Newsom defends backing socialist candidates, calling party divides ‘healthy’

Gavin Newsom wants it both ways, and he's not even being subtle about it. For months he's been running the "reasonable moderate" playbook, doing podcasts with conservatives, talking about how Democrats need to stop losing normal voters. Now he's out there calling the party's socialist wing just another flavor of "healthy" disagreement, the same way you'd describe a debate over infrastructure spending. That's not moderation. That's a man counting votes for 2028 and hedging every bet on the table.

Here's the thing Newsom is dancing around: socialism isn't a policy disagreement, it's a different theory of what America is for. When a candidate wants to nationalize industries or blow up the market economy, that's not a spirited primary, that's a fork in the road. Calling it "healthy" is the kind of thing you say when you need both the AOC crowd and the suburban donors to like you at the same time.

Democrats keep pretending this tension is a feature, not a problem. It isn't. Every cycle they let the socialist flank get louder because nobody wants to be the guy who tells the base no, and every cycle the party pays for it with voters in the middle who don't want a revolution, they want groceries to be cheaper. Newsom knows this. He's just not willing to say it out loud yet, because saying it out loud might cost him votes he needs in a primary before he needs votes he needs in a general.

If Newsom actually believes what he says on cable news about pragmatism, he should act like it and draw an actual line somewhere. Instead we get "healthy," a word politicians use precisely when they don't want to answer the question.