California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Axios on HBO in an interview published Monday that the Republican Party will be reduced to third-party status nationwide in 10-15 years due to ” “xenophobia” and “hyper-masculinity.”
Asked about his attacks on “toxic masculinity,” Newsom said that the phrase “man up” was deeply damaging, and “a weak thing to say.”
He added that he believed Republicans were lying to white male rural voters:
What was the most interesting part of this election in 2016 was the number of white men of working age that aren’t working any longer … I spent 50 years of my life in rural California, in one of the reddest parts of the state, in Placer County. We grew up with these folks. I have deep respect for people in rural communities. Deep. I just don’t want them to be lied to. I actually care about them. I’m not using them as a pawn. They’re not being respected. They’re being lied to. They’re not connected to any movement. This guy — you think Trump cares about them? He’s a sole practitioner. You think they’re being protected? … They’ve been sold a complete bill of bullshit.
He said that Trump was “exploiting” a “sense of nostalgia” among white rural voters. And he added that Fox News “gins up a smaller and smaller base” of voters. Drawing on California’s experience, he said that just as Republicans in the state had shrunk, reaching what he called “third party status,” so, too, would they decline nationwide: “It’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing, Mitch McConnell, who’s completely complicit, is doing to the Republican Party nationally. They don’t even know what’s about to hit them. I am honestly empathetic towards what they are about to experience, which is a profound demise because of their own making.”
He said that conservatives today had “no governing philosophy, no value system that’s interesting, except fear of others — and those others are going to be a majority.”
Newsom did not mention the role that amnesty for illegal aliens has played in his “sanctuary” state — and in Democrats’ future plans to change the electorate. Nor did he mention the effect of “ballot harvesting” and other dubious voting methods, which make it virtually — and artificially — impossible for Republicans to win elections in California.
Republicans are not a “third party” in California, but have lost the ability to challenge Democrats for power statewide. Newsom’s party holds a supermajority in both houses of the California legislature, and state officials routinely manipulate ballot initiatives — such as last year’s gas tax repeal — to protect Democrats’ policy preferences.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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