the podcast managed to emphasize Walz’s absolute inability to be an American president, it also highlighted Newsom’s reluctance to nail members of his own party to the wall, even the hamstrung ones.

Newsom will never be Joe Rogan and he shouldn’t even aspire to it, because we don’t need another Rogan.

Both he and Walz bemoaned the Democrats’ performance in 2024, but stopped short of actually deconstructing the reasons behind the failure or criticizing anyone (heaven forbid). Platitudes were thrown about, they tom-tommed the need to ‘connect’ with the voter without actually explaining how they would do it. This was MSNBC-lite.

Newsom came across as a politically-savvy chameleon with no ideological platform, while Walz emerged as a radical antagonist, unwilling to engage with ‘those people’ on the right. Both, in their current avatars, would get a hiding at the polls by JD Vance.

If Newsom had pressed Walz on his far-left ‘woke’ agenda or drilled down into the failure of the Harris-Walz campaign, this tepid Democratathon may have been salvaged. But by the time Newsom startlingly claimed the Harris-Walz campaign was “impressive”, the episode had ceased to become anything other than two prospective Democratic presidential candidates agreeing on things the rest of the country totally disagrees with.