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The Ezra Klein Show

Dec. 10, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

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The Contradictions of Gavin Newsom

How the California governor became the 2028 Democratic front-runner.CreditCredit...The New York Times

The Contradictions of Gavin Newsom

How the California governor became the 2028 Democratic front-runner.

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

That Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, might want to run for president someday has been widely believed for a long time. That he would have a chance if he ran for president — that was less widely believed. A liberal white guy from a state the country considers badly governed just didn’t seem like the profile that either the Democratic Party — or the country — was looking for.

Well, things change. If you look at polls of the likely Democratic field now, Newsom leads in many of them. If you look at the Polymarket betting odds on who will be the 2028 Democratic nominee, Newsom is far ahead of anyone else. Jonathan Martin, a senior political columnist at Politico, wrote a piece titled “Admit It. Gavin Newsom Is the 2028 Front-Runner.”

Look, I know it’s all very early to be talking about 2028. And in this episode, I try not to. But even putting the future aside, Newsom has become, without any doubt, one of the Democratic Party’s leaders at a time when the party is desperately looking for leadership.

And as a Californian, someone who has watched and covered Newsom for a long time, he has surprised me. He is experimenting, trying new things. He has a feel for this moment — not just in politics but also in how attention now works — in a way that very few other Democrats have demonstrated. And he does not seem, in the way so many Democrats seem, afraid: of taking risks and failing — or of making his own side angry.

And it is working for him.

It began right after the election, when Newsom launched a podcast on which he began interviewing people like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich and Michael Savage.

That podcast pissed off Democrats. I heard from many of them. But I watched Newsom in those episodes, and I thought: He is listening. And I wondered what he is learning from them.

At the same time, Newsom turned himself into the leader of the resistance. He began trolling Trump on social media, talking about the president in the same terms the president talks about everyone else.

It worked. Suddenly, I was being sent, left and right, Newsom tweets.

And then when Texas began its midcycle redistricting, Newsom did something many found shocking. He pushed through a ballot initiative to pause California’s independent redistricting, a huge point of pride in California — and something he had, by the way, supported. He instead created highly partisan maps to counter Texas’ — an attempt that could have not succeeded, and would have looked terrible had it failed, yet passed overwhelmingly.

But Newsom’s problem as a leader for the Democratic Party is what it has always been. California is, in my view, the greatest state in the nation, the place I love more than anywhere else on Earth. But at a time when the politics of affordability are paramount, California routinely ranks as the least affordable. Newsom has signed many good bills and done many good things, but he has not fixed that.

So I wanted to have Newsom on the show to talk through what he has learned from the right, what he believes must be the future of the Democratic Party and how he answers California’s manifold critics.

Ezra Klein: Governor Gavin Newsom, welcome to the show.

Gavin Newsom: It’s great to be with you.

I can’t believe I was on your podcast before you were on mine.

Well, that’s the way it should be.

[Laughs.]

I needed some numbers, I needed some audience, so thank you for providing that. I’m grateful.

I’m happy to help.

So I’ve been watching interviews with you recently. Everyone starts by asking you about the Democratic Party.

Yes.

I want to ask you about the right. I am always struck by how much of the modern right comes out of California.

It’s interesting, it’s interesting.

You have Breitbart in California. Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire begin in California. Stephen Miller grew up in California.

That’s right. Santa Monica.

Peter Thiel. Curtis Yarvin is based in California. The Claremont Institute, the intellectual home of Trumpism, is also located there.

Why do you think that California has birthed so much of the new right?

Well, look, it’s the size of 21 state populations combined. So you have to put it in perspective. There’s nothing like it in scale, size and scope. You have more Republicans in California than most states have population, so you have to put all of that in perspective.

By definition, in a very pluralistic state, its politics are very diverse — even despite its perception of being a big blue state. You look at a map, two-thirds of that state is deeply red. You have some of the most conservative counties in America, and you have some of the most historically conservative counties going back decades and decades, like Orange County —

My county.

Your county — that really forged the modern construct of Reaganism and Nixon and these guys who came from that frame. So in that respect, it’s not surprising.

But Stephen Miller — I think that’s interesting because there’s this dialectic, that pushback to orthodoxy. The friction and the people who emerge from that emerge with a very strong point of view.

I know some of these guys. I don’t know some of the others. Do you think there’s something, too, about the way they end up feeling embattled on the wrong side of history? Everybody says, and I believe: California is a place where the future happens first. And a lot of them felt like they were watching what they believed in get encircled.

It seems to me it created a kind of conservatism that is much more apocalyptic, much more ethnonationalist —

It’s certainly ethnonationalist.

Much more about trying to stop where things are going — rather than preserve the best of where things were.

