California Gov. Gavin Newsom sat down with Turning Point USA founder and Salem radio host Charlie Kirk for the Democrat’s first episode of his new podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” where he asked the grassroots activist to give some advice to his party following their 2024 election loss.
The two discussed a recent op-ed from Democrat strategist James Carville calling on his party to just sit back and let the GOP “crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” That strategy faced criticism from not only Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) but also from Newsom.
“I immediately, no B.S., thought about you, who's just 24/7 flooding the zone, owning this space every day, getting a convert every day, picking up one, two, 10,000 folks, continuing the momentum, coming out of this damn election," Newsom told Kirk, reports Fox News. "And then I'm thinking about - we're gonna stand back and watch you run circles around us for six months, the next two or three years, waiting for the moment to finally strike - struck me as not necessarily the best advice.”
While Kirk joked that he hoped Democrats followed that advice, he highlighted the party’s problem: “there’s no opposition, no activist spark. You guys are posting these cringe videos on social media.”
That last comment sparked Newsom’s interest—“What are the videos? What are the ones that are most cringy?”
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Kirk pointed to nearly two dozen Democrat senators posting videos saying the same thing.
That’s when Newsom genuinely asked for advice.
"Get better ideas, governor," Kirk responded.
Kirk explained he set a goal to move the youth vote 10 points believing the Democrats had taken them for granted and had ignored a real crisis among young people.
"This is the first time in America's history that a 30-year-old is gonna have it worse off than their parents. It's a breakdown of the social compact," Kirk said. "They are the most alcohol-addicted, most drug-addicted, most suicidal, most depressed, most medicated generation in history. And the message that was largely being fed to a lot of young people was lower your expectations. You're not gonna have the same American Dream that your parents would have. And we saw this as an opportunity, especially with young men.
"This got ridiculed a lot by the press that, 'Oh, you know, they're creating this manosphere thing.' Look, they're half of the population and necessary for any society and civilization to succeed, which is have both strong men and strong women. And we went about that in a very unique and creative way," he added.
And it wasn't just that Trump went all in on that strategy, going on a number of podcasts to reach young male voters, but Kirk explained he is also a cultural phenomenon because no matter what attacks the left threw at him, he rose above them all.
"And despite all of that, of course, being shot, and that was kind of the crescendo of all of it, he kind of became this figure of an American comeback story," Kirk explained. "So he personified what a lot of young people, especially young men, wanted back in their politics, which was an ascendant rebel attitude against these institutions that have failed them so miserably."
