A quirky podcast conversation between Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Tim Walz (D-MN) revealed an important divide within the Democratic Party as it seeks to regain power.
Newsom kept urging Democrats to find ways to win back the voters they lost to President Donald Trump and the Republicans. Walz, the unsuccessful 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, suggested the party find new ways to fight Trump and his allies.
It’s one of the most important debates taking place among Democrats after they lost the White House and the Senate last year. Their House majority was wiped away in the 2022 midterm elections. Democrats also suffered only their second national popular vote loss at the presidential level since 1988.
Typically, the party out of power splits between forces that want to pivot back to the center, correcting mistakes that cost it the previous election, and those that think it is important to draw a stronger ideological contrast with their opponents.
The Democrats in 2025 are no different. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has made rhetorical overtures to Republicans and voted with them a handful of times. And Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) jeopardized his leadership position by defying the progressive base on a government shutdown. Both have faced backlash from those on the Left who want congressional Democrats to fight the GOP agenda at all costs.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has been criticized for being too left-wing and cautious. Her past progressive positions, especially those taken in her failed 2020 presidential campaign, cost her votes in November. But she also soft-pedaled or reversed many of those stances, seeming like a flip-flopper and potentially depressing progressive enthusiasm for her candidacy.
Newsom would surely like to be the Democratic standard-bearer in 2028. Since launching his podcast, he has interviewed MAGA figures such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. The California governor has also repudiated many progressive excesses, such as biological men competing as transgender women in female sports and the term “Latinx.”
Walz might also be looking to strike out on his own after being Harris’s understudy in the 2024 campaign, especially if she doesn’t run again. The Minnesotan was sure to demonstrate he remained appropriately outraged by MAGA in all its forms.
While Newsom said he wanted “to first understand what their motivations are” and figure “what they’re actually doing,” Walz had a simpler question for dealing with their shared political opponents: “How do we put some of those guys back under a rock?”
“These are bad guys, though,” Walz said as Newsom explained why he had people such as Bannon and Kirk on his podcast. “These are bad guys.”
“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,” Newsom said, later adding that what Bannon says “reminds me a lot of what Bernie Sanders was saying, reminds me a lot of what Democrats said 20, 30 years ago.”
“But he denies the election!” Walz shot back, referring to 2020 instead of the more recent election he and other Democrats lost.
Neither Newsom nor Walz is an ideal candidate for a Democratic rebranding. Both face major authenticity problems. Walz said of Trump supporters, “I do think I could kick most of their ass,” a characteristically awkward formulation. Newsom would have to explain constantly changing positions no less than Harris did and defend California’s dysfunction and liberalism.
But their conversation highlighted the Democrats’ choices in the next two elections. They can continue to run on democracy, Jan. 6, fighting Trump, and more or less reinforcing the progressive agenda. Or they can try to adjust, both in style and substance, so they are no longer on the wrong side of public opinion on as many matters.
The third option is to wait for Trump to self-destruct. It has happened before, and it is easy to see opportunities for it to happen again.
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Yet, after nearly a decade in national politics, Trump is still here. He is in the Oval Office while two leading lights of the Democratic Party are arguing about his aides on a podcast having failed to “kick most of their ass.”
It’s a conversation Democrats will be having a lot over the next couple of years.