Yes. Ron Brownstein has written a lot about the forces of restoration in that context versus the forces of transformation. These guys want to put America in reverse. They want to bring us back in many ways to a pre-1960s world on voting rights, civil rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, women’s rights, etc.

And look, you think about that in the context — or I think about that in the context — of the California in your question. To me, that peaked in my modern construct, in terms of contemporary space, in 1994 with Pete Wilson, a Republican governor.

***Archival clip: ***One of the hardest-fought state races is in California, where incumbent Republican governor Pete Wilson is facing Democratic challenger Kathleen Brown, and where the issue of illegal immigration could be a decisive one.

***Archival clip: ***Wilson believes he has touched a nerve. He is backing Proposition 187, which would deny immigrants basic services like health and education for their children.

And on that same ballot was the beginning of the end of affirmative action, which occurred at the University of California Regents meeting shortly thereafter.

But Proposition 187 was all about pushback. The xenophobia, the nativism, the pushback against immigration — peak 1994.

Archival clip:* They keep coming: 2 million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them but requires us to pay billions to take care of them. Enough is enough. Governor Pete Wilson.*

***Archival clip: ***Those against 187 were heard in the streets but not at the polls.

And of course his ascendancy running for re-election was all about his presidential aspirations, as well.

***Archival clip of Pete Wilson: ***I am seeking the presidency of the United States. The values that guided us for over 200 years are suddenly under siege, and so is America.

So it was directional, not just in California, but growing across the United States. We’ve had this for decades. There’s a familiarity here.

But the response to that is also interesting. I think in many respects, the response to Proposition 187 and Pete Wilson’s success has a lot of clues in terms of how the Democratic Party responds to this moment and reasserts our success moving forward, in terms of rebuilding the party.

What clues?

It was about grass roots. It was about building movements. It was about connecting communities. It was about NGOs. It was about community organizers. It was truly bottom up, and it forced a discipline that led to a lot of organizations that are thriving today that quite literally came out of what they perceived as chaos, of 1994, 1995.

I think about it now in the context of where we were in 2004, as well. In terms of where our party is, we got shellacked: We lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost the presidency. And then we built Media Matters, and we built Center for American Progress. We built Democracy Alliance.

We started organizing millennials. We started organizing Hispanics. We started focusing on mobile, local, social, cloud — “cloud” meaning technology. And we built this bottom-up movement that brought us back into the majority with Nancy Pelosi two years later. And then two years after that, in 2008, we had a 53 percent popular vote, the most since 1964, to get Barack Obama into the White House.

So it was a remarkable story of resilience, but it was also the hard work in 2005 and 2006 that set that course.

So I often think about the ’04 analogy. I think the Democratic Party was probably more shattered and broken after 2024, but I think people don’t remember 2004 and how bad that felt — the sense that the Democratic Party had lost touch with the heartland. It had to be a completely different thing.

I was reading books about going to Applebee’s — “Applebee’s America.” It was all about appearing less frank. You can’t have Hermès ties anymore. I mean, it was all about the heartland.

It’s so familiar, so much of this. All this stuff echoes over and over and over and over again.

You’ve actually been trying to figure out different parts of America. So I was struck, after the election, to see you start a podcast, homing in on our territory here.

You didn’t expect that?

I got to say I didn’t. Well, you’ve actually had a podcast before with Marshawn Lynch.

Yes, “Beast Mode.”

Archival clip:

[Music]

Marshawn Lynch:* Man, what’s happening, man? You got Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch.*

Doug Hendrickson:* Doug Hendrickson.*

***Gavin Newsom: ***And Gavin Newsom, and you’re listening to Politickin’.

So talking about podcasts, I didn’t expect you to have — that probably beat this one.

[Laughs.] Yes.

But I would not have expected you to start with Charlie Kirk as your first guest. Steve Bannon. Dr. Phil. Michael Savage. I’ve watched you in these interviews. You’re listening. You’re looking for threads of interest and agreement.

Yes.

I watched Steve Bannon tell you repeatedly how the 2020 election was stolen. You just let the pitches go right by.

Because, I mean, how many debates have we had about that? He’s wrong, and it’s exhausting.

I want to ask what has stayed with you from these conversations and what you have been learning across a couple of them.

Let’s start with Kirk. What, for you, was the most resonant point Charlie Kirk made? And I don’t mean here that you have to have agreed with it —

Oh, yes — no, I appreciate that.

Just something that has made you think about the world a little bit differently.

I thought there was a deeper sincerity than I had anticipated, in terms of his point of view and his perspective. A willingness to engage with people he disagreed with, a willingness to debate — to the extent that he thought — in a fair and balanced way. I think there’s grace in that. Someone deeply focused on organizing in a deeper way than I fully understood.

