1: DAMAGE YOUR OWN PARTY'S BRAND. 2: ???? 3: GET ELECTED.

The recent podcast chat between Gavin Newsom and Charlie Kirk was worse than you knew, reports Natasha Lennard of The Intercept (free to read here). I'm sure you knew about this:

Newsom told Kirk that he finds the participation of trans women in sports to be “deeply unfair.” “I completely agree with you on that,” he told Kirk, a man who called trans people a “throbbing middle finger to god” and “an abomination.”

But also:

Newsom showered Kirk with affirmation and only the most meagre of pushbacks; one listener counted that the governor used some variation of the word “appreciate” 52 times in reference to Kirk’s views. Newsom denigrated the use of gender pronouns in introductions, mocked the term “Latinx,” and decried calls to defund the police as “lunacy.” In a particularly disturbing segment, the governor effectively disavowed Democratic support for trans people accessing gender-affirming health care in prisons — a constitutionally protected right under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Newsom described as “brilliant” the popular Trump campaign ads with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” One of the ads featured a clip of former Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was California attorney general, voicing support for adhering to a law ensuring medically necessary gender-affirming care be provided for trans people in prison.

“Issues of people who are incarcerated getting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment … that is a 90/10 issue,” he said, referencing the perceived unpopularity of the issue with voters. The “90/10” number appears to have been pulled from thin air; I can’t find it anywhere.

Even if you agree with some (or all) of the things Newsom is saying, understand this is not merely a "Sister Souljah moment," or a series of Sister Souljah moments. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton did attack a rapper who had said, "if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" He did distinguish himself from death-penalty opponents in his party by presiding over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man who'd been left so mentally damaged by a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he had no idea his last meal was his last meal.

The difference is that Clinton also ran as an opponent of the Republican status quo. He strongly denounced the sitting president, George H.W. Bush, and presented himself as a change agent. What we're getting these days from Democratic Democrat-bashers like Newsom (and John Fetterman and others) is predominantly Democrat-bashing. The Republican-bashing is secondary or nonexistent.

Maybe these politicians are correct when they conclude that attacking their own party will make them more popular than other party members. But if you're five points more popular than the rest of your party but your party's numbers are extremely low -- and you're a big part of the reason that they're low -- are you sure you're getting a net gain?

Democrat-bashing is all the rage among people who claim to oppose Republicans. This, from a recent New Yorker daily newsletter, is typical:

Democrats are afraid of being proud to be Democrats. Democrats might attack Donald Trump or Elon Musk, but they're afraid to criticize the Republican Party as a whole, and they preface attacks on this monumentally unfit and depraved chief executive with We're happy to work with the president on areas of agreement. Democrats praise any Republican who deviates from Republican orthodoxy (Liz Cheney, for instance), but rarely praise members of their own party, and rarely make the simple assertion that Democratic ideas and policies are better than Republican ideas and policies, which seems to be the least you should expect from a political party.

When Republicans bash Democrats every day and Democrats agree with them the party deserves bashing, are results like those seen in a mid-February Quinnipiac poll any surprise?

57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party, the highest percentage since Quinnipiac started asking the question in 2008....

43% of voters have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, the highest since 2008.

Remember that Republicans didn't wash off the stink of George W. Bush (lowest approval rating: 25%) by bashing themselves. They did it by attacking Barack Obama and asserting the superiority of their own ideas via the Tea Party.

In the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump bashed Jeb Bush and his other primary opponents, but not as much as he bashed Hillary Clinton. You knew who his main enemy was. You knew in the 2024 campaign that his main enemies were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

That's the approach Democrats have to take: Republicans are the enemy, not fellow Democrats. Obviously! Maybe it would be effective to stir a 10% Sister Souljah solution into the batter. But 90% Sister Souljah is what they seem to be offering, and that's a recipe for failure.