John J. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Even Gavin Newsom has a political podcast now.
The governor of California hasn’t said whether he’s planning to run for president in 2028, but he’s clearly thinking about it — and everything the Democrat does these days compels pundits to speculate on how it helps or hurts his chances.
The initial reviews of “This is Gavin Newsom” are poor. Mark Z. Barabak of the Los Angeles Times called it “full-on cringe.” Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker labeled it “embarrassing.” Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times dubbed it “a protracted exercise in self-harm.”
Yet they are mostly media liberals who have disapproved of his Trump-friendly guests, such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. They have also objected to Newsom’s apparent efforts to back away from the woke progressivism that lately has defined Democrats. In his first episode, on March 6, the governor said that transgender athletes should not play female sports: “It’s deeply unfair.” He also scoffed at the word “Latinx,” a gender-neutral term for Latinos, even though he has used it repeatedly in the past.
Newsom has made headlines off his show, too. “The Democratic brand is toxic right now,” he said in an interview with the comedian Bill Maher on March 28. He pointed to an NBC News poll in which only 27 percent of registered voters expressed a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party. (The figure for Republicans was 39 percent.)
What Newsom’s critics haven’t noticed is that the governor is following the playbook of a famous predecessor who launched a multimedia campaign to communicate with voters half a century ago, as his party was sinking in the polls and his own ambitions shifted from Sacramento to Washington, D.C.
It worked out well for Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. If nothing else, Newsom’s approach may reveal that he’s studying the political path of the best statesman that California has ever produced.
A potential rival to Newsom without a new podcast is former vice president Kamala Harris, and she could be looking at the story of a different Republican: Richard Nixon, a fellow Californian who also lost a presidential election as vice president. After his defeat in 1960, Nixon returned to his home state, ran for governor in 1962, and lost again — but he also started to set the stage for his successful comeback in 1968, when he was elected president.
Harris supposedly has told allies that she’ll decide by this summer whether she’ll run for governor in 2026 — and she must wonder if her own road back to Washington might wind through California.
Nixon, of course, resigned in scandal in 1974. His notoriety devastated Republicans, who suffered badly in that year’s congressional elections. Yet it also opened the door for Reagan, who was then in the final months of his governorship.
As Reagan moved into private life, he plotted to remain on the public stage. He traveled extensively. He gave speeches constantly. He put his name on newspaper columns, which were mostly ghostwritten by an aide.
He also launched a daily radio commentary. He delivered more than 1,000 of these five-minute segments. The series began in January 1975 and ran to October 1979, with one interruption, when Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor as president, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Reagan stopped his radio segments permanently just before he began his bid for the White House.
Unlike the newspaper columns, Reagan wrote most of his radio scripts himself, in longhand and on legal pads. He addressed everything from the threat of the Soviet Union to the promise of free markets. The exercise of putting his ideas into words helped him develop the winning messages of the 1980 presidential election.
They were also forgotten until the scholar Kiron Skinner discovered them years later in Reagan’s personal papers. She published them in 2001 as “Reagan, In His Own Hand,” an edited book with Annelise and Martin Anderson. George P. Schultz, who was Reagan’s secretary of state, wrote the foreword: “To many people, President Reagan was a mystery. How did he know what to say? Who was handing him notes and whispering in his ear? Who was writing his speeches? Even some of his close aides were puzzled. … The answer to that mystery may lie in these essays.”
Newsom is adapting Reagan’s approach to the 21st century. Rather than writing essays, he’s engaging in free-flowing conversations, in a style suited for our age of so-called influencers. Rather than recording for radio, he’s making podcasts, which are perhaps best understood as on-demand radio programs.
Will it work? The odds against anybody making it to the White House are huge — but one way to get there may be to learn from the last century’s “Great Communicator.”