Archival clip:

***Charlie Kirk: ***Right around, I’d say 2021, we had a goal: Could we move the youth vote 10 points over 10 years?

***Newsom: ***You literally sat down and put that number?

***Kirk: ***Yeah, like, can we move it 10 points over 10 years? Because our whole hypothesis was — and we did this alongside President Trump and his great team — that this demographic is disproportionately to the Democrat side, and we believe Democrats were taking them for granted.

Someone who understood more deeply the pain that young men are facing and struggling with.

***Archival clip of Kirk: ***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 going to have the same American dream that your parents would have. And we saw this as an opportunity, especially with young men.

And was able to do something about it and give them hope and recognize that society is failing young men.

And he was someone who clearly was playing an outsize influence — even greater than I fully understood — in terms of supporting the base of the MAGA movement.

What part of his perspective on how society is failing young men felt reasonable or recognizable to you? And which part didn’t?

Look, everybody knows the stats. If you’re 30 years old, you’re the first generation living that’s not doing better than your parents. And there’s a sense of nihilism that’s growing. I’ve had a number of other interesting guests — Atrioc and others. I went down to TwitchCon and was there with a lot of gamers, really trying to get into the belly of the beast of understanding where young men are, and this pain and suffering, this isolation, that’s turning increasingly to grievance — that they’re never going to do better than their parents, they’re never going to get out of that room with three roommates. They can’t even afford rent because they can’t afford the first two months’ payment on the rent, let alone buy a home.

And this nihilism, Kirk understood. Certainly Trump understood it, as well. He took advantage of it. But they have no prescriptions to address it and deal with it.

Of course, I only had an hour-and-a-half conversation with Charlie, but where it seems to me to have fallen short with Turning Point USA and the MAGA movement is they don’t have a prescription to actually address the real and substantive issues — but they sure as hell identify the problem.

Well, isn’t that a prescription? If I were to try to boil it down: tariffs, a closed border and Christianity?

Christianity is a big part. That was also telling.

I lazily said, “Jesus!” and he got offended. And then I said it again, and I realized: Boy, I really am offending him now. Forgive me.

I didn’t understand how deeply held his faith was and how much of an organizing principle it was for him, as well.

Oh, yes.

And how these rallies and everything — that’s interesting. Just that merger in terms of creating community, a sense of belonging, meaning, identity — it’s hard to break.

I mean, he was trying to build a new Christian right.

Yes, and Trump understands that. It gives people meaning and purpose. It’s powerful. I haven’t been to a Bernie rally necessarily, but it seems not dissimilar. Even more, there’s a religious construct to it. That’s powerful. Faith, community, belonging — we’re desperate for that. And those are universal. Those are not right and left.

Are you religious or spiritual at all?

Yes, spiritual, probably, more than religious. As my dad would say: I went to Catholic schools and went to a Jesuit university — I’m a Catholic of the distant kind. I’ll go to church on Christmas. I’m one of those. But I feel a deep connection to my faith beyond that in a spiritual sense.

And a Jesuit upbringing really has defined me. St. Francis is our patron saint in San Francisco: “Many parts, one body.” When one part suffers, we all suffer. This notion of social justice, racial justice, economic justice is deeply ingrained in me. It has really shaped me in that respect.

So I don’t dismiss that when I talk to someone like Charlie. I respect that deeply. I admire that.

Look, I think there are a lot of grievances there. But there are also a lot of grievances I have in this space: that my party has completely neglected this space, that we haven’t been organizing the campuses.

We haven’t been organizing young men. We haven’t been addressing their societal screams, their concerns. Their suicide rate — four times that of women. Their dropout rates. Their depths of despair. We have men who are suffering, and it’s hurting women. Any mother understands this.

I’ve got two boys, and one of them, as you know if you listened to that podcast, was so excited Charlie Kirk was coming on because his algorithms are saying that Andrew Tate is innocent, and this guy Jordan Peterson is an unbelievable thought leader up in Canada, and Joe Rogan is the best. And Charlie Kirk — you really need to get to know him, Dad.

I started to wake up to this reality that the Democratic Party needs to wake up to. And that’s, again, the entry into why I did this podcast and had those folks on as first guests.

I thought one of the most interesting shows you did was with the streamer Atrioc.

Yes, thank you.

What did you take from that conversation?

You know what’s so interesting? He was wonderfully combative with me. I kept wanting to talk about his history as a streamer and a gamer. He had no interest.

***Archival clip of Atrioc: ***I do want to start talking about Gen Z men and the issue I’m seeing. Not all of them are like this. It’s a broad, diverse group, of course, and it’s a huge point of my audience, and I’m hearing them. I’m hearing their thoughts a lot. They range from angry to openly nihilistic.

He said: I’m coming on because my audience is pissed off. Pissed off with you, pissed off with everybody, Democrats and Republicans. You’re not listening to us. They’re struggling, they’re suffering, and you’re not listening to us. It’s not about gaming. It’s not about Discord. It’s not about Twitch. It’s about what the hell you guys haven’t done to address the crisis for so many young people and how they’re feeling today.

***Archival clip of Atrioc: ***If I could boil it down to one word, it’s like radicalism is when no house. If you can’t get a house, if you don’t see a path to get a house. And I hear this all the time. Some of them are working. They’re working decent jobs. They’re working hard. It’s not even feasible in a lot of these cities to ever get a house.

It was remarkable.

***Archival clip of Atrioc: ***Once you feel like you can get on that ladder, you’re OK. You can calm down, you can find a party, you can vote. But if you can’t see that, what’s the point? Why am I doing it? Why am I working this job for a boss I hate, for wages that are only OK? I’m never going to get another step up.

And it was not just illuminating — it woke me up.

Wake up! Wake up, Democratic Party! Wake up, everybody! People are suffering and struggling.

And look, Trump understood that in contemporary terms. I didn’t understand that in these terms. I was out there making a case, and I was one of the last men standing for Biden. And I was talking about the economy in the aggregate — 15.4 million jobs, eight times more than the last three Republican administrations combined, the best jobs market since the 1960s. All of these things were true.

All that said, I missed the obvious point: That’s in the aggregate. We’re talking about the economy. We’re not talking about the American people. We’re not talking about people’s lived experience. And we missed that.

Atrioc kept bringing that back — that systemically, for decades, this economy has not been working. Ten percent of people own two-thirds of the wealth; half the consumer spending is that top 10 percent. The stock market is seven damn stocks. Maybe 10, but primarily seven. Mostly in California.

And so he burst that reality in a way that pierced me even more than all the intellectual punditry — the things you and other people have written — because he brought it home.

You didn’t have to make it personal here, man.

[Klein and Newsom laugh.]

But it’s not nourishing the economy for enough people. People are living on edge. And I saw that at home — I lived that reality. But it’s deeper than that now.

I mean, we were able to finally afford a home —

But I think somebody listening to this could say: Look, you’re the governor of California. Nobody was unaware that inflation was punishing people, that homes had become extremely unaffordable for young people. Nobody was unaware that there was pain.

When you say it burst a bubble for you, how was that bubble burst?

On my own rhetoric. I was so stubborn.

I’m talking about my rhetorical posture, not my understanding. Look, I’m the guy who did the $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers. No other governor in our country has done that. Twenty-five dollars per hour for health care workers. Doubled the earned-income tax credit. Who has universal health care, regardless of preexisting conditions, ability to pay and immigration status.

I’m deeply mindful of the imperative to address these underlying issues. So I’m not naive in that respect — quite the contrary. But my rhetoric did not match. And I think that rhetoric, this defensive posture — that inflation was cooling from that 9.1 percent, and the jobs market was growing; we were the envy of the world, Economist magazine and everybody else; G.D.P. growth — it just landed flat.

America is already great.

Yes. And Trump understood. So it was the rhetoric, not the reality that I’m trying to —

But let me get at this rhetoric and reality landing flat, because I do think there’s something pretty deep here.

When you used to defend Biden to me and to others, the word you would use about his governance, not necessarily his communication, is “master class.”

That’s right, I agree.

And you were probably the most effective at making the case people wished he would have made.

If these policies were so good, if the policies in California were so good, then what is the disconnect? Because ultimately this whole thing is supposed to work on a feedback loop between policy, reality, voting.

Was the policy not actually that good? Was it just unable to overcome the reality? What broke?

Well, I thought the policy was extraordinary.

Then why did it not make people happier?

Because program passing is not problem solving. So you have to establish that as a framework. When you pass a piece of legislation, that’s Day 1. Now you start at the beginning of a new process, which unfolds over the course of a period of time.

And it unfolds in ways that no one understands better than Ezra Klein, that no one understands better than the person sitting across —

I’m sure you say that to all the podcasters.

No, but it’s a fundamental fact of the frame of reference that we have together in terms of your abundance agenda — understanding process, understanding the labyrinth of governance, understanding jurisdictions, understanding the pluralistic realities of how you actually manifest and implement these ideals. That’s challenging, and that plays out in 50 states.

I mean, I just think about living in the Bay Area. There are 101 jurisdictions in the Bay Area alone. There are hundreds of special districts, J.P.A.s, and transit districts in addition to that. To get anything done, how you break that down — imagine, from the presidential perspective, the CHIPS and Science Act and the I.R.A. and the tax credits, etc., having that framework. Localism is still determinative.

You can drive a lot of reforms on NEPA and CEQA in California, etc. — but localism still outweighs so much of that. And perhaps that should have been communicated more effectively, but also it needs time to gestate.

Trump’s success is destroying, not building. That’s easy. And you can destroy in nanoseconds. The symbolism and the substance of the East Wing — that’s destruction. DOGE — destruction. And that kind of destruction somehow satiates people in this respect. They feel like: Oh, there’s something actually happening. There’s real action here.

But to be a builder, that’s where greatness is. That’s where greatness lies.

That’s what I believe was the master class of the Biden administration. It was able to create a framework to build again at scale — a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the I.R.A. — so we can compete against our most fierce competitor, China. In low-carbon, green growth, Biden delivered $369 billion.

The reality, though, obviously, is that Trump will take advantage of a lot of those investments. But he is also taking advantage of the narrative of destruction.

A view I hold, I think even more strongly now than I did when I was writing the book, which was mostly before the election: Liberal democracy will not work if policy cannot deliver at the speed of elections. When Democrats get to the point where they are endlessly justifying why everything is so slow —

[Chuckles.] Yes.

My favorite example of this is that when Medicare was passed, it took one year for the Medicare cards to go out. When Biden, in what was arguably the most popular single thing he passed during his presidency — certainly one of them — negotiated down Medicare drug prices, the way it was designed — and you can blame corporate influence on all kinds of things. But it’s still not — those 10 drugs, I think the first time people will pay those lower prices is next year. Just in time for Donald Trump to take advantage of it.

Yes. I get it.

If you break the cord between the things that Gavin Newsom is doing and Joe Biden is doing and what people can feel — how are voters supposed to make decisions?

I think that’s why they have turned to Viktor Orban and you’ve got more authoritarian leanings. It’s why we were all reverential a decade ago, with Tom Friedman and others writing breathlessly about the China model and how they’re going to clean our clock.

People — yes, they want action. They want to see results immediately — I get that. But we also believe in due process, believe in civil service, believe in the rule of law — not the rule of Don, not the law of the jungle.

We believe in oversight — advice and consent. We believe in due process and transparency. We don’t believe in cronyism — or perhaps we don’t.

I’m not saying we need to believe in Trumpism. I’m saying: What do you do to reconnect people to the fruits of governance?

So look, I’m trying to do that in real time. One of the things that I look back on in my term is if there was a mistake.

There are policy things, things I certainly should have or could have done. But this notion of compromise and being complicit in that process — where there are all these interest groups, and we just want to work through, and we’re making progress, it feels good, so we went 80 percent of the way, and we’re going to come back — I have lost all patience for that. Because I agree with you: The public has, as well. They want to see results.

And that was reflected in 13 housing bills that I disproportionately had to assert — well, a number of them I had to put in the budget, which you just don’t do, because it couldn’t get out of the legislature otherwise — in order just to assert and deliver with a mind-set that is aligned with your critique and your observation.

But again, there’s a balance there. Because I don’t want crony capitalism. I don’t want state capitalism. I don’t want command and control. I don’t want to blow up the procurement. I don’t want to just pick winners and losers.

Let’s take as a premise that the model where you walk in and you hand Donald Trump, sometimes nonmetaphorically, a gift made of gold to get good deals from him — it’s bad.

It’s not bad. It’s corrosive beyond words. It’s extraordinary what’s happening.

We’ll go with that.

Yes.

The model where government doesn’t deliver is also corrosive.

Yes.

You have a great metaphor in your book “Citizenville,” where you say that people treat government like a vending machine: They go and put their tax dollars into it, and when nothing comes out, they begin shaking the machine.

Yes, you kick the machine.

If Gavin Newsom or somebody Gavin Newsom likes was doing DOGE, but the thing DOGE claimed to be —

We have been doing it. I started DOGE. We spell DOGE O.D.I. It started in 2019.

That’s sort of worse than DOGE, actually. [Chuckles.]

Well, I agree. It was the Office of Digital Innovation. Now it’s the Office of Data Innovation. So I made it even worse, again.

We’ve reformed our procurement. We’ve reformed our civil service system. We have advanced more generative A.I. pilots than any other big state in the country — we continue to innovate in that space. But I didn’t try to do things to people. I tried to do things with people, so it didn’t get the kind of attention that running around onstage with — who is that guy?

Chainsaw.

Yes. Chainsaw.

Milei’s chainsaw.

Which our Argentine president or our dictator-in-chief would have generated.

I’ll give you a specific: We’ve installed more green energy projects last year than at any other time in history — 7,000 megawatts. We just had in Fresno County the $5 billion, 2,300 megawatt project, Darden, the largest solar battery project, one of the largest in the world, done in record time because of the new processes we’ve put in place.

We also did the same thing with fast-tracking around permits for an aboveground storage facility, the first in half a century in California. We’re doing the same with housing — 42 CEQA reform bills I’ve signed. Infill housing reforms, A.D.U. reforms. We can get into all that as they relate to single family housing reforms — everything that you have written about. And we have moved to a degree I don’t know that many states have.

So I’m completely aligned with you in terms of having to deliver. And I’ll tell you, if nothing else, Trump has awakened our party. That’s what people want to see — but for good, not for destructive purposes.

I want to move to Michael Savage. I think it is hard for people who didn’t grow up in the era of Limbaugh and Savage to understand what Savage culturally represented and why it was so surprising to see him on your show.

How would you describe who Savage was in his heyday?

Savage was at peak back in the day. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, dominating right-wing radio. He was an outsider in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. You talk about someone who was sitting there in the heart of the region and attacking 24/7 the culture and the community and the values.

And remember, the modern MAGA movement you could trace back, you could deeply argue, to Michael Savage. That’s why we thought he was an important guest.

***Archival clip of Michael Savage: ***If I were running, I would run on a campaign of borders, language and culture. Say: Well, what do you stand for Mr. Savage? Borders, language and culture. The Republicans are having meetings now, what they should stand for. You hear this? They’re still trying to determine what their motto is. Duh.

“Language, borders and culture” — that was his mantra for decades and decades. And so, for me, I thought that was perhaps one of the most interesting interviews. It sort of mined his consciousness of where we are today.

And then what did you actually take away from the conversation with him that you thought was interesting?

I think it’s just his history. He’s a big environmentalist. He’s got a lot of deep opinions. Very critical of the current administration as it relates to endangered species, as it relates to natural and working lands, as it relates to animal rights, more broadly defined.

He’s got an interesting progressive background that evolved — or devolved, depending on your point of view — through his own experiences. And he’s a family man — unbelievable relationship with his son, who’s unbelievably successful, interestingly, and his wife, which I admire. Family and faith.

You’re really connecting Kirk and Savage to the fact that they’re human beings. I know they’re human beings.

And I think it’s important.

But you’re talking to people on the right who have a very different —

Yes, but it’s not about right or left. For one thing, it’s a great irony talking to me because I’m fighting fire with fire, and I’m pushing back, and I’m being criticized for that, by being very aggressive, and I’m not holding punches.

At the same time, I say this all the time: Divorce is not an option. We have to live together and advance together across our differences. So I want to find those areas. I want to find the humanity. I want to find the “love” — I’ll use that word. We all need to be loved, we all need to love.

Savage’s view is that California is a kind of hellscape.

Yes.

***Archival clip of Savage: ***Five years ago I had a heart attack here in Marin County. So I’m rushed to Marin General. I have to wait in line, it’s filled with illegal aliens.

***Archival clip of Savage: You’ve got the ten zones where you’ve got snow to the desert. So ***it’s a perfect geographic location for me. But there’s a point at which I will leave this state, and will be taxation without representation.

***Archival clip of Savage: ***So Gavin, the homeless thing is the turning point. When that man defecated outside the window, that was the beginning of the end of San Francisco — not only for me but for the whole city.

And my point is not to have you agree or even disagree with that, but when you sit there and you listen to him and he lays it out, which part of it do you think: There is something to respond to here? Not the way he would respond to it — but is there some set of problems that from his perspective are visible but that from your perspective are harder to see?

Well, the affordability crisis — he’s 100 percent right. The poster child of our failure as a state is the issue of poverty that’s out on the streets and sidewalks as it relates to encampments and homelessness.

But look, he loves our state. That’s why he is living in the state — California. The vast majority of these guys who attack the state grew up in the state, made their wealth in the state — still have businesses in the state.

Elon Musk put his research and development headquarters — his world headquarters — back in California. His A.I. company is in California. SpaceX was launched in California. Tesla exists because of California. He’s a billionaire because of the state’s regulatory posture.

So many of these folks who are attacking the state all come from the state of California. What they don’t like is the progressive taxes.

I mean, tell me about it. [Laughs.]

Yes, you understand. But it’s the progressive tax — they want to take their capital gains someplace else, which I deeply understand.

Its homeless, housing and transportation problems are legendary. It’s a mass exodus.

The “California derangement syndrome” is not new is my long-winded point.

When I talk to people about you as a leader of the Democratic Party — and you’re a leading voice, let’s call it that for the moment.

Sounds pessimistic: “for the moment.”

So what are you suggesting? It won’t be for long? I get it. I read between the lines.

I’m not going to ask you seven different ways if you’re running in 2028.

God bless you.

What I am going to ask you is this: The big political issue of the day is affordability. California — U.S. News and World Report on Wallet Hub looked at all these different rankings — ranks 50th on affordability. These measures combine housing costs and other measures of the cost of living.

Why and what is the affordability agenda that is credible coming from the governor of California?

It’s interesting. Wallet Hub also talks about the happiest city index. Five of the Top 10 —

Listen, man, I’ve got redwoods tattooed on my arm. I grieve every day I’m not in California. You don’t need to tell me it’s the happiest place to live.

And in terms of taxes, which is interesting — Wallet Hub comes out with their annual survey on taxes saying we’re slightly above average on taxes. Total mythology there — it’s the highest tax rate in the country, but not the highest taxes across the board when you add in everything.

That said, the affordability issue in California is real. It’s been the original sin going back decades and decades. Housing — period, full stop. More things and more ways on more days. Explains everything. It’s the original sin in California. NIMBYism — we haven’t gotten out of our own way. We haven’t produced enough housing stock. It’s Economics 101: supply and demand. It’s not very complicated.

And when I started as governor, there was no housing agenda. There was no homeless agenda. It was not the responsibility or role of the state. It was assigned to cities and counties and regional Continuums of Care.

And we changed all that. In fact, I put a marker down within the first few days when I got into office by suing some cities in my state. Put 47 on notice, sued Huntington Beach, and have changed radically our approach to accountability, creating a housing accountability unit. Looked at state excess land sites, which unlocked over 5,000 units. Began a process of working with carrots and sticks to move from NIMBYism to a YIMBYist mind-set, which I think we have demonstrated in meaningful ways, in substantive ways.

We completed 110,000 housing units last year. It’s completely, completely underwhelming. And so we have more work to do.

Why is it so hard? Because you’ve wanted to do this. You set a 3.5 million housing production goal.

That was the aspirational goal. And then the legal goal, 2.5 million by 2030, became what we call the arena goals —

Great. Let’s use 2.5 million —

And that is the established legal — and by the way, it’s the first time we had goal setting that was this prescriptive.

But you’re not on track for either goal?

Well, no one is.

Yes, no one is.

Across the country. And by the way, that’s macroeconomics. You’ve got 1.2 million —

I spend, because I’m a nerd, a fair amount of time looking at statistics on housing starts in Austin and Houston —

Well, Austin is now having a big downturn in terms of costs because of some of the overbuilding. But it’s interesting.

Listen, I think of California having a big downturn in rents because of overbuilding —

You want to see that happen? [Chuckles.]

I think that would be a welcome change of problem.

No, I get it. But no, we have to build more houses.

I take you as genuinely serious. I’ve seen how many bills you’ve passed. I’ve covered a bunch of them. What makes this so hard?

Well, you’ve got 470 cities. You have 58 counties. I’ve mentioned 101 jurisdictions in the cities and counties just around the Bay Area. I haven’t even gotten to L.A. County. There are 88 cities, 88 leaders, C.O.C.s.

Everybody — everybody — is participatory in this. That’s the challenge. It’s that labyrinth.

And by the way, these folks aren’t happy. League of Cities is not happy. Our county partners are not happy.

We are asserting ourselves in ways that the state has never asserted itself into local planning decisions in order to break down those barriers, and we’ve been breaking down those barriers.

What we need is to break down the costs of borrowing. It’s the last piece that’s missing right now. I think we have shifted the dialogue. We have won the debate. We’re on the other side of this. And the proof point will be when we see the borrowing cost reduction.

So I think you can think about what it takes to build housing as having three buckets. One is land use, zoning, permitting, etc. — the legal traps you have to run in order to get started. Then there’s financing of construction — interest rates, things like that. And the cost of construction, which is related, but has to do with the cost of materials, labor, all the rest of it.

As you say, I think in a lot of blue states, the fight on land use and zoning is intellectually won. Whether or not it’s been totally won on policy is harder. But I do think that’s won.

The financing and the cost of construction, with Trump’s tariffs and deportations, is getting worse on a bunch of levels. Tell me about those, because I actually think those are harder to talk about.

You didn’t even bring up productivity, which is down about 30 percent since 1970 to 2020.

In the housing sector.

In the housing sector. In every other part of our economy —

I’m pulling that into the cost of construction, but yes.

And so, let’s establish, situationally: The tariffs environment has impacted the cost of goods, so material supplies have gone up.

He’s made it worse — Donald Trump. The labor shortages are real. Today there was a Wall Street Journal article showing a 300,000- or 400,000-plus construction workers shortage — and they can’t even get enough data center workers to address some of the energy needs for A.I., etc. And that’s been exacerbated by the mass deportation efforts. So those two things are important.

But the issue of productivity goes to deeper questions now around: Can we look at new styles of construction? Are we going to promote, at scale, modular housing? Prefab housing —

This is off-site — you’re building houses like you’d build a car and then assembling them on site.

And it’s also 3-D printing, which is really interesting. There are some interesting companies in Texas. They’re actually working with NASA in terms of some opportunities there, in terms of new materials. A.I., as it relates to the materials space, is also interesting in relation to this conversation.

So I do think we’re about to experience a completely different shift on the productivity side because of necessity, because of the reality, because of the crisis of affordability.

And this holds a lot of promise. It holds a lot of political peril in the context of the politics within labor. And that has to be accommodated and dealt with.

By the way, if there’s a big preview for California my last year, it’s in this space legislatively to take it to the next level. But we have to accommodate because there are a lot of unions within —

I want to slow down what you just said here, just for people who are not as into the modular housing debate as we are.

So right now, building housing is: Guys show up with hammers.

Same way they have been since the beginning of time.

This is why productivity is down.

Yes.

There’s no place in America that does a ton of off-site manufactured housing. But in Sweden, I think more than 80 percent of single family homes are now off-site manufactured. You can have modular build, as many places do, in unionized factories.

That’s right.

So it doesn’t have to be a nonunion industry, but it still means fewer builders.

And it means: Which unions, which different skills and which trades are part of that? And therein lies the issue we have to address.

When you talk about addressing it, I think you’re pointing toward there being some way that it can be addressed. But on some level, it will mean fewer people building on-site unless we increase housing production so much that you have a volume difference.

Yes, and that’s the opposite — the goal is to do what we need to do, which is the abundance agenda — actually addressing the demand side of the equation. So I think we’ll be fine for a decade or two as we work out of this morass, this mess we’ve created, not just in California but all across this country.

You had a hell of a conversation with Steve Bannon.

I thought I was talking to Bernie Sanders for half of it.

It’s interesting.

I mean it.

I’ve had that experience with him. What did you take from that, the strange horseshoe nature of the populism that he espouses — maybe a little bit more when he is talking to people on the left — but that I think is authentic to him?

I think it is authentic. I mean, he has a point of view. He has a perspective.

***Archival clip of Steve Bannon: ***Let’s get back to why President Trump won again. You basically have working class people, middle class people, particularly down the chain. They’ve seen the bailouts on Wall Street, they’ve seen the oligarchs be made, they don’t think they have agency in a global supply chain. They think they’re just a cog in the machine, that their voice is not heard. They’re kind of dismissed culturally. And I don’t care if you’re Black, Hispanic or white working class. It’s not a race thing or ethnicity — you’re just dismissed.

He’s thought things through in a deeper way than I frankly understood. We’re so quick to dismiss: Oh, Steve Bannon tried to light democracy on fire on Jan. 6 — and the like.

Then you get under the hood, and he’s making a rational case for an industrial policy that’s worker centered. He’s making a rational case of critique and reflection about the W.T.O. and NAFTA. He’s making a reflective case that both parties — not just the Republican Party but also the Democratic Party — were complicit in the hollowing out of our infrastructure and our manufacturing base.

He’s making a case for progressive taxes. I stopped him in the interview. I said: You quite literally made a more effective case for California’s progressive tax policies than I or others have made. He was arguing that Trump on the “big, beautiful bill” made a mistake, that he should have increased corporate taxes and increased taxes on the 1 percent and lowered them for working folks.

***Archival clip of Bannon: ***On the upper brackets, I don’t want to see extension. I want them to go back to the old rates, and they have to pay the old rates. And then additionally, if they can’t help us get this under control, I’m all for increasing taxes on the — they will have a tax increase if President Trump doesn’t extend it, but then I think we’ll have another tax increase.

Had he done that, the Democratic Party would be in real trouble right now.

I’ve had this experience interviewing and then listening to Bannon. There are moments where I’m like: If Trump actually listened to this guy, the left would be in much more danger.

Real trouble. Had he done that, he would have, I think, created an enduring mega-movement.

I don’t think there is one after Trump. I think it’s going to fray. There’s no chance JD Vance could keep it together. Certainly not Rubio or anybody else.

Without Trump, there’s no Trumpism, there’s no ideological framework. But there could have been — he could have built the structure from a policy framework.

And Bannon, I think, is the thought leader in that respect. I say “thought leader,” and I know that offends a lot of liberal minds who are offended by Bannon and don’t want to attach any thoughtfulness to what he promotes, but I think we would be wise to listen.

And again, there’s got to be some grace. Learn from people. Success leaves clues. There’s power of emulation. You’ve got to get out of your bubble —