No one wants a Gavin Newsom podcast — not even Democrats 

A new survey out this week from CNN offered another reminder that, whatever they may be telling themselves in the Beltway, Democrats are about as popular as a skin rash. The party is now skidding along its lowest favorability levels in history, dogged by voters who simply don’t take Democrats seriously.  

The common-sense response would be for Democratic leaders to heed that voter feedback and start doing more things their voters actually want, like the 57 percent of Democrats who want the party to more aggressively oppose President Trump’s legislative agenda. Instead, the country’s top Democrats put their heads and wallets together and came up with … podcasts. 

The announcement of a glitzy, profoundly ill-conceived new podcast by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) should be met with a resounding groan by anyone serious about fixing the Democratic Party’s problems. If party leaders want voters to take them seriously on the long road to 2026, they’ll stop humoring ideas like this and focus on talking to actual Democratic voters. 

It’s hard to know where to start with elite Democrats’ latest effort to build their own paperboard version of Joe Rogan’s influential podcast empire. Trump’s appearance on Rogan and other popular “manosphere” podcasters — and the GOP’s insistence that it made the difference in November — dug into Democrats’ psyches in a way few Republican strategies seem to have before. The idea that the same party that once dominated social media and pioneered podcasting could now be decisively losing to Trump sent shockwaves through the Democratic establishment. After all, isn’t this why we had Pod Save America? 

Pundits were quick to decide it was Rogan that had tipped the balance. “Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN,” The Nation justice correspondent Elie Mystal posted on Nov. 6, with ballots still being counted. It’s easy to understand why Democrats would want a piece of Rogan’s more than 17 million Spotify followers — even if he didn’t tip the scales in 2024, his format represents one of the few ways Americans today willingly engage with political content. If you aren’t versed in your Theo Vons, Talk Tuahs and h3h3s, you simply aren’t having the same conversation as middle America. 

But podcasts are seductive to Democrats for more than just their cultural relevance. They allow the party to ignore its biggest challenges by reframing a behavioral problem (Democratic lawmakers aren’t doing the things their voters would like them to do) as a messaging problem (Democratic voters just don’t understand that Democratic lawmakers are right). Even after an electoral drubbing in November, prominent party figures like Newsom are still convinced they know better than their voters.  

Take one of Newsom’s recent, much-maligned episodes featuring an extended conversation with MAGA axe-man Steve Bannon. At a time when a near-supermajority of the Democratic base wants their elected leaders to vigorously oppose efforts to normalize Trump’s agenda, Newsom’s off-key pitch for bipartisan understanding comes off as dismissive to voters’ wishes — and harmful to the party’s anti-Trump message.  

The idea that Democrats can talk away the party’s malaise with an endless stream of near-identical podcasts shows just how stuck today’s Democratic Party has become. Voters who feel their leaders have become too distant from their day-to-day lives don’t want to see Gavin Newsom breaking bread with a member of the far-right elite. They want to see Newsom giving it back to Republicans as good as they give it to Democrats — something voters repeat almost weekly in the party’s own internal polling. 

Instead of trying to create their own parallel infrastructure, Democrats need to engage with the podcasting world that already exists. But that will first require the Democratic Party to decide what it believes and what it actually has to say to the listening public. Unfortunately for the party, that’s exactly the thorny discussion they’re trying to avoid by launching podcasts in the first place. Eventually, something has to give. 

There won’t be any easy fixes for the deep trust issues between the Democratic base and party leaders in Washington, and investing resources into messaging won’t bear fruit until the party finally decides what its post-Biden message is. They can start by spending less time listening to Steve Bannon and more time listening to the voters who are deserting them in droves. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.