America, meet the new Gavin Newsom!

He’s similar to the old one — same hair, hand jives while speaking — but this one oozes machismo and has a brand new backstory.

California’s governor is working feverishly to reinvent himself as he plods along on his never-ending campaign for president, apparently accepting that the old Newsom is limited in appeal.

In California, old Newsom is unpopular among the voters who know him best. His approval rating is underwater at 44%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, and a majority of voters think he, at best, puts the needs of Californians over his own only “a little” bit of the time, according to a Berkeley IGS poll.

Old Newsom’s list of actual accomplishments is so small that he defaults to bragging about things for which he deserves no credit, like the size of California’s gross state product and the state’s population of Nobel laureates, that also do little to affect the lives of most Californians (except those lucky Nobel laureates!).

In other words, Gavin Newsom needed a new Gavin Newsom fast.

Back in Newsom HQ, everyone must have been scrambling: What do voters want?

Someone manly, for starters. Democrats bombed last November, and they blame their repulsiveness to men and a rejection of popular male podcasts, like “The Joe Rogan Experience.” So this week Newsom went on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” a podcast hosted by a former Navy Seal.

There’s nothing more manly than Navy Seals, but Newsom could only steal so much masculinity. To prove he’s one of the guys, Newsom started swearing a lot and calling Ryan “brother.” He unveiled an apparent love of bow hunting and skeet shooting (who knew?) and said he was a big Second Amendment supporter (again, who knew?).

The only thing Newsom could have done to be more manly would have been to gobble down a raw buffalo liver and then challenge Ryan, barechested, in arm wrestling. This is new Newsom, not the guy who railed against “toxic masculinity” and condemned as misogynists the same male voters he’s now courting.

At times, Newsom broke character and slipped back to the old, elitist self, like the Nobel laureates gaffe, but quickly moved on to Fortune 500 companies because men know Gordon Gekko was badass and had amazing hair too.

Newsom made clear Ryan was his bro, but don’t be fooled by the tone. Polling shows that Democratic voters want a fighter and Newsom is here to deliver.

An NBC News poll from March showed that nearly two-thirds of Democrats want their elected leaders to fight Trump, even if it means getting nothing done. And when it comes to getting nothing done, Newsom is the man.

All of this is cosmetic. To finish the job, Newsom needed some distance between new him and old him, with his well-known and often touted (by him) record of ineffective, far-left policies.

Democrats abroad are leery of importing California policies to their states, as Newsom learned during a recent campaign trip to the early primary state of South Carolina. So he made up a whole new history.

Newsom brags about California’s strictest gun laws, but to Ryan, who said he carries a gun wherever he goes, new Newsom said he’s “deeply mindful and respectful of the Second Amendment and people’s constitutional rights.”

During COVID Newsom ran one of the longest and most restrictive responses of any state. A year into COVID, he indicated he had no regrets (besides dining unmasked with lobbyists at the French Laundry) about the severity of the response.

But Newsom told Ryan this week that shutting down beaches and open spaces, which was widely panned at the time by me and many others, was foolish.

Tough talk, tough on COVID, Newsom cleans for no one. Be still my male heart!

There are countless other examples out there and surely more to come. This version of Gavin Newsom is here to stay — at least until polling says it’s time to pivot.

Matt Fleming is